Perspective Chapter: Developing a Semiotic Awareness of Argumentation in Academic Writing for Studies in Higher Education

The importance of argumentation in academic writing, while recognised historically, has arguably lost prominence alongside the rapid expansion of higher education since the early 1990s in the UK. This has been exacerbated by an increasingly prevalent technological intervention in teaching and learning processes. With this as a background, this chapter presents a discourse analysis of dissertation extracts to articulate the role of intertextuality in governing interpretative, evaluative, and concluding propositions in argumentation. Each proposition is examined as indexed to syntactical compositionality by which a previous proposition elicits a present one that awaits a future one, thus forming an argument. The analysis teases out what is at stake concerning the interdependence of signifying codes in textual relations and functions. It brings to the fore the notion of instances of signification that lends itself as a mediational apparatus to what counts as the intertextuality of argumentation - particularly why intertextuality matters in justifying a claim by giving logical reasons rather than wading into mere description or verging on textual turbulence. The chapter concludes by adding to long-standing debates on critical thinking in higher education a quest for a semiotic awareness of argumentation, highlighting the intertextuality of argumentation as facilitating rational deliberation for critical thinking in academic writing.