Semiotic Relations and Proof Methods: A Cross-Genre Study of Argument Structure with Large Language Models

When a direct proof of a statement S seems hard or even impossible to obtain, there may exist another statement (or set of statements) S*, somehow related to S, on the basis of which S can be proved. In order to investigate what options can be used to move from S to S*, four kinds of semiotic relations inspired by the four master tropes of semiotic research are briefly reviewed. Specifically, our syntagmatic, paradigmatic, antithetic and meronymic relations correspond, respectively, to metonymy, metaphor, irony and synecdoche. It is suggested that these four semiotic relations determine the options to move from S to S*, leading to proof by inference, proof by analogy, proof by contradiction, and proof by case analysis. To examine how the four relations are actually used across different kinds of argument, we complement the framework with an empirical study. We turn the four relations into explicit operational definitions and apply them to a cross-genre corpus of mathematical, legal, and everyday argument using a panel of large language models. We find that the relations are used very unevenly across genres: mathematical proofs draw on all four, whereas legal and everyday reasoning rely almost entirely on inference.