Winning the Battle in Private Discourse: Rhetorical—Logical Operations in Storytelling

Abstract

Argumentation is examined in its intersection with narrative in natural, situated, oral discourse in two-party interactions. This study examines the arguments of members of a minority group who are targets of prejudice by other minority groups. In the everyday practice of arguing in and through storytelling, speakers contextualize and rationalize conflicts, including conflicts in intergroup relations. The focus is on operations that establish relations between propositions: consequence, explanation, and analogy. The formal elaborations that take place in face-to-face storytelling include the intense exploitation of negation, parallelism and reported discourse, and reinforce the argumentative position being defended. The interviewees' motivation to make their discourse reasonable and persuasive was to transform negative socially shared opinions that eventually justify unfair treatment of their group.