Low-Narrativity Narratives and Argumentation

Abstract

Two types of conversational narratives are examined in a corpus of interviews with Salvadoran immigrants who live in Washington, D.C. On the one hand, narrative sequences of counterfactual or hypothetical events position the virtual as opposed to or in comparison with the actual and, in doing so, they convey the narrator's commentary and perspective. On the other hand, narrative sequences of repeated or habitual events create the effect of a static, self-contained picture of the past and can be used to present experience as generalized and common. Both types of sequences are characterized as resources for argumentation. It is shown how recourse to irreality takes place to back a claim and how looking at the past from the past makes the storyteller's perspective relatively immune to challenge. The sociohistorical conditions of the events recounted in the data provide the basis for the view of the immigration and integration experiences presented in this paper. (Discourse Analysis, Linguistic Anthropology)