Abstract
Based on the study of an article written by Maurice Barrès on the 25 August, 1914, the present chapter aims at showing that studies of the relations between narration and argument must take into account not only narrative arguments but also arguments that narrate. On the ground of an analysis of the organization of contents (foregrounding and backgrounding) by means of the Semantic Blocks Theory (Carel M, L’entrelacement argumentatif. Lexique, discours et blocs sémantiques. Honoré Champion, Paris, 2011), it shows that the argumentative structure, in the foreground of the text, can produce and manage the narrative one. Finally, we draw conclusions regarding presupposition, textual organisation and utterance acts: (a) presupposed contents can complete main contents; (b) on a textual scale, backgrounded contents can build up a secondary structure, here a narrative one, and therefore a single text may hold several structures; (c) utterances acts may be described by the backgrounded contents.
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Notes
- 1.
Lemercier, E-E. (1916), letter written on the 26th August 1914 (our translation).
- 2.
Ibid., 23rd October 1914 (our translation).
- 3.
Denis d’Halycarnasse, Lysias.
- 4.
According to Montherlant (Carnets. Années 1930 à 1944, Gallimard, Paris, 1957, pp. 264–265) quoted in Michel Winock (2006 [1997], p. 166): “Montherlant relates an anecdote regarding Barrès: ʻI engage…’, said Barrès in August 1914. Cries of ʻbravo!ʼ masked the rest of the sentence so that nobody heard that it continued thus : ‘I engage myself to write a daily article for L’Écho de Paris during the rest of the war.’ This led to a long misunderstanding. Montherlant explains Barrès’ attitude thus: ʻHe chose his daily article policy for two reasons. 1° Vanity: the desire to impose his presence constantly, to identify little by little with the national cause, and 2° a sincere love for this national cause, which he would rather serve in this trifling weekly way, because this seemed more urgent to him, than through the grand service of creating long-lasting work on the sidelines.” (our translation).
- 5.
In this article, all the text samples have been translated into English. However, our conclusions concern the samples in French.
- 6.
A speaker who does not admit the generally accepted viewpoint that winning is positive might go on with (3). He would also go on with (3) after j’ai gagné la course. Thus, remains the fact that j’ai presque gagné and j’ai gagné are co-oriented, even if j’ai presque gagné means the speaker has lost the race.
- 7.
Or simply “chaining”.
- 8.
Or simply ‘template’.
- 9.
From now on, the excerpt quoted from Barrès, its intuitive content and the argumentative chaining that analyses the content, bear the same number. The excerpt is quoted in italics; the intuitive content is enclosed in square brackets; the chainings are in Roman characters.
- 10.
- 11.
Romain Rolland (1952, p. 152) goes on: “[…] now he thrives on the freshly-dug graves” (our translation).
- 12.
In this article, the word entity refers to word’s semantic value. It does not refer to any particular word.
- 13.
We use foregrounding and backgrounding to describe two different linguistic phenomena: in 9.5 they enable us to describe the speaker’s involvement; in 9.6 they enable us to describe presupposition.
- 14.
Gustave Flaubert, Trois Contes, Un cœur simple, Gallimard, coll. « Folio classique », 2003, p. 64.
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Frenay, A., Carel, M. (2017). From Narrative Arguments to Arguments That Narrate. In: Olmos, P. (eds) Narration as Argument. Argumentation Library, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56883-6_9
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