Credible as Evidence? Multilayered Audience Reception of Narrative Arguments

Abstract

Building on a view of both narration and argumentation as dynamic concepts, this paper consid-ers ways of assessing the credibility of narrative arguments constructed in empirical examples of conversational discourse. I argue that the key in any such exercise is to pay close attention to both structural and pragmatic details, particularly how conversa-tional storytelling gets embedded in the surrounding discourse and how the way this is discursively accom-plished vis-à-vis the narrators’ multi-layered audience may be reflective of their argumentative goals.