Arguing to Persuade and Arguing to Explore in Preschoolers' Narrative Discourse

The paper focuses on argumentation occurring in the process of co-constructing narrative text at the preschool age in the two types of situations: one where disagreernent between the discourse participants occurs, and another where none of the discourse participants has opposed the speaker's position, in undisputed, non-conflict situations. The data come from a study of 162 children between ages four and seven. The children participated in the study as co-narrators (two children in the role of co-narrators), who constructed a text for a peer listener (a third child in the role of a listener). The analyzed material consisted of 93 narrative texts. The findings show that the argumentation refers to both dimensions of children's narration activity: the content introduced by discourse participants, i.e., the semantic dimension of the constructed text, and the process of constructing the text, i.e., the interactive dimension (who, when and how introduces any given information). However, in conflict situations the argumentation more often concerns the interactive dimension. On the other hand, in non-conflict situations, the argumentation more often concerns the semantic dimension of the discourse. Moreover, when the argumentation refers to the rules of interaction in the discourse, it is mostly characterized by a simple structure and is constructed individually. When the argumentation refers to the content which is introduced in the discourse, in the non conflict situations it is still mostly characterized by asimple and individually created structure, but in comparison to the conflict situations it is more often constructed jointly and results in the more compound structures. The analyses of argumentation in the two types of situation - conflict and non conflict ones - reveal that convincing, as the main goal of argumentation, can be realized in narrative discourse in different ways.