Argumentation in Training Courses – Form and Function

The paper starts from the assumption that argumentation is a basic feature of everyday interaction; interlocutors resort to it to minimize disagreement, to resolve disputes, or to align the audience to the speakers’ point of view. In order to achieve this, speakers continually adjust themselves to their audience’s reaction, who play a major part in the process. The paper aims to analyse the arguments used during the opening stage of a training course for life insurance agents, arguments brought by the manager of the company providing the course. It considers their uses, structure, and linguistic realization. In terms of structure, the arguments are analysed in respect of their constituents – data, claim, qualifier, warrant, backing, and rebuttal (Toulmin (2003), while their linguistic realization is investigated at various levels – words, sentences, speech acts, and figures of speech. Using the data recorded during the training course, it selects the arguments that are considered more relevant with a view to identifying their function, structure, and lexical realization.