Publications

Publication details [#57062]

Greco Morasso, Sara. 2013. Multivoiced decisions: A study of migrants’ inner dialogue and its connection to social argumentation. Pragmatics & Cognition 21 (1) : 55–80.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/pc

Annotation

This paper sets out to explore the relation between social argumentation and inner debate by taking into account suggestions from argumentation studies and from social and discursive psychology. It develops Dascal’s (2005) claim that there are metonymical and structural relations between the two realms of debate by substantiating it with data taken from international migrants’ inner debates at moments of difficult decisions. The data are drawn from the experience of migrating mothers who have to decide whether to go back or to remain in their host country (the UK). The paper shows that others are present in migrants’ multivoiced decisions in two important senses: first, inner debates can be reconstructed as critical discussions (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1984). Second, the locus from analogy has the special function of allowing the comparison between the migrant’s experience and someone else’s experience.