Argumentative writing acquisition: resignification of the other’s discourse through the illusion of argumentation

Abstract

In this paper, we look for cues to the circulation of subjects in secondary education through imagination concerning (their) writing in an argumentative discursive tradition. To this end, we have chosen junction mechanisms as a privileged place of analysis, in the light of a theoretical and methodological framework, which presumes a heterogeneous constitution of writing. Such framework conceives these mechanisms as symptomatic aspects of discursive traditions, which are seen as both the matter and product of language and as traces of the subject’s movement in textualization. Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the texts, the results reveal: (i) the regularity of a singular argumentative strategy, supported by anticipation and refutation of arguments of the other, by incorporating and resignifying them through causal and contrastive argumentative sequences, which point towards the illusion of argumentation; and (ii) the relevance of considering discursive traditions in order to observe the increasing complexity of semantic aspects of junction techniques in spaces of junction which define, at once, the particular and the general of historic singularity.