On the Use of Narrative as Argument

Narrative is an important genre of discourse. It consists of the telling of a story, with the story having a temporal sequence, characters, actions, and events. In psychological research, the narrative has received considerable attention with a wide range of issues being investigated. Such issues include children’s understanding of narrative (e.g., Stein & Glenn, 1979), causal reasoning (e.g., Trabasso, van den Broek, & Suh, 1989), inference generation (e.g, Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994), and models of comprehension and understanding (e.g., Kintsch, 1998).