From syntactical to textual strategies of argumentation

The paper focuses on tevelopmental relations between syntactical complexity, cohesion — especially conjuctional connection — and textual coherence in a sample of 150 argumentative texts written by school children (grades 4, 7, 10 and 12) and young adults (university students). In common sense and even in linguistics and psychology written text and especially written argument has been taken to be the prototype of syntactically complex, self-contained and explicit text over a long period of research on the topic. Thus it has been argued that syntactic connectedness and explicit cohesion of propositions were the most valuable indicators for a well-done contextualization and abstraction of content space and rhetorical space in writing. Empirical data show this common-sense position to be questionable. The discussion emphazises the role of argumentative implicitness as a necessary condition for getting the reader involved in the discourse and thus for the emergence of coherence in argumentative texts.