"It had to be that way, because without it there would be nothing". Linguistic means of persuasion in reminiscent accounts from the Oral History Archive of the Warsaw Uprising Museum (based on selected examples)

Abstract

The article focuses on the mechanisms and selected grammatical and lexical means of linguistic persuasion prevailing in reminiscent narratives of the Warsaw Uprising witnesses. The research material comprises over 3,400 interview transcripts developed as part of the project entitled the Oral History Archive of the Warsaw Uprising Museum. The analyses’ theoretical and methodological background constitutes, in turn, the assumptions of memory linguistics drawing, inter alia, from the findings of stylistics and rhetoric as well as corpus linguistics. The analyses also took advantage of the distinction of mechanisms used to fulfil the persuasive function, by Stanisław Barańczak. The research conducted, which fills the gap in the investigations profiled in terms of memory allows us to conclude that the historical narrative can be perceived as a rhetorical structure, and learning about the past consists in constructing the past, where a decisive role is played by the language.