出版物 ｜Sophia Linguistica
Yumiko Takahashi Akira Hara
Since ancient times, argument theory has been the most essential part of logic which
concerns semantic-dialectical aspects of speech or text. This article follows mainly the
tradition of Aristotelian Topics, adding the recent argument theories of Kienpointner
(1992), Ottmers (1996), Takahashi (1998) and Takahashi (2009). Its aim is to explicate the
fundamental patterns of literary argumentation as well as their topical construction around
the end of the 19th century in German-speaking areas. The corpus of this study is the short
prose, “A Memory of Beautiful Days” (1908), written by the Austrian author Hugo von
Hofmannsthal (1874-1929). The following conclusion is drawn: The most important pattern
of argumentation in that text is the enthymeme, in which 13 quasi-logical and 2 conventionalized
topoi are verified. It is also possible to gather the major interest and longing
of the author in his mid-thirties from that enthymeme, i.e. “The former days were very
beautiful.”
