1 Keynote 00. Argument: Its Origin, Function, and Structure Dale Hample, University of Maryland I am gratified to have been asked to give this keynote, and am enormously thankful to Dennis and his planning team for choosing me. I have been coming to Alta for 30 years and like many of you I have planned both my professional life and our family vacations around this meeting. It has always been a source of intellectual stimulation and new or deeper friendships. This year we have not come quite as high up the mountain as usual, and that makes my selection as keynote speaker somehow more plausible to me. I still clearly remember standing up to give one of my first papers here and realizing that nearly my entire bibliography was staring at me. This was a pair of early lessons: in the nature of a scholarly community, and in the importance of quoting carefully. Perhaps some of this year’s younger scholars can relate. In thinking about what to say tonight I spent some time reflecting on the conference theme, “Argument Functions and Social Context.” This is a congenial set of ideas for me and I have found the theme to be a useful prod to develop some ideas that I think are important. I will talk about functions explicitly and social context implicitly. More particularly, I want to discuss three topics with you: argument’s origin, its function, and its structure. Although I’m sure it is controversial, I think all three of these things can quite usefully be treated as singulars, not plurals. Even if we do eventually decide that argument has multiple origins, functions, and structures, this will be a place to start. Argument’s Origin First, how do arguments come to be? I’ve chosen “origin” as a neutral way to formulate this topic. Other phrasing presupposes the sort of answer that we want, before we even begin. If we ask, “What motivates arguing?,” we are committed to the idea that arguments are internally caused, and that the initiator has the main responsibility for the argument happening. If we ask, “What calls out an argument?,” we tend naturally to look for situational forces. If we ask “Why do people argue with one another?,” our answers might include motivation and situation, but in preferring this phrasing, we would likely