narration, argumentation, conference presentation, genre, systemic-functional approach, academic spoken discourse

The study focuses on the functions of narrative in the genre of conference presentations. Drawing on the corpus data the analysis attempts to reveal to what extent the speakers employ narratives for argumentative purposes when talking about the research process. The starting point for the present research is Virtanen?s (2010) concept of two separate and distinct kinds of categorizations, text types and discourse types. The aim is to explore how these two categories, which are for analytical reasons treated separately and whose mutual coexistence in concrete texts is seldom the result of the one-way traffic between text and context, function and operate in conference presentations.