Arguing about the future: On indirect disagreements in conversations

Abstract

The point of departure for this paper is the widely accepted view that any further research on disagreement, as well as on other allegedly ‘face-threatening’ or ‘dispreferred’ acts, needs to be context-sensitive in order to shed light not just on the types of devices for constructing disagreement in different local contexts but also on the interrelations between the act of disagreement and interactional goals or purposes that may be locally in play. Specifically, the study uncovers the main devices of sequencing and production of disagreements in informal Greek conversations between young people. The discussion will demonstrate that disagreements in the data are systematically implied and indirectly constructed by means of a) specific turn-initial markers, (b) stories used as analogies for the issues debated, and c) questions. It will be argued that this pairing of disagreement and indirectness in the context of informal conversations between intimates is neither an index of sociability nor is it motivated by increased politeness and formality. It is, instead, shaped by the contextual exigencies of the data in question, in particular, the participants' close knit relations, the implicitness that their shared interactional history affords, the activity-type in which disagreements mostly occur (in this case, talk about the future), and, finally, the local norms of argumentation which call for a collaborative perspective-building.