Argumentative schemes and symptomatic, causal, and analogical relations in discursive exchanges between adults and children

Abstract

This study aims to explore the interplay between parents’ arguments, children’s types of reaction and topics of disagreement during mealtime conversations. Within a data corpus constituted by 30 video-recorded meals of 10 Swiss and Italian families, a corpus of 132 argumentative discussions was selected for a qualitative analysis. The findings of the pragma-dialectical analysis indicate that both parents and children assume argument schemes related to the object of the disagreement: when the contested standpoints refer to food, arguments are based on a symptomatic relation; when they refer to the behavior of children, parents base their argumentation on a causal and analogy relation. Moreover, the children’s type of reaction is typically an expression of further doubts or a mere opposition without providing any argument. The implications concerning the use of argumentative schemes are discussed in terms of possibilities of mutual learning occurring during daily discursive exchanges between parents and children.