How Face Threatening Are Disagreement Moves? A Proposal for an Integration of Insights from Politeness Theory into Argumentation Theory

Abstract

Studies on conflict talk and disagreement in everyday argumentative interactions adopt various theoretical perspectives ranging from social psychology and interactional sociolinguistics to ethnography and conversation analysis. However, no systematic reference is made to theoretical frameworks for the study of argumentative discourse, which link the expression of disagreement to what arguments are and how they relate to the rational and pragmatic organization of verbal communication. At the same time, argumentation theorists hardly ever pay close attention to politeness considerations that govern the arguers’ moves in face-to-face argumentative exchanges. In this paper, I propose a classification of disagreement moves by taking into account their functional and linguistic properties and by relating these to face considerations that participants are assumed to have when engaging in an argumentative discussion. Such a classification can be of use in the analysis and evaluation of disagreements in both their rational and social dimensions. Examples from dialogue scenes in fiction films are used to illustrate the proposed distinctions.KeywordsConversational argumentDisagreement movesFacePolitenessPragma-dialectics