Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2024

The introduction to this special issue provides an overview of the notion of disagreement in relation to argumentative practices and presents the rationale for investigating disagreement management in argumentative discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It describes how existing accounts of disagreement in argumentation have focused on limited instances of the phenomenon, both in terms of its pragmatic embedding (which has predominantly focused on assertive speech acts) and of its scope (which usually covers the normative dimension of argumentative quality). The contributions to this special issue are then presented and contextualised within this broader topic to expound how each of them addresses key pragmatic aspects of disagreement management in argumentative discourse.

Accusations of trolling (deceiving participants about one’s communicative intention, conducted for amusement, Dynel 2016; Hardaker 2013) and bad faith (dishonestly denying a speaker’s committing meaning, de Saussure and Oswald 2009; Oswald 2022) abound in digitally mediated communication. The labels chosen by posters significantly impact the outcome of discussions, as accusations of trolling tend to result in more abrupt settlements of disputes compared to accusations of bad faith. However, proving these deceptive activities can be challenging for posters. As a result, they often substantiate the “bad faith” label by mentioning in their accusations what they perceive as strategies indicating their interlocutors’ bad faith.

In this paper, I examine 161 accusations of trolling and bad faith gathered from a forum. The analysis draws on Hardaker’s (2010, 2013) research and proposes a comparison of the strategies mentioned in these accusations. The aim is to describe the ways in which posters justify the label they opt for when confronted with deceptive activities.

The persuasive effectiveness of implicit strategies, associated with reduced epistemic vigilance, may lead to their exploitation in conveying doubtful information in advertisement and propaganda. In political communication, presuppositions tend to specialize for the conveyance of questionable opinions and self-praise, while implicatures reveal a preferential association with face-threatening contents in general, where implicitness can allow speakers to count less evidently as offenders, at the same time being able to convey contents that can discredit the opponent.

In public debates, speakers do not necessarily aim at convincing the opponent, but at shaping the beliefs of the public at home. In Italian broadcast political debates, implicatures and presuppositions are used exactly with this function. Confirming this pattern, participants in public debates often “intercept” the opponent’s implicatures and make them explicit in order to reduce the persuasiveness effected by their being implicit. Sometimes this also offers the opportunity to provide explicitations that are different from the original implicature, caricaturizing the position of the opponent with a strawman effect.

The idea that manipulation relies more heavily on implicit than on explicit communication has been the plank of several earlier and recent debates on argumentation and speaker roles in interactions. The present contribution will inquire into the selective nature of the use of implicit communication in political discourse; notably, analyzing the distribution of presuppositions and implicatures in two political debates, it will be argued that the use of these two implicit communicative devices – and, particularly, that of presupposition – is likely to correlate with the expression of disagreement, notably through aggressive and blasting contents, more often than with other content types. This tendency will be accounted for by considering the evidential meaning presuppositions and implicatures add to an utterance, which contributes to modulating both speaker’s commitment to truth and source identification on the part of the receiver. Data also show that, when face-threatening contents are exchanged, presuppositions epitomize by far the most preferred strategy in both debates.

Debates are important events during presidential elections in the U.S.A. Candidates are juxtaposed and engage with each other on a wide range of issues. This poses the question how disagreement between the two candidates and the public is managed. The aim of this paper is to articulate the prototypical argumentative pattern used by candidates which shows that to defend that the public should vote for them, candidates recurringly make three central claims. Specifically, they claim that some political action has to happen, they will do that action if elected, while their opponent will not. This basic argument scheme – which could be referred to as campaign promise argumentation – is further expanded by candidates by responding to six distinct critical questions, resulting in a prototypical argumentative pattern designed to deal with potential criticisms against a bid to become president.

The use of metaphors is a common strategy in argumentative discourse to resolve disagreements and create common ground. Nonetheless, metaphor use could also backfire. An opponent could, for example, hijack a metaphor to oppose the proponent’s standpoint. The current study focuses on this type of resistance, which we have dubbed ‘metaphor exploitation’. Such exploitation is of particular interest because proponents are pragmatically committed to the metaphor which is subsequently exploited to attack their ideas. This paper introduces a model to distinguish metaphor exploitation from other types of reusing metaphor (extension and recontextualisation) and contrasts it with the neighbouring phenomenon of metaphor reframing. Subsequently, the model is applied by analysing the strategic use of metaphor exploitation in a corpus of 196 replies on Twitter (now ‘X’) to a violence metaphor employed by former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson (his so-called ‘mugger metaphor’). As such, this paper offers the tools for systematically analysing the reuse of metaphors in disagreement.