Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2015

Numerous studies have examined conflict talk from an ethnomethodological perspective, scrutinizing development of conflict talk sequences (e.g., Coulter 1990; Maynard 1985a). We take up this strand of research to examine an extended episode of conflict talk in a second language (L2) classroom. Throughout this study, we conduct a detailed analysis of a single episode, applying previous research findings and using this analysis as a springboard into uncovering distinct aspects of conflict talk in this institutional context that may also be generalizable to other institutional contexts. The focus here is on an extended dispute occurring in a group discussion extracted from a larger corpus of L2 classroom interaction.

This paper sets out to investigate the issues leading parents to engage in argumentative discussions with their children during mealtimes. Within a data corpus of 30 video-recorded meals of 10 middle to upper-middle-class Swiss and Italian families with a high socio-cultural level, 107 argumentative discussions between parents and children aged from 3 to 9 years old were selected. The approach for the analysis is based on the pragma-dialectical ideal model of a critical discussion. The results show that family argumentative discussions unfold around issues that are generated both by parental prescriptions and by children’s requests. The parental prescriptions largely concern context-bound activities such as having to eat a certain food or the teaching of correct table manners. The issues triggered by children’s requests refer to a wide range of activities, mainly related to the activity of mealtimes but also related to the children’s behavior outside the family context. These results indicate that argumentative interactions between parents and children are not mere conflictual episodes that must be avoided, but they essentially have a broader educational function.

The study explores how code switching (CS) manifests itself in adversarial episodes during meal time. In particular, it examines how CS emerges among members of a Korean American family as they wrangle, dispute, and argue in this intimate discursive setting. Several researchers have examined how arguments and disputes among children are realized (e.g., Boggs 1978; Brenneis and Lein 1977; Corsaro and Rizzo 1990; Eisenberg and Garvey 1981). Nonetheless, little is known about how bilingual children and their parents employ CS as a negotiating tool in conflict-related interactions. Among the findings, the study reveals that CS is manifested in the parents and children in slightly different ways although the family members skillfully maneuver the use of two languages and registers. The study uncovers how CS was employed as a strategy to attempt to achieve goals and how it intersected with stance taking. In general, CS also emerged as a discursive strategy that the interlocutors employed to explicate, challenge, mitigate, hedge, and plead during these episodes.

Although it is quite easy to conceive of a number of conventionalised impoliteness formulae that, depending on context, do not lead to the hearer’s evaluations of impoliteness, there are many situations when the speaker aims to be genuinely impolite and does not try to mitigate his/her verbal behaviour. This paper reports the findings of an analysis of twenty-nine genuinely impolite verbal behaviours that occurred in the Big Brother UK 2012 house. The main objective of this study is to examine the triggers for genuine impoliteness and determine which aspects of the hearer’s face and rights s/he claims for him/herself are targeted in such interactions. The results reveal that impoliteness among the housemates is triggered by previous impolite (non-)verbal behaviour, implied negativity or personal dislike of the target. The speaker, in his/her turn, tends to associate the target with a negative aspect or behaviour, question his/her mental, emotional state or knowledge, deny the freedom of expression or participation and, finally, warn or threaten the target.