The approach of researchers working broadly within the speech act tradition in the area of communication studies (e.g. Jacobs, 1982; Jacobs and Jackson, 1982) provides a bridge between speech act theory/ argumentation theory and conversation analysis. Thus, as well as recognising argumentation as an ‘expanded speech act sequence’ (Jackson and Jacobs, 1983), they also conceptualise it as involving forms of ‘conversational repair’ in the context of disagreement. They are less interested in the quality of argumentation per se, and more in it as a natural interactive feature of conversation. They engage directly with real-world argumentation and shifted the focus from the sometimes rather idealised process of arriving at truth through argumentation, towards a concern with how people manage the disagreement that is often one of the hallmarks of argumentation.
Thus, they looked at the structure of conversational argumentation in terms of adjacency pairs. These, as we will see in the next section, are structural pairings, or regularities, in conversation and the concept originates in the work of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974). For Jackson and Jacobs (1980) argumentation has a very particular relation to this structural patterning. If the response to the first speech act does not express the required agreement,
there is the potential for argumentation. They also observe that argumentation in the form of disagreement is not simply the result of an explicit disagreement over the propositional content of an utterance, as Van Eemeren & Grootendorst, (2004) assert. Rather, it might be a matter of the pragmatic failure of an indirect request and Jackson and Jacobs root their analysis in real, not idealised, examples. All this, in addition to their overall emphasis on the management, rather than the resolution, of disagreement pushes at a more conversation- analytic focus, a tradition they readily acknowledge.
In sum, how might we evaluate the approach to argumentation as a speech act? It is valuable in that it focusses upon the functional dimension of argumentation and it is compatible with a view of argumentation as a dynamic process. As we have just been discussing, recent work within this broad tradition is more empirical in nature and more oriented towards everyday argumentation.
However, there are limitations of speech act theory as an approach to the discourse analysis of argumentation? To begin with, it roots both the structure and function of argumentative intentions in the isolable speech act (Schegloff, 1988). As a consequence, it fails to account for different contexts in which argumentation emerges and also the variety of forms its linguistic expression takes (Jacobs and Jackson, 1983). Put simply, it does not offer a sufficiently situated account of argumentation.
Furthermore, as we have seen, it is problematic in terms of its focus on sentence-level propositions and also in its rather simplistic view of the relationship between linguistic form and function. It is also problematic in its insistence that we can unproblematically infer speaker intention and, as Goodwin (1990, p. 85) observes, analysing the moment-by-moment unfolding of discourse is problematic as soon as we label a turn of talk as a particular type of speech act. Summarising his critical evaluation of the problem of speech act theory, Jacobs (1989, p.360) observes that its fundamental weakness is in the suggestion that argumentation is constituted by ‘a homogeneous class of utterances definable by a common force and a common set of felicity conditions.’
2.2.5.1.4 Argumentation and politeness
Argumentation, and the differences it opens up, clearly implicates issues around politeness and it is necessary to establish the ways in which this bears upon the analysis presented in this thesis. The discussion will centre on the face-based politeness theory developed by Brown and Levinson (1978; 1987) out of the work of Goffman (1955).
Goffman characterised face as ‘the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself’ (Goffman, 1955) and face is the image of yourself that you present to other people. A face-based theory of politeness theory was developed out of Goffman’s work by Brown and Levinson (1978; 1987). According to them, a person’s face could be threatened by various speech acts (argument being an example). They described face threatening acts in terms of threats to positive face, a person’s need to be accepted or liked by others, and threats to negative face, a person’s need to be independent. In this way, Brown and Levinson (1978; 1987) conceptualise politeness as ways of mitigating the threat to face in spoken interaction, identifying the different strategies used to save face and some of these (e.g. the use of irony to save negative face, giving sympathy to save positive face) are visible in the argumentation presented in this thesis.
The concept of face-work is used by some researchers (e.g. Muntigl and Turnbull, 1998) in order to explain the tripartite structure they identify as characteristic of conversational argumentation. They suggest that the greater the perceived threat to the positive face of the person making a disputed claim, the more likely they are to respond by further supporting their initial claim. Other research (O’Donnell, 1990; Vuchinich, 1990) also draws upon the concept of face to explain the ways in which argumentation emerges, unfolds and ends in a variety of different contexts. This research is often broadly conversational analytic in approach and it is to this that we now turn.