"No, you listen!" A pilot experiment into escalation devices in confrontational conversation

Abstract:

In conversation, interlocutors are often friendly or polite and generally socially collaborative. However, it is not uncommon that interlocutors get upset, defensive, and antagonistic, engaging in confrontational conversation. Given that we are able to intuitively perceive the contrast between confrontational and non-confrontational conversation, our goal is to find out whether there is a linguistically manifested contrast between the two contexts. A corpus of confrontational conversation was analysed for potentially escalating linguistic devices. In this paper we propose an exploratory experiment where we test these devices to find out whether they, in fact, correspond to the perceived escalation of confrontation in a conversation.

Research areas:

• Dialogue
• Repair
• DivCon

Year:

2024

Type of Publication:

In Proceedings

Book title:

Proceedings of the 28th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - Poster Abstract

ISSN:

2308-2275