You’re offended, I’m offended: A face-based analysis of confrontational conversation

Abstract

Despite its ordinariness in everyday interaction, confrontational conversation is rarely examined in the field of pragmatics, particularly in studies concerned with interactional phenomena. So far, there is no account of what specifically makes an exchange confrontational, as opposed to non-confrontational. This dissertation addresses that gap by investigating whether there are necessary and sufficient conditions for confrontational conversation and, if so, what they are. The study draws on notions from Conversation Analysis, speech act theory, as well as politeness theory, particularly the notion of face. The investigation is carried out through corpus analyses using data from reality TV, judgement tasks, and dialogue annotation. I analyse the two minimal turns in conversation separately, focusing on their locution and illocution. The findings lead me to propose that, in order to identify confrontational conversation, the two turns must be considered together, and that the distinction from non-confrontation lies in the perlocution of the turns. I argue that for conversation to be confrontational, each of the two turns must result in the perlocutionary effect of offence.