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Article published In:
Closeness and conflict: The discourse of domestic discord across English and Spanish-speaking communities
Edited by Diana Boxer and María Elena Placencia
[Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 6:2] 2018
► pp. 228–247

Conflict in corpora

Investigating family conflict sequences using a corpus pragmatic approach

| Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick

The analysis of conflict in family discourse has often been characterised by ethnographic approaches and/or fine-grained analysis of unique conflict episodes. This article, by contrast, uses a c.175,000-word spoken corpus of Irish family discourse, in conjunction with a corpus pragmatic approach, to explore specific linguistic aspects of conflict discourse. Conflict episodes are identified and analysed in the corpus using a range of linguistic “hooks” (Rühlemann 2010) that have been previously associated with prefacing disagreement such as the marker well, mitigators (I think, I mean, I guess) or the counterargument strategy yes but. The analysis reveals that the family members most frequently use the yeah but strategy in conflict episodes which facilitates immediate disagreement. This strategy is often accompanied by a range of mitigators, predominantly in turn final position, some of which have not been previously identified as indexing conflict sequences.

Keywords: conflict, disagreement, family discourse, spoken language, corpus, corpus pragmatics, pragmatic markers
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous literature on markers that characterise conflict sequences
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Analysis and discussion
    • 4.1Locating and quantifying conflict sequences in the corpus of family discourse
    • 4.2The mitigation and structure of conflict sequences in the corpus of family discourse
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00011.cla
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