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Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 8:3 (2017) ► pp.323–354

Emotional positioning as a cognitive resource for arguing

Lessons from the study of Mexican students debating about drinking water management

| ICAR Laboratory, Université de Lyon,
| ICAR Laboratory, Université de Lyon,
| ICAR Laboratory, Université de Lyon,
| ICAR Laboratory, Université de Lyon,
This paper consists of a detailed analysis of how the participants in a debate build their emotional position during the interaction and how such a position is strongly related to the conclusion they defend. In this case study, teenage Mexican, students, arguing about access to drinking water, display extensive discursive work on the emotional tonality given to the issue. Plantin’s (2011) methodological tools are adopted to follow two alternative emotional framings produced by disagreeing students, starting from a common, highly negative, thymic tonality. Through the analysis of four parameters (distance to the problem; causality/agentivity; possibility of control and conformity to the norms) we describe how the emotional dimension of schematization (Grize 1997) is argumentatively relevant. In authentic discourse, it is impossible to separate emotion from reason. The conclusion section discusses the implications for the design of argumentation-based pedagogical activities.
Keywords: argumentation, schematization , norms, values, socio-scientific issues, emotional framing, group cognition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Emotions in educational argumentation
    • 2.2The discursive construction of emotions as part of authentic argumentation practices
  • 3.Data and social context investigated
    • 3.1Pedagogical situation
    • 3.2Recording and treatment of the data
  • 4.Students’ strategic emotional positioning in argumentative discourse
    • 4.1Thymic characterization of the debate: “A matter of life or death”
      • 4.1.1Use of lexical markers
      • 4.1.2‘Necessity’: Death-orientated causal reasoning based on ‘upstream’ signals
    • 4.2Different emotional positions supporting competing argumentative claims
      • 4.2.1Emotional distance to the issue
      • 4.2.2Control, causality and agentivity as parameters framing emotional intensity
      • 4.2.3The use of principles to define appropriate, more or less pleasant, emotions
      • 4.2.4The ‘argument of sadness’: From normative to emotional conflict
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.8.3.01pol
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