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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 30:4 (2020) ► pp.586–613

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The pragmeme of disagreement and its allopracts in English and Serbian political interview discourse

ORCiD logo with link | University of Niš
ORCiD logo with link | University of Niš
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 25 August 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.19013.rad
Abstract
The paper explores the disagreement pragmeme as a culture-bound notion ( 2016a. “Why We Need the Pragmeme, or: Speech Acting and Its Peripeties.” In Pragmemes and Theories of Language Use, ed. by Keith Allan, Alessandro Capone and Istvan Kecskes, 133–140. Cham: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, 2016b. “Modular, Cellular, Integral: A Pragmatic Elephant?” In Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society, ed. by Alessandro Capone and Jacob L. Mey, 353–369. Cham: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Mey, Jacob L. 2001. Pragmatics: An Introduction. Second edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) in the language use of English-speaking and Serbian-speaking politicians. The objectives are to establish the types, frequencies and cultural specificities of disagreement allopracts in political interviews. Furthermore, the research analyses allopracts in relation to the single and multiple dispute profiles (Eemeren, Frans H. van, Peter Houtlosser and A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans. 2007. Argumentative Indicators in Discourse: A Pragma-Dialectical Study. Dordrecht: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The starting assumption is that allopracts will be realised in culturally specific ways despite the fact that the analysed pragmeme belongs to the same communication genre, which is the Immediately Relevant tertium comparationis (Krzeszowski, Tomasz. 1990. Contrasting Languages. The Scope of Contrastive Linguistics. Berlin/New York: Mouton De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) of the research. The hypothesis to be verified is that the Serbian sub-corpus will yield more examples of strong disagreement. Another aim is to classify the obtained allopracts according to their degrees of strength. The analysis is based on the corpus of 50 political interviews, involving 30 politicians and 262 allopracts.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework and related research
    • 2.1Pragmemes and allopracts
    • 2.2The pragmeme of disagreement
    • 2.3Dispute profiles
  • 3.Corpus analysis and results
    • 3.1Corpus
      • 3.1.1The English sub-corpus
      • 3.1.2The Serbian sub-corpus
    • 3.2Methods
    • 3.3Results and discussion
      • 3.3.1Single and multiple non-mixed profiles (SNM and MNM)
      • 3.3.2Single and multiple mixed profiles (SM and MM)
      • 3.3.3Personal styles across cultures
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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