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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 32:4 (2022) ► pp.562–587

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Picking fights with politicians

Categories, partitioning and the achievement of antagonism

ORCiD logo with link | Ulster University
ORCiD logo with link | Leeds Trinity University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 14 April 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.21028.joy
Abstract
In 2016 the UK held a divisive referendum on its membership of the European Union. In the aftermath, difference and division were rife in politics and in everyday life. This article explores how such difference and division play out in and through interaction through examining a citizen ‘picking a fight’ with a politician over how Brexit has been handled. Drawing on membership categorisation analysis we show how antagonism is interactionally accomplished. The analysis focuses on three categorial strategies which interlocutors use to achieve antagonism: establishing omnirelevant devices, categories and their predicates; explicitly challenging category membership; and partitioning a population. Beyond offering insights into moments of social life that are not easily captured, the findings contribute to an empirical conceptualisation of antagonism and illustrate how membership categorisation analysis can shed light on its interactional achievement.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Contesting Brexit in language
    • 2.2Membership categorisation analysis
    • 2.3Categories in political encounters
    • 2.4Antagonism
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Establishing omnirelevant devices, categories and their predicates
    • 4.2Challenging category membership
    • 4.3Creating ingroup and outgroup through partitioning
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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