Conflict in corpora: Investigating family conflict sequences using a corpus pragmatic approach (Pre-published version)

Abstract

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.