Power and Politeness in Action: Disagreements in Oral Communication

This study investigates the interface of power and politeness in the realization of disagreements in naturalistic language data. Power and politeness are important phenomena in face-to-face interaction. Disagreement is an arena in which these two key concepts are likely to be observed together. Both disagreement and the exercise of power entail a conflict. At the same time, conflict will often be softened by the display of politeness. The material for analysis comes from three different contexts…