How participants in arguments challenge the normative position of an opponent

Abstract

This article describes a device used to challenge a target's normativity in the course of an argument, a members' method employed in arguments in public places. In this device, participants seek to challenge their opponent's normativity by implying that the target of the device is not adhering to a norm mutually agreed-to in the earlier preparatory phases of the device. A pre-challenge phase poses an 'enticing interrogative', a question that fails to take for granted common-sense features of the target as a resource for obtaining a pre-figured reply. The resulting challenge phase implies that on the basis of the pre-challenge, the target is failing to adhere to some norm required of them by means of category or general membership. This article describes the way in which with this device parties to an argument may manufacture challenge an opponent's normativity.

Language and Movement Synchronization in Dyadic Psychotherapeutic Interaction – A Qualitative Review and a Proposal for a Classification

“…Sequences of synchronized, i.e., quasi-simultaneous speech have been investigated in collaborative story tellings (Pfänder and Couper-Kuhlen, 2019;Schmidt, 2020), in greetings (Pillet-Shore, 2012), in phone call closings (Auer, 1990) and in competitive turn-taking (French and Local, 1983;Bolden et al, 2019). Both bodily and verbal alignment have been reported as constitutive for taking (and negotiating) epistemic or affective stances (Lerner, 1992;Fox, 2001;Stivers, 2008;Heritage, 2012;Myers and Lampropoulou, 2012;Sidnell, 2012;Reynolds, 2015;Imo and Lanwer, 2019). Alignment and synchronization have been found to be a constitutive ingredient in almost all of these sequential designs (Deppermann et al, 2021).…”

The Grammar of Obviousness: The Palm-Up Gesture in Argument Sequences

“…These arguments, and the data for this study, come from a growing, publicly accessible online corpus of videos, the Corpus of Language Discrimination in Interaction (CLDI), in which targets are challenged for speaking a language other than English in public (Raymond, et al, in prep). The ubiquity of cell phones and social media has created a new genre of online viral video in which people video-record public interactions and post them online, allowing us to capture and examine precisely these sorts of spontaneously occurring social activities which have thus far largely evaded systematic interactional inquiry (but see Reynolds 2011Reynolds , 2015.…”

“…Within arguments, participants can be agentive in their deployment of resources so as to actively occasion a sequential impasse at a reality disjuncture. Reynolds (2011Reynolds ( , 2015, for instance, describes how parties to an argument can "manufacture challenge" through the use of a "pre-challenge phase", which serves to lay the groundwork for a subsequent challenging action. In example ( 6), involving a restaurant manager and a customer, we see just this sort of pre-challenge.…”

Withholding consent

“…One context where this distinction comes up is the news interview, where journalists' adversarial questions to politicians show how a powerful actor gets questioned (Clayman 2002). Studies on the ways that questions create challenges in everyday interaction have commonly addressed situations with symmetrical power relations (e.g., Reynolds 2015). Studies on institutional interaction, however, have predominantly addressed how the party who is typically in control of the discussion agenda can ask questions to challenge the recipient's conduct or statements.…”