Disagreements in Debate: Focusing on the Preference Structure

Abstract

This paper focuses on the reversed preference structure of disagreements used in a debate setting. Unlike disagreements in everyday conversation, which are normally dispreferred(Pomerantz 1984), disagreements in debate classes are shown to be preferred, similar to the ones found in conflict situations(Greatbatch 1992, Kotthoff 1993, Gruber 1998). Two debate classes in U.S. are collected through the well-known website, YouTube, and are analyzed following the Conversation Analysis(CA) framework, focusing on the sequence organization and turn shapes. The results show that first, disagreements are preferred from the beginning of the debate; second, disagreements used to gain floor are very direct and aggravated; and third, participants sometimes try to re-reverse the preference structure of disagreement by using, for example, tag-questions.