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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 30:4 (2020) ► pp.586–613

The pragmeme of disagreement and its allopracts in English and Serbian political interview discourse

ORCID logo | University of Niš
ORCID logo | University of Niš

The paper explores the disagreement pragmeme as a culture-bound notion (Mey 2016a, 2016b, 2001) in the language use of English-speaking and Serbian-speaking politicians. The objectives are to establish the types, frequencies and cultural specificities of disagreement allopracts in political interviews. Furthermore, the research analyses allopracts in relation to the single and multiple dispute profiles (van Eemeren, Houtlosser and Henkemans 2007). The starting assumption is that allopracts will be realised in culturally specific ways despite the fact that the analysed pragmeme belongs to the same communication genre, which is the Immediately Relevant tertium comparationis (Krzeszowski 1990) of the research. The hypothesis to be verified is that the Serbian sub-corpus will yield more examples of strong disagreement. Another aim is to classify the obtained allopracts according to their degrees of strength. The analysis is based on the corpus of 50 political interviews, involving 30 politicians and 262 allopracts.

Keywords: pragmeme, disagreement, allopract, political interview, English, Serbian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework and related research
    • 2.1Pragmemes and allopracts
    • 2.2The pragmeme of disagreement
    • 2.3Dispute profiles
  • 3.Corpus analysis and results
    • 3.1Corpus
      • 3.1.1The English sub-corpus
      • 3.1.2The Serbian sub-corpus
    • 3.2Methods
    • 3.3Results and discussion
      • 3.3.1Single and multiple non-mixed profiles (SNM and MNM)
      • 3.3.2Single and multiple mixed profiles (SM and MM)
      • 3.3.3Personal styles across cultures
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 25 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.19013.rad
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