No means no!: Speech acts in conflict

This dissertation gathers a series of studies on speech acts that appear in contexts of disagreement, and non-cooperative conversations. With these essays, I open some avenues to study dissent and disagreement within and beyond the field of speech acts theory. By showing both how speech acts behave in conflictual settings, and impact our pragmatic understanding of linguistic items, I integrate agonistic practices of discourse in our understanding of conversation. In situations of disagreement, speakers use specific speech acts to prevent conversational moves from being made. Incurvati and Schlöder’s weak rejection (2017) and weak assertion (2019) are such speech acts. Chapter 2 delineates the norms and normative effects of rejection on conversations. Chapter 3 applies a speech acts analysis of assertion and rejection to a semantic problem: adversative markers. By means of corpus examples, chapter 4 provides linguistic evidence for the speech act of weak assertion, triggered by the linguistic marker perhaps. When they wish to renege on their commitments, speakers use retractions, that cancel the effect of a previous utterance. Chapter 5 stresses the proposal aspect of retractions, that need to be accepted by participants to affect the Common Ground. The study of speech acts that express disagreement leads naturally to studying speech acts in non-ideal contexts. Chapter 6 applies the idea that contexts can be non-ideal, such that speaker and audience have different conversational goals, to the picture of silence. Chapter 7 sketches a broader notion of communication and applies it to the characterisation of Fregean colourings