Pragmatic perspectives on disagreement

Abstract

The introduction to this special issue provides an overview of the notion of disagreement in relation to argumentative practices and presents the rationale for investigating disagreement management in argumentative discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It describes how existing accounts of disagreement in argumentation have focused on limited instances of the phenomenon, both in terms of its pragmatic embedding (which has predominantly focused on assertive speech acts) and of its scope (which usually covers the normative dimension of argumentative quality). The contributions to this special issue are then presented and contextualised within this broader topic to expound how each of them addresses key pragmatic aspects of disagreement management in argumentative discourse.