dc.contributor.author | Concannon, Shauna | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2017-12-16T13:27:17Z | |
dc.date.available | 2017-12-16T13:27:17Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2017-09 | |
dc.date.submitted | 2017-12-11T12:38:20.418Z | |
dc.identifier.citation | Concannon, S. 2017. Taking a stance: experimenting with deliberation in dialogue. Queen Mary University of London | en_US |
dc.identifier.uri | http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/30623 | |
dc.description | PhD | en_US |
dc.description.abstract | Abstract
How do people manage disagreements in conversation? Previous studies of dialogue
have shown that the interactional consequences of disagreement are not straightforward.
Although often interpreted as face-threatening when performed in an
unmitigated manner, disagreement can also encourage novel contributions. This
thesis explores how systematically altering the presentation of someone’s stance
influences the deliberative potential of a dialogue.
A corpus analysis of ordinary conversations shows that exposed disagreement
occurs rarely, but that speakers can signal a potentially adversarial position in a
variety of other ways. One of the most interesting among these is the way people
mark their rights to speak about something. Resources such as reported speech and
prefacing incongruent content with discourse markers (e.g. ‘well’) can be important
to the management of interpersonal factors.
The idea that disagreement is problematic but also useful for deliberation is
examined. Using a method that allows fine-grained manipulations of text based
dialogues in real-time, agreement and disagreement fragments are inserted into a
discussion dialogue. The findings show that inserting exposed disagreement violates
the conventions of polite dialogue leading participants to put more effort into the
production of their replies, and does not improve levels of deliberation.
This raises the question of whether manipulating apparent degrees of speaker
commitment might be more important for influencing the quality of deliberation. An
experiment was devised which presented oppositional content with differing degrees
of ‘knowingness’. The findings indicate that marking stance as knowing leads to
less guarded exchanges, but does not increase deliberation. Conversely, framing
statements as less knowing increases the likelihood that participants consider more
alternative viewpoints, thus increasing the deliberative quality of a dialogue.
Potential applications include training guidelines for professionals developing
tools to support considered debate. Implications for computational argumentation
studies include the importance of interpersonal dynamics and stance construction for
formulating polite arguments. | en_US |
dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
dc.publisher | Queen Mary University of London | en_US |
dc.rights | The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author | |
dc.subject | Discourse | en_US |
dc.subject | Dialogue | en_US |
dc.subject | Disagreement | en_US |
dc.subject | Interaction | en_US |
dc.title | Taking a stance: experimenting with deliberation in dialogue | en_US |
dc.type | Thesis | en_US |