Disagreements in Plenary Addresses as Multimodal Action

Abstract

Disagreement has been discussed extensively in pragmatics. It is typically treated as a face-threatening speech act that needs mitigation. For example, Stalpers (1995) identifies ten strategies that may be used to mitigate disagreements. Her research is valuable in that it demonstrates the use of pauses, hedging expressions, modal verbs, token agreement and indirect speech acts in performing disagreements and illustrates their use both prior to and during the expression of the disagreement. However, this set of strategies does not reflect the complexity of disagreement in real-life communication. As Sifianou (2012, p. 1553) argues, disagreements are "complex, multidirectional and multifunctional acts" because of the context of the social interaction under question, face dynamics and multiple functions that are relevant to specific disagreements. Current research in multimodal discourse analysis also points to the interplay between various social semiotic resources in mediating social interaction: For example, Norris's (2007) study of a public speech illuminates the variety of meaning-making resources or communicative modes such as spoken language, posture and gaze, and their complementary roles for conveying multiple messages and performing multiple identities. It is thus important to examine how actions such as disagreements are performed by investigating the various possible resources that are mobilized including linguistic and paralinguistic resources. By building on research in multimodal discourse analysis-in particular, Norris's (2004) multimodal interaction analysis-this chapter explores how disagreements are accomplished by plenary speakers at academic conferences, with the focus on their use of multimodal meaningmaking devices to achieve their communicative goals, and discusses how such insights may contribute to teaching English for academic purposes.