discussionlinguistics

Discussionlinguistics is an interdisciplinary field that studies the linguistic structures and pragmatic functions of discussions in everyday talk, meetings, debates, and online forums. It aims to describe how participants coordinate turn-taking, manage topics, propose and evaluate arguments, and perform social actions through language.

Core topics include turn-taking conventions and sequence organization, adjacency pairs and repair, topic introduction and closure, stance and evaluation, evidentiality and epistemic stance, as well as politeness and face-work in the flow of interaction. Researchers also examine how disagreements are initiated, negotiated, and resolved, and how argumentative moves are staged across multi-party conversations.

Methods combine qualitative and quantitative approaches. Researchers use conversation analysis and discourse analysis to analyze the micro-structure of talk, often with detailed transcripts and sequential coding. Corpus linguistics, experimental pragmatics, and computational methods are employed to study larger discourses, including meetings and online discussions. Data sources range from face-to-face conversations and group discussions to moderated forums and broadcast or online debates.

Relation to related fields is strong. Discussionlinguistics draws on sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, rhetoric, and communication studies, but emphasizes the interactive, multi-party nature of discussion rather than solitary discourse or single-turn utterances.

Applications encompass education and pedagogy for improving classroom discussion, organizational communication and meeting facilitation, moderation of online platforms, analysis of political dialogue, and the development of dialogue systems in artificial intelligence that can manage turn-taking and negotiation.

As a developing field, discussionlinguistics builds on conversation analysis and discourse theory, addressing cross-cultural variation, multilingual settings, and methodological standardization to enhance comparability across studies.