Introduction
 
In the past, the linguistic means of conducting conflict among adults did not receive
much attention in either linguistic or anthropological linguistic research, in part
because, as Briggs (1996) puts it, conflict constitutes a type of “disorderly discourse.”
As a result, either researchers did not venture into this form of “backstage language
behavior” (Goffman 1959) or this kind of data was not easily gathered. Consequently,
several studies exist that talk about conflict (e.g. Watson-Gegeo and White 1990), but
few focusing on a turn-by-turn analysis of how conflict is conducted among adults,
except among adults in interaction with children.
Initially, researchers focused on the structural properties of arguments or disputes,
but gradually the focus shifted to more contextual strategies, and more recently,
scholars are investigating how the self or selves is or are constituted through conflict
and how ideology is constructed and reflected through conflict talk.

1 Structural Properties of Conflict

The structural elements of different types of conflict are the focus of this section.
One of the earlier studies on children’s conflict is Brenneis and Lein’s (1977)
investigation of role-played disputes among white middle-class children in the first,
third, and fourth grades from an elementary school in Massachusetts. They found
that the children’s argumentative sequences fell into three structural patterns: repetition,
escalation, and inversion. They also identified “stylistic tactics” (suprasegmental
elements) that characterized the tone of the children’s exchanges. A reciprocal
redundancy was noted between content and style. The shorter and more repetitive
the content exchange, the more stylistically elaborate it was. Conversely, the more
semantically complex exchanges were not stylistically elaborate.The three communities, however, differed in their organization of arguments,
particularly in the turn-taking system. The Indian children showed a much higher
tolerance for overlapping talk than did the black children, who had no instances of it.
White children showed organization patterns similar to those of the black students.
The occasional cases of overlap that were recorded among the white children occurred
when a speaker was perceived to have finished his or her utterance.

Kakavá (1993a, 1993b) and Kotthoff (1993) also provide counterevidence to the
structural markedness of disagreement. Kakavá finds that in casual conversations.
Finally, another study addresses the concept of preference and the shape that
oppositional turns take, but in a different medium: computer-mediated communication.
Baym (1996) investigates agreement and disagreement patterns in a mostly female
newsgroup. The disagreement patterns she discovered matched those suggested
by Pomerantz, but some major differences emerged due to the medium, gender, context,
and interactive goals: disagreements included quoting, were linked to previous
discourse, and had pervasive elaboration. Interestingly, accounts and justifications
emerged with agreements, and not just disagreements, as the notion of preference
predicts.

2 Communicative Strategies of Conducting Conflict

The studies reviewed in this section indicate the researchers’ interest in exploring not
just textual features of conflict or argument but discourse-level phenomena as well,
including irony, joking, stories, reported speech, etc. Another aspect that distinguishes
these studies is that they examine macro- and microcontextual factors to determine
the effect they have on the oppositional strategies chosen; for instance, cultural
interactional rules, style, and gender, as well as speakers’ interactional goals.

Kakavá (1993a) and Song (1993) provide a qualitative analysis of the linguistic
strategies of engaging in conflict in two different cultures: Greek and Korean, respectively.
Some of the strategies found in the Greek data were direct disagreements
sometimes accompanied by figurative kinship terms, contrastive repetition, sarcasm,
personalization of an argument, accounts, and stories.4 In Korean, Song lists formulaic
expressive adverbials, repetition, code-switching, silence, and personal experience
stories among others.
In a series of studies, Tannen (1990b, 1994, 1998) has provided numerous examples
of the different strategies boys and girls (and later, men and women) use to engage in
conflict in casual and professional settings. Although, as she constantly reminds the
readers, not all females and males behave similarly, she maintains that patterns of
gender-specific preferences exist and that these need to be identified, since people
experience normative pressures to act according to their gender. Tannen claims that
boys and men tend to engage in direct confrontations or use opposition as a way of
negotiating status, whereas girls and women tend to seek at least overt expression
of agreement and avoid direct confrontations. Often boys’ and men’s use of conflict
is ritual (in her terms, “agonism”), such as playful roughhousing among boys,
and men’s use of verbal challenges as a way of exploring ideas (“playing devil’s
advocate”). However, Tannen also notes that other contextual parameters, such as
conversational style, emergent context, and interactive goals, can affect the engagement
or disengagement from confrontation irrespective of gender.
This section explored some representative features and strategies of engaging
in conflict and the combination of contextual factors affecting the form they take.
The next section will examine how interactants negotiate conflict and what the main
patterns of conflict resolution in social interaction have been.

3 Conflict Negotiation and Resolution

How children negotiate conflict or resolve it has been the focus of several studies. A
seminal paper is that of Eisenberg and Garvey (1981), who examined videotaped play
sessions of 48 dyads of already acquainted preschoolers and 40 dyads of unacquainted
preschoolers who met at a laboratory and were observed through a one-way mirror.
Children rarely used “nonadaptive” strategies, that is, insistence, repetition, or paraphrase
of their utterance. Instead they employed “adaptive” strategies, such as supporting
their moves with reasoning, justifications, and requests for clarification to
resolve their conflicts.
Building on his earlier research, Maynard (1986) focuses on the dynamics involved
in multiparty disputes among children, using as data videotaped sessions of reading
groups. He points out that some disputes may start as two-sided, yet end up being
multiparty. Different “parties” may, invited or uninvited, align with a displayed
position, stance, claim, or counterposition, and may challenge a particular position
“for different reasons and by different means” (1986: 281). He also found fluid patterns
of collaboration in this type of dispute that depended upon the children’s emergent
alignments.
Qualitative cultural differences of negotiating disputes were reported in Corsaro
and Rizzo’s (1990) study of American and Italian nursery school children between the
ages of 2 and 4. Italian children had many more disputes involving claims than the
American children had, and these disputes were often unresolved and rather lengthy.
Corsaro and Rizzo argue that the claim disputes in the Italian data displayed theelement of discussione, that is, the “enjoyment of argumentation,” which they compare
to the aggravated disagreement found in Goodwin (1983, 1990a) and Goodwin
and Goodwin (1987). This element also manifested itself in the “dispute routines”
found only in the Italian data. During these routines, Italian children engaged in a
“skillful performance” to tease, enacting “complex, stylistic, and aesthetically impressive
routines” (Corsaro and Rizzo 1990: 40). This “emphasis on style” characterized
all Italian children’s disputes in contrast to the American ones.
Vuchinich’s finding in terms of the most common type of conflict termination (i.e.
stand-off) is consonant with what Genishi and di Paolo (1982) observed in their study
of upper-middle-class children’s disputes in a classroom setting. It was found that
resolutions were not usually attained but arguments tended to be diffused.
Conflict resolution strategies and the way that gender affects the strategies chosen
are the research area of the following studies. Sheldon (1990, 1996) analyzed the
conflict talk of 3-year-old friends in same-sex triads, and found that the strategies
used by the two groups confirmed proposals made by Maltz and Borker’s (1982)
anthropological linguistic model of gender-marked language use and Gilligan’s
(1987) psychological framework. In Sheldon’s study, the children were videotaped
while playing with toys. The two disputes (one representative triad for each gender)
that she analyzed displayed different discourse strategies. The girls used patterns
of opposition–insistence–opposition sequences. However, they also used a variety
of means to reach a negotiation (e.g. reasons). The boys’ dispute was much more
extended and with more opposition–insistence–opposition sequences than the girls’.
In contrast to the girls’ strategies, the boys did not “jointly negotiate a resolution”
(1987: 27), even though they did offer some compromises.

4 The Meanings of Conflict

The studies reviewed in this section offer suggestions about the situated, cultural,
and social meanings of conflict, a step that brings us closer to how conflict is viewed
in different societies and by different groups.
Status negotiation has been one of the most commonly cited meanings of conflict
talk among children and adults. Maynard (1985b), using the same data as in his previous study (Maynard 1985a), claims that conflict among children latently functions
to “develop their sense of social structure and helps reproduce authority, friendship,
and other interactional patterns that transcend single episodes of dispute” (1985b: 220).Some of the cultural and social constraints of ritual insult are reported in Heath’s
(1983) ethnographic study. She reports that whereas working-class black school-age
boys and girls engaged in exchanges of insults and play songs, white children of the
same class did not. First- or second-grade females did not engage in one-liners,
couplets, or verses, (forms of insults and play songs) the way the boys did, until they
were in upper primary grades. Girls preferred physical confrontation in challenges of
peer relations with groups of girls from other communities, but they used verbal
challenges with friends or girls with whom there was no confrontation in status
relations.
In summary, conflict has been viewed as a means to negotiate status, in particular
among males, and it has been evaluated as either positive or negative, depending on
one or more of the following factors: culture, gender, class, or situational context.

5 Conclusion: Recent Trends and Directions in Conflict Research

Recent studies of conflict build on the properties already reviewed. For example, they
discover either structural features or interactional strategies, but they also seek to
describe the social roles participants take in the course of an argument or they seek to
delineate what other resources participants will use to construct an oppositional
format. Furthermore, some studies observe a fluidity of opinions or attitudes, and
alignments. Thus these studies seek to discover how opinions, roles, identities, and
consequently ideologies are constructed, supported, or contested through conflict talk.
What one can conclude from all the studies reviewed is that some of the features
and strategies used to engage in conflict are shared among diverse languages (see for
example structural repetition in English, Taiwanese, Greek, and Korean; overlaps in
Chiapas, Greek, etc.; and silence in English and Korean), whereas others may not be
shared, or at least there is not sufficient evidence that they are shared (e.g. personal
analogy in Greek; Kakavá 1994a). What also emerged is that certain strategies are
indexical to contextual constraints such as speech event (family talk versus parliamentary
interpellations, for example), face, or gender. Since linguists have always searched
for universals or implicational universals, it could be viable, if other microstudies
of conflict are conducted, to create a matrix of commonly shared structural and
interactional features and produce a typology of them across different contexts. Muntigl
and Turnbull’s (1998) work, for example is a first step toward correlating the force of
a subsequent claim and face considerations. Furthermore, no study has focused on the nonverbal means of conducting conflict
(i.e. gestures and facial expressions), although Maynard (1985a), Goodwin (1994),
Taylor (1995), and Ochs and Taylor (1995) refer to some nonverbal oppositional stances
in their papers. Consequently, there is a lacuna as to how nonverbal means of expressing
conflict can index the linguistic means of expressing conflict and vice versa.
Could some gestures or postures constitute argumentative icons, and how do these
vary by culture? Kendon (1992, 1993), for example, demonstrates how the closed fist
accompanies argumentation in Italian, while Goodwin (1994) shows a postural
oppositional stance among Hispanic girls. Future research can attempt to provide
these missing links, which could grant a much more integrated typology of the means
of engaging in conflict.
Another area that needs further investigation is how conflict is evaluated in a
particular society and/or context. This line of research will shed more light on theoretical
frameworks that view disagreement either as a threatening act that needs to be
avoided at any cost (Pomerantz 1984; Heritage 1984; Brown and Levinson 1987; Leech
1983) or as a positive action that enhances sociability (Simmel 1961). While we do
have evidence from some cultures for either the positive or negative evaluation of conflict (e.g. Schiffrin 1984; Keenan 1974), researchers have started to question whether
conflict can have either a positive or a negative value in a particular culture. Tannen
(1993b), for example, has argued and shown that conflict can be potentially polysemous,
in that it can create solidarity or power. As we also saw, gender (e.g. Tannen 1990b,
1994) and interactional context have emerged as important factors affecting the value
conflict has. It seems that we still need to furnish more qualitative, within- and acrosscontexts
research to study not just how conflict works but also how it is evaluated.

Finally, over a decade ago, Grimshaw (1990) urged researchers of conflict to explore
the full range of texts available and not limit themselves to local or familiar loci of
conflict but discover the processes that govern international disputes as well. It seems
to me that his call is as pertinent now as it was then. Although as discourse analysts
we have shed light on conflict management at home and in the workplace, we have
not shifted our attention to international types of dispute, where the ramifications
and consequences are even more dire, as we have recently experienced. Tannen
(1986: 30) once wrote, referring to cross-cultural communication: “Nations must reach
agreements, and agreements are made by individual representatives of nations sitting
down and talking to each other – public analogs of private conversations. The processes
are the same, and so are the pitfalls. Only the possible consequences are more extreme.”
We need to refocus our energies on these public conversations, which turn out to be
more problematic than the ones we have already investigated, if we want to increase
our contributions to humankind.