Common Ground or Conceptual Reframing? A Study of the Common Elements in Conflicting Positions in French Interactions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 151

Fig. 8.10 A region of the conceptual space of the interaction as defined by BETA's reply

A final interesting element of BETA's strategy is that by situating the two
positions as specifying the same frame, she gives a view of the conflict as
confronting two different ways of seeing the same thing. This is similar to the
previous analysis in which TWO's reply accepts that the French hate the Blacks and
the Arabs yet not taking it as a racist attitude but as “understandable” behaviour .
However, what is specific to BETA's strategy is that she presents her opponent's
position as a particular manifestation of a higher level concept 15 (Fig. 8.10 ).
Would ALPHA agree with this? Maybe or maybe not. One can imagine that
ALPHA has a different conception of democracy, but this is not the point. What
counts here is that BETA has made ALPHA's position enter into a conceptual frame
that appears to be common to both of them. In order to get out of this frame, ALPHA
would have to show in what way what she calls populism is not a democratic
attitude. Thus, comprehensive reframing appears as a highly efficient argumentative
strategy: by making the opponent's position appear as a partialised vision of reality,
the speaker who reframes is associated to the “ethos” of an orator who has a more
impartial vision of the situation.

8.5 Conclusion

In this paper, my intention has been to show that taking content to be connections of
linguistic forms instead of pieces of information reveals a particular kind of replying
strategy in conflicting interactions, and, at the same time, allows a more accurate

15 In this chapter I have not dealt with the problem of the “status” of the concepts within the
conceptual space. In BETA's reply, ALPHA's position is given a “rejected” status, whereas this is
not the case in the previous fragments we analysed. Other related issues are overlooked here, like
the fact that BETA treats ALPHA as ill-intentioned because of her use of the term populism and
not because of the concept that is asserted.