The pragmatics of denial and resistance: Some theoretical and methodological considerations

Abstract

This paper presents a theory of audience-resistance and speaker-denial. The paper commences with the problem of definition, encompassing an analysis of the scope and nature of denial and resistance. The data for this study were primarily obtained from mainstream and social media postings in two languages: English and Arabic. The article primarily draws on discourse and socio-cognitive frameworks. The paper’s principal question is how and why Arab and English speakers may resist or deny a remark. Previous research on resistance to figurative language has focused predominantly on the rhetorical trope of metaphor and on what drives the English political and media elite to reject a metaphoric expression. However, this raises an important question that is rarely asked: how and why do members of the general public resist verbal metaphors, and what about other tropes such as hyperbole and metonymy, other languages such as Arabic, and other modalities such as images and art forms? The paper argues that the existing literature on meaning negotiation and/or human dialogic action and behavior is riddled with fundamental theoretical, methodological, and analytical flaws. The paper aims to fill in this gap and has significant implications both for conceptual metaphor theory and for (non-)deliberate language use.

Keywords

• speaker-denial
• audience-resistance
• multimodal discourse
• deliberateness
• empirical pragmatics
• cross-cultural communication