Construcciones interrogativas en las sesiones de terapia: una herramienta para la (des)escalada del conflicto

Abstract

This paper focuses on describing the strategic use of interrogative constructions in Spanish during the communicative interaction that takes place in couples therapy sessions. Specifically, it focuses on examining how the interrogative construction may help to escalate or de-escalate the communicative conflict that emerges in this type of contexts and what type of interrogative sentences are involved to this end. For this purpose, once the interrogative constructions were identified in the corpus generated by the recording and transcription of therapy sessions of different Spanish couples, the following aspects were observed and interrelated: (a) the type of interrogative constructions used by the Spanish participants in these situations, (b) the role of the participants (couple vs. therapist, sender vs. listener) in the conflict situation and, finally, (c) the strategic use of interrogative constructions to escalate or de-escalate the conflict. As a result of the qualitative analysis of the corpus, strategic discursive uses linked to the thematic progression of the discourse, strategic pragmatic uses linked to the modification of the illocutionary force of the speech acts, and strategic social uses linked to the attempt to (dis)alienate and (dis)affiliate with the other participants in the interaction are all identified.

Keywords

• couples therapy
• conflict
• interrogative construction
• strategy
• de-escalate
• mitigation