On the negotiation of the 'issue' in discussions among young children and their parents

Abstract

When analyzing argumentative discussions between young children and adults, it emerged that in some cases, adults and children do not share the same issue at the beginning of an interaction. The present contribution makes a first step in investigating how issues are negotiated among the discussants so that this diverging understanding can be overcome. To do so, an example from a corpus of everyday discussions in a family is analyzed. For the reconstruction of the argumentation, the pragma-dialectical model of a critical discussion will be used. Furthermore, the analysis of the implicit contextual-material premises on which the discussants base their reasoning will contribute to a better understanding of the interaction.