Agreeing to Argue: The Conventionalization of Swiss German School Children's Practices for Initiating Disaffiliating Arguments With Ja

Turn-initial ja (‘yes’) becomes more frequent with age—and even more frequent than nein (‘no’)—in disaffiliating actions by Swiss German school children. But what are children actually doing when they say ja to begin disaffiliating? Using corpus-linguistic methods, this study shows that one bigram particularly contributes to the growing share of disaffiliating arguments initiated by ja: ja aber (‘yes but’). This increasing reliance on a single linguistic device provides evidence that beginning a turn with ja ( aber) is becoming a conventionalized way of addressing the recurring interactional challenge it is associated with. Sequential analyses illustrate how different uses of this bigram reflect varying levels of conversational argumentation skills. When used skillfully, ja aber displays agreement with engaging in the ongoing argumentative activity (alignment), while simultaneously projecting upcoming disaffiliation. This allows interactants to strategically and flexibly tailor their arguments to the contextual demands.