Disagreement and relational work in 17th-century didactic dialogues

My paper focuses on Early Modern English didactic dialogues in an attempt to reveal the interrelation existing between relational work and authoritative discourse. In particular, I shall investigate the use of disagreement strategies in a corpus of constructed dialogues covering the period from 1601 to 1703. The dialogues are taken from the "Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760". All texts deal with the religious, political and social concerns of the time and use an argumentative structure featuring two characters who confront each other with opposite viewpoints. The results show that the character's politic/non-politic behaviour carries considerable ideological implications. Characters who maintain a politic attitude enhance the argumentative force of their claims, whereas those who deviate from politic behaviour are perceived as factious and fallacious.