ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand aspects of acrimonious talk in facilitative conflict mediations. “Acrimonious” was chosen as a descriptor because it is associated with anger, accusation, bitterness and mean-spiritedness. The notion of “stance” is drawn from Goffman as a way of drawing attention to the way people shift their display of attitudes, feelings and identities dynamically in interaction with others. In this view, emotions emerge and get displayed based on how people are communicating with each other. People, of course, vary in their tendencies toward acrimony, but presumably, everyone can project or feel it. “Acrimony” is a general, negative opposition toward another person. Acrimony has been defined in terms of behaviour, cognition and emotion, but especially in terms of personality type. A schema is a sort of mapping the concepts of one domain on to another, unrelated domain. A theory of language that focuses primarily on words cannot be a theory of communication.
