This article describes some of the linguistic mechanisms people use when engaging in disagreements with one another. Unacquainted students discussed an issue on which they had opposing views. These disagreements were then transcribed and examined for the occurrence of politeness strategies. There was evidence for many of the positively polite strategies described by Brown and Levinson, as well as several previously undocumented strategies that appear to function as positive politeness. In addition, participants rated each other on several dimensions, and these perceptions were related to a speaker's degree of positive politeness.
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Thomas Holtgraves (1997) studied this question.
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