Disagreement and argumentation in university exposures

Academic discourses are supposed to bring something new to the student or contradict something he thought he knew well. From this perspective, academic discourses (be they oral or written) are turned into a kind of "argument" in which a lot of things are rejected as inappropriate. Making a student accept a new point of view supposes the use of a series of communicative strategies among which EXPRESSING DISAGREEMENT has a special place as it is not only a way of rejecting, but also a pass-way to argumentation, a sine qua non of rejecting: we all know that young people are bound to accept a new point of view provided it is well supported by arguments and properly set. This paper shows the results of a research concerning the inventory of linguistic items used in rejecting, a sub-type of the speech act EXPRESSING DISAGREEMENT, such as they appear in academic discourses.