Arguing in English and French asynchronous online discussion

Online discussion fora have introduced a new type of communicative situation characterized by many-to-many interaction, physical distance and particularly low contextual information. Analysis of a French-English comparable corpus of online political discussion reveals tendencies to topic decay and to fragmentation of interaction from multi-party discourse to overlapping dyadic 'conversation'. A recurrent message structure is identified in the political discussions: [reaction] + position + support. Within this structure, the usage of two concession markers is examined and found to resemble more closely that of conversation than that of monologic political discourse. Data are drawn from online discussions of current affairs and political themes, within the readers' fora provided by The Financial Times, Le Monde, The Guardian and Le Nouvel Observateur. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.