“Let’s agree not to disagree!”: doing getting acquainted in initial encounters

Within initial interactions, unacquainted individuals attempt to establish relationships, yet very few studies consider this communication event outwith the specialised genre of Speed Dating (Stokoe, 2010). This interactional politeness project uses applied conversation analysis in order to investigate the preferences for agreement in more ‘ordinary’, non-romantic settings. This paper therefore represents a natural extension of related research from previous studies (Haugh, 2015, forthcoming; Haugh and Carbaugh, 2015). While this paper broadly investigates the preference for agreement employed by unacquainted individuals in initial interactions, the focus is not only to analyse the politeness techniques involved in doing agreeing, but also those involved in avoiding doing disagreeing. Specifically, this paper reports on the British–British dialogues collected by the current author as part of a larger scale project (in collaboration with Haugh and Merrison) involving an inter-cultural and cross-cultural comparative study between participants from the UK, Australia and the USA. The wider project will therefore ultimately investigate the preference for agreement of speakers of a range of different varieties of English. In examining these data, we will be able to offer a more nuanced account of some of the ways in which unacquainted individuals mobilise agreement in the process of doing getting acquainted.