Abstract

This article reports on an interactional practice found in one form of adversarial talk, arguments during protests, where participants work to ‘entice’ a particular answer from an opponent using an uncontroversial questions in order to challenge the opponent on the basis of their own answer. Based on a collection of arguments during protests posted to YouTube, this article uses conversation analysis in order to investigate the way in which participants employ these uncontroversial questions as ‘prechallenges’, using speaker selection, recipient focused topics and a moral ordering of talk to work to obligate a particular answer from the recipient. The results of the analysis illustrate several ways in which participants manipulate epistemics, speaker selection, and recipient design as resources for enacting social conflict.