Evidence for Grounding in Polarised Gender Debates on YouTube

This paper addresses the challenge of grounding—establishing shared knowledge and beliefs—in highly
polarised online debates on sex and gender, where platform affordances and psychological biases foster defective
contexts and uncommon ground rather than cooperative communication. A multiphase qualitative discourse
analysis of 609 comments from two opposing German YouTube videos (one conservative and one scienceoriented)
was employed, deductively coding linguistic markers from pragmatic theory (e.g. negation, directives
and questions) and inductively identifying novel markers such as fixed assertions. Question types were examined
for their role in signalling alignment or conflict. The analysis reveals that, in these polarised environments,
grounding is dominated by 'negative evidence' — markers of misalignment, conflict and stance divergence —
rather than the collaborative mechanisms described in canonical models. A distinct asymmetry emerged between
the datasets: the conservative thread displayed a high frequency of refusal to negotiate common ground, whereas
the science communication thread showed no instances of establishing common ground, despite containing a
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higher number of attempts at negotiation. Furthermore, interrogative forms predominantly functioned as tools for
signalling conflict (e.g. incredulity questions), rather than for seeking information. This confirms that interactional
resources are adapted to express disagreement. These findings provide empirical evidence for ‘grounding under
epistemic incompatibility’ — a mode of interaction in which participants exhibit recognisable grounding
behaviours, but without any trajectory towards mutual understanding. This extends grounding theory beyond its
cooperative foundations, demonstrating that polarised online discourse actively produces and sustains uncommon
ground through systematic linguistic means, rather than merely lacking common ground.