Metapragmatics of verbal aggression and workplace conflict

Abstract This study advances a participant-anchored, metapragmatic account of conflict triggering in Greek private-sector workplaces. It conceptualises escalation not as a direct outcome of harsh wording but as a rights-based process through which speakers publicly contest one another’s interactional legitimacy. Drawing on 55 semi-structured interviews with Greek private-sector employees, the analysis integrates (a) an etic mapping of recurrent aggressive manifestations, (b) emic metapragmatic evaluations through which participants label and moralise offence, and (c) an interactional threshold defined by explicit offence-labelling with immediate uptake. Findings reveal that escalation occurs when moralised evaluations reallocate communicative rights, particularly in public contexts where audiences amplify face risk and moral accountability. By linking linguistic choices, moral evaluation, and interactional consequence, the study contributes to sociopragmatic theory, workplace conflict studies, and applied models of interactional management.