> Argumentation > Moves and Tactics > arghXiv:2512.11487
Response Types to Direct Questions in Two-Party Text Disputes
View PDF: Response Types to Direct Questions in Two-Party Text DisputesAbstract: A question put to a participant in these channels is usually not answered, and the ways in which it is not answered are various enough to require a manual. We developed one over 1,950 questions drawn from 47 channels, coding each response into thirty-one mutually exclusive categories, of which two describe an answer. A direct answer was recorded in 214 cases (11.0 per cent) and a truncated one in 131. The commonest response of any kind was a question put in return, at 268. Two categories admit an external check: of 109 responses asserting that the question had already been answered, a prior answer was locatable in the channel in 18, and of 55 deferring the answer to a stated future occasion, the occasion arrived in 2. Four coders applying the manual agreed at κ = 0.71 on whether a response contained an answer and at κ = 0.24 on which of the twenty-nine non-answering categories applied, so the field agrees that a question was not answered and does not agree about why. We then wrote to 291 participants to ask why particular questions had gone unanswered. Forty-seven replied, thirteen of them with a question.