Conflict talk (Grimshaw, 1990), also termed as ‘dispute’ (Brenneis & Lein, 1977),
‘adversative episode’ (Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981) and ‘argument’ (Maynard, 1985a),
is, structurally, a sequence that begins with an opposition, an assertion, or an action and
ends with a dissipation or a resolution. It is a verbal behavior that occurs as one
individual states his/her opposition to another one’s statement, request, or action. In
brief, it is an opposing idea or a disputed state caused by participants’ wording about
diverse opinions (Liu, 2016).This verbal behavior is termed differently; however, the
definitions share a similarity that they all refer to a situation that participants disagree
with each other or they concern differently. In the present study, those terms are
interchangeably used. We also use the term ‘opposition’ to refer to such a conflictive
interaction, as mentioned earlier in Chapter One.
Arguments can be further divided into a serious type and a non-serious (playful)
type (Garvey & Shantz, 1992). As defined in Garvey & Shantz, (1992), ‘serious’ means
the participants in the talk understand that one another means it, neither joking nor
pretending, while ‘playful’ is marked by non-serious intent and it usually carries a
teasing quality. Although these two types are differentiated, they are not mutually
exclusive. Serious conflicts can be lightened by laughter and other playful acts whilst
playful conflicts sometimes are taken seriously, especially ritual insults (Eder, 1990).
Among the previous studies exploring children’s disputes, some focused on the
features and strategies (e.g., Brenneis & Lein, 1977; Boggs, 1978) while others dealt
with playful languages (e.g., Eder, 1990; Ardington, 2006). Still others concerned the
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gender issue (e.g., Farris, 1991, 2000; Kyratzis & Guo, 2001; Kuo, 2011). In terms of
structures and features in conflict talk, Brenneis & Lein (1977) directed role-plays to
investigate the forms and structures of disputes by American elementary school
children (i.e., grade 1, 3, and 4). They analyzed disputes in terms of content and style
(i.e., paralinguistic cues like volume, stress, and speed), and identified various initial
opening acts (e.g., threats, insults, simple assertion, etc.) and reactions (e.g., denials and
demands for evidence). They found three basic structures, ‘repetition’, ‘inversion’ and
‘escalation’ (i.e., the following statements are stronger, more imaginative or longer than
the prior ones). Following Brenneis & Lein (1977), Boggs (1978) went beyond the
forms and structures and considered the function of disputes in peer cultures. He
described part-Hawaiian children’s verbal disputing and identified the disputing pattern
as ‘contradicting routine’. In his definition, the pattern is structured by turns consisting
of sequences in which an utterance of a particular set provokes a certain set of replies.
It seems that the routine functions to structure serious conflicts for children whilst it
plays a role in playful interactions for adolescents. Rather than examining the whole
disputing routine (i.e., antecedent events, oppositions, and resolutions), Maynard (1985)
paid special attention to the initial phases of an argument. He found that opposition
occurs in many contexts (e.g., repair sequences, teasing, and play routines), and it
indicates the violation of certain rules or values. Although Boggs (1978) and Maynard
(1985) mainly investigated serious conflicts, they also documented the functions of
playful conflicts. Boggs (1978) noted the playful use of threat, challenge, and insult;
Maynard (1985) showed how playful cues can shift a serious conflict to a mitigated one.
The thorough discussion of playful conflicts was presented in Eder (1990) and
Ardington (2006). Eder (1990) examined a variety of conflicts among white adolescent
girls from diverse social backgrounds. She found that ritual insult is a common skill
among girls. Different from boys who are engaged in competitive insults to sustain their
status in the social-hierarchy, girls’ insults usually occur within conversations between
good friends (Eder, 1990). The function of playful language in preadolescent girls’ talk
was extraordinarily studied in Ardington (2006). She identified a range of linguistic
behaviors including partial transformation of forms and sentence structures, syntactic
mirroring (e.g. don’t you insult your sister, you always insult () dominic), sound play
and playing with rhythm. She claimed that the negotiation of disagreement is
accomplished through the use of name-calling, insults, teasing, directives, word play,
sound play, and tiztizn’ts (i.e., a sequence/an adjacency-pair used to display speakers’
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oppositional stances toward others, often restricted to younger kids’ dispute). The
results implied that both confrontational and collaborative practices are used to
negotiate friendly relations. Eder (1990) and Ardington (2006), indeed, provided us
with how playful disputes functioned in peer interactions. However, they only made a
point of girls’ talk but failed to observe playful talk among boys and in mixed-sex
groups. It appears that playful conflict talk in boys and cross-sex groups deserves more
exploration.
Regarding children’s dispute in Mandarin Chinese, several studies have shown
interest in the construction of gender in same-sex and cross-sex groups (e.g., Farris,
1991, 2000; Kyratzis & Guo, 2001; Kuo, 2011). Farris (1991, 2000) examined
same-sex and cross-same-sex conflicts in a primary school. She found that boys and girls are likely
to use the sex-stereotyped styles in same-sex conflicts (i.e., boys used a direct,
confrontational speech, while girls preferred a mitigated one). She also argued that girls
sometimes use a direct and a masculine style to deal with same-sex and
heterogeneous-sex conflicts. Similarly, Kuo (2011) investigated the strategies and the gender
differences in Taiwanese children’s verbal arguments with peers. She discussed both
verbal and non-verbal strategies. She suggested that girls tend to use ‘insistence and
repetition’, ‘verbal support’, and ‘physically aggressive’ in both homogeneous and
heterogeneous gender arguments; boys, however, are more likely to use ‘verbal support’
and ‘appealing to another individual’ in same-sex arguments while using ‘insistence
and repetition’ and ‘temporizing’ to oppose in mix-sex disputes. With regard to the role
in opposition, she found that when boys are in the role of opposee, they use ‘insistence and repetition’, ‘verbal support’, ‘mitigation’, and ‘offering to compromise’ to interact
with the opposite gender. As with the same gender, they ignore the opponents.
In addition to gender differences, Kyratzis & Guo (2001) also paid attention to
cultural differences. They compared the disputes by middle-class boys and girls from
the US and Mainland China. They noticed that girls and boys used conflict strategies
differently in same-sex groups. In all-girl groups, American girls exploited mollified
strategies, collaborative connectives, and framing shift to avoid conflicts. In contrast,
Chinese girls were directive by using aggravated commands, negative polarity items,
complaints, mocking, threats, and even physical force. As in all-boy groups, American
boys used direct strategies to show opposition whilst Chinese boys, similar to American
girls, used more mitigated forms. In heterogeneous-sex groups, American girls used
aggravated ones, scarcely found in same-sex interactions. Interestingly, girls in both
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cultures were more dominant than boys.
Unlike the previous studies on Mandarin-speaking children’s arguments, the
present study does not center on the gender issue. Instead, we would like to give a
systematic classification of strategies commonly used in children’s arguments. Both
serious and playful types are taken into account.