The present study focuses on the speech act of disagreement on Facebook, one of the most dominant Social Networking Sites in recent years. Facebook provides multiple services like instant messaging (synchronous), text messaging (asynchronous) and Wall. In this study, I choose public page of Wall to be the main target. Facebook Wall is a semi-public space in which only the users on the friend list can comment on and read the content inside. The present data collected is analyzed on a turn-by-turn basis. Participants in conversations take turns to speak. Speakers observe TRP while they are competing for the turn and speak. However, a turn in CMC is not totally identified with the traditional definition of “turn.” A “turn” in FtF conversation varies and is realized in various forms with different sizes. It could be a word, a clause, a noun phrase, or a sentence. But a turn in the present study is easier to define.
Observing TRP is totally unnecessary in CMC like Facebook because of the feature of asynchronicity. As shown in Figure 2, a comment box consisting of multiple feedbacks may contain several turns. Each turn in the comment box is marked with
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the time when the feedback is entered. A turn is therefore defined as one single feedback in the comment box with time and date marked below it. For example, The sentences "弟，你在那上班嗎? 買東西有折扣嗎?...你姊正需要!" constitute a turn, and the time when the turn was produced was Feb. 21, 7:14pm.
Figure 2. A comment box in FB
One turn might consist of more than one single strategy. The unit of analysis in the present study refers to a clause that is separated by punctuations like period, an exclamation mark, a question mark, a single space between words, or a carriage return.1 A clause is defined as a linguistic unit that expresses a propositional content with an overt or non-overt subject.
1 The “space” button on computer keyboard functions to separate two syntactic units in digital documents. On the Internet, the use of punctuation is simplified so that the messages through Net are usually fragmented. Since the punctuation system of Mandarin is not the standard equipment on most computer keyboard (usually English form only), punctuation, particularly those which function separate clauses and sentences, is often omitted and replaced by a single “space.”
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(1)
TY2: yep. [我是 說 放 個 假 回來 感覺 一切 都
yep wo shi shuo fang ge jia huilai ganjue yiqie dou yep 1SG be say put CL vacation back feel everything all
不 一樣 了],你 需要 多 睡覺 還 有 換 工作．
bu yiyang le ni xuyao duo shuijiao hai you huang gongzuo not same CRS 2SG need much sleep also exist change job
‘Yep. I mean I feel refreshed after my vacation. You need more sleep and a new job.’
(2)
YP: 那 不 是 自信， [那 是 臉 皮 厚!!!]
na bu shi zixin na shi lian pi hou that not be confidence that be face skin thick
‘That’s not confidence. That’s thick-skin!!!’
As shown in the above examples, TY2’s comment is one clause instead of two because it contains only one complete propositional content. On the other hand, YP’s comment “那不是自信，那是臉皮厚!!!” contains two individual clauses, which is separated by a comma. Therefore, in our data coding process, there are a total of three units of analysis in the above examples. For convenience of observing separated units of analysis, brackets are used to divide different clauses/units of analysis if there are multiple disagreement strategies observed in one single turn.
Given the above definitions, therefore, first turn (A1) in Figure 3 (reproducing Figure 2) includes three isolated units of analysis ([弟，你在那上班嗎？][買東西有 折扣嗎？][(≧∇≦)妳姊正需要*！]), which are separated with two question marks, and the last one ends with an exclamation mark. Speaker B1's turn, on the other hand, is composed of three turns separated by carriage returns, and it contains three disagreement tokens marked by square brackets.
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Figure 3 Analyzable figure format Participant Message
選購員加班中 — at IKEA 宜家家居 敦北店.
Photo: 選購員加班中
Speaker A1 [弟，你在那上班嗎？][買東西有折扣嗎？][(≧∇≦)妳姊正需要*！]
Speaker B1 [哈哈哈姐姐抱歉啦] ← disagreement token 1 [我只是去採購新辦公室的用品] ← disagreement token 2 [不是在那上班 不能給折扣] ← disagreement token 3 Speaker A2 哇哇！╮(╯_╰)╭
Speaker B2 可惜了...
Speaker A3 嘿啊！好可惜喔！
*description with boldface refers to the assessment which initiates the following disagreements
In the present study, over 1,000 turns of posted messages in a total of 97 dialogues are collected. The participants consist of 166 males and 198 females. The age of participants ranges from 20 to 30 years old. Most of them are college/graduate students, and some are already in employment. The topics of the dialogues in the data are mostly about life experience that participants want to share with friends, and there are few topics about social issues which are important to the society. A quantitative analysis based on Lin’s (1999) and Muntigl and Turnbull’s (1989) studies is employed to categorize the disagreement tokens into several types in terms of the linguistic features and pragmatic strategies. The classification of the disagreements adopted in the present study is presented in the following section.