Chapter 6 Conclusion
6.2. Limitations and Suggestions
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Second, for degrees of agreement, in general, FF and FM use WOC significantly more than WC. Additionally, FF is the only one group among the four that use significantly more upgrading agreement than preserving agreement.
In other words, women are the one who try hard to maximize agreement to fulfill hearers’ positive face wants.
Based on the results above, women are the one who makes more effort to make agreement forceful. Furthermore, when interlocutors are both women, this tendency becomes more obvious. Perhaps it is because that for women, the purpose of
communication is to reach consensus, maintain solidarity, and avoid conflict between self and other (Tannen, 1994). Besides, women are more hearer-oriented and more willing to fulfill hearers’ positive face wants (Brown and Levinson, 1978; Woods, 1997). Therefore, women and men differentiate from each other in the way to make agreement.
It is concluded that gender differences occur in the construction and pragmatic strategies of agreement. Thus, in general, gender is an influential factor to the construction of agreement.
6.2. Limitations and Suggestions
This thesis tries to examine how agreement is constructed and how pragmatic strategies of agreement are performed in Chinese culture, and to figure out how speaker’s gender, hearer’s gender, and both speaker’s and hearer’s genders influence the performance of agreement. However, some limitations exist in this study. The following suggestions may remedy these limitations.
First, due to limited time and data of agreement, the linguistic markers coding agreement are not analyzed in the current study. Future studies, with sufficient amount
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of data, can linguistic markers be categorized and studied in detail. At that time, more importantly, will the way of interaction between these linguistic markers and the categories of agreement be identified.
Second, due to time limitation, the referential contents of agreement (or the topic of propositional content), are not investigated in this thesis. These referential contents may also influence the agreeing party’s choice of construction, degrees, and pragmatic strategies of agreement. In future studies, the interaction between referential contents and the usage of agreement should be examined.
Third, due to time limitation, follow-up interviews are not conducted to confirm patterns found in this study. Therefore, all of the interpretation and explanation made are not fully justified. In future studies, follow-up interviews should be made to secure more holistic and countable explanations for findings in agreement.
Fourth, social factors other than gender (such as age, social status, or educational level, familiarity, and intimacy) should be considered in order to obtain a more
holistic view on the usage of agreement. Data of this study are adapted from NCCU corpus of Mandarin, which is not sociolinguistically designed, so only social factor, gender, is examined. It is highly expected that some other, social factors, if not all, would cast critical impacts on people’s ways to show agreement.
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高麗君、李珮甄、王萸芳，2006，中文會話中表同意和不同意之語言特徵及其教 學應用。發表於第八屆世界華語文教學研討會。