2.3 Major elements in opposition: refusal and disagreement
2.3.2 Disagreement
Disagreement refers to the circumstances that one speaker’s statement is opposed
to the other speaker’s point of view, and the opposition provides the basis for a conflict
(Lin, 1999, p.21). A rather clear definition is given in Liu (2009, p. 19), which defined
disagreement as a breakdown of the consensus of an intended proposition (literally or
non-literally stated) between speakers and hearers. In general, disagreement can be
denoted via linguistic features/strategies (e.g., Levinson, 1983; Pomerantz, 1984; Wang,
1997; Lin, 1999) and pragmatic strategies (e.g., Beebe & Takahashi, 1989; Kuo, 1992;
Muntigl & Turnbull, 1998; Lin, 1999). For linguistic features, Pomerantz (1984, p. 70)
introduced dispreferred actions, structurally marked with delays, requests for
clarification, partial repeats, other repair initiators, and turn prefaces. Levinson (1983)
generalized some features of dispreferred seconds (e.g., delays, prefaces, accounts, and
declination components). Following Levinson (1983), Wang (1997) proposed some
devices of disagreement in Mandarin Chinese, such as long pause, hesitation, negation,
qualifier, contrast, question or repair initiator, use of discourse markers and tag (i.e.,
duì bú duì ‘right?’), account and partial disagreement. Based on Wang’s classification,
Lin (1999) left out account and partial disagreement and added three other features like
modal, interjection, and interruption. She further grouped all the features in her data
into three categories, syntactic (i.e., negation and question), hesitation marker (i.e.,
repair, pre-announcement marker, contrast marker, modal, interjection, and qualifier),
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and turn-taking devices (i.e., interruption and long pause). She claimed that repair,
question, and negation are mostly used. Similar to Lin (1999), Liu (2009) adapted Lin’s
classification and added degree marker to extend the classification in her study.
From a pragmatic perspective, Beebe & Takahashi (1989) provided six semantic
formulas, including criticism, suggestion, positive remarks, gratitude, empathy, and
token agreement, while Muntigl & Turnbull (1998) identified four types of
disagreement (i.e., irrelevancy claims, challenges, contradiction, and counterclaims).
Building on Beebe & Takahashi (1989) and Muntigl & Turnbull (1998), Lin (1999) and
Liu (2009) analyzed disagreement in Mandarin Chinese. Lin (1999) categorized the
strategies into eight types, including correction, account, challenge, defense, evasion,
partial agreement, clarification, and suggestion. Liu (2009) mostly followed Lin’s
classification but she excluded evasion and set a boundary to divide disagreement into
content matter disagreement and personal judgment disagreement. Despite a systematic
classification proposed by Lin (1999), Tu (2014) found it problematic since the
definition of every single category in Lin (1999) was so brief that it might lead to
confusing results. Thus, he modified Lin’s classification and proposed other strategies
to account for the data on Facebook wall. The definition of each category proposed by
Tu (2014) is reproduced as follows.
(1) Account: It is used to disagree with the disagreement initiator by offering proper
explanations to support a speaker’s opposing stance.
(2) Correction: It occurs as the interlocutor considers the prior speaker’s assessment to
be inaccurate. However, it only deals with the disagreement initiator’s content of
talk, with no involvement of audience’s assumption.
(3) Challenge: The interlocutor questions the speaker’s prior assessment and further
requests supportive evidence, either directly or indirectly conveyed in the message.
(4) Criticism: A strong disagreement refers to the circumstances that a speaker
disagrees with negative judgments.
(5) Minimal Disagreement Token (MDT): It refers to fixed, idiomatic, and formulaic
expressions that function as a single clause directly showing disagreement.
(6) Dispute: It indicates a type of strong disagreement with strong emotion. Similar yet
different from ‘correction’, it involves with the disagreement against the prior
speaker’s assumption.
(7) Modesty: The hearer rejects and disagrees with previous compliments given by the
speaker so as to show modesty and humility.
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(8) Suggestion: It is a passive disagreement that the speaker tries to avoid direct
conflicts by providing alternative methods to solve the prior speaker’s problem.
(9) Pure Humor: A weak disagreement shows the speaker’s sense of humor in the
meantime. Disagreement is presented playfully without an aggressive attitude.
(10) Clarification: It is a resolution of previous speaker’s mishearing that helps avoid
misinterpretation. It occurs when the hearer is unable to fully understand the
previous assessment made by the speaker. To clearly convey the statement, the
speaker may repeat what has been said and provide more details.
(11) Evasion: It refers to a situation that the speaker eludes his/her own stances or
attempts to mislead the current topic with the intention to minimize the possibility
of threatening other’s face.
Dissimilar to Lin (1999), Tu (2014) added ‘minimal disagreement token (MDT)’,
‘dispute’, ‘criticism’, ‘humor’, and ‘modesty’. In addition, he further sub-categorized
each of strategy. For instance, account was divided into ‘pure account’, ‘account with
defense’, ‘account with humor’, and ‘account with defense and humor’; MDT was
distinguished into ‘pure MDT’ and ‘MDT with defense’ (Tu, 2014).
With a particular regard to MDT (also termed as ‘formulaic opposition markers’),
Kuo (1992) elaborated more than Tu (2014). According to Kuo (1992), formulaic
opposition markers tend to occur in turn-initial position and they are often delivered
with an emphatic tone signaling the following statement as a contrast action. She
discussed negators bú ‘no’, búshì ‘not to be’, and búduì ‘not right’, and other formulaic
expressions like suànle ba ‘forget about it’, luànjiăng ‘wild-talk’, nălĭ ‘not-at-all’, bù
yídìng ‘not-necessarily’ and bù jiàndé ‘don’t think so’. Similar to Tu (2014), she found
many aggravated forms usually considered dispreferred. However, those aggravated
forms were common in her study. The possible account of the frequent use of
aggravation may be a close friendship shared by the participants (Kuo, 1992; Tu, 2014).
Table 1. Aggressive and passive strategies in disagreement (Tu, 2014, p.71)
Aggressive strategies Passive strategies
Correction Account
Challenge Modesty
Criticism Suggestion
Minimal disagreement token Pure humor
Dispute Clarification
Evasion
Tu (2014) also asserted that disagreement strategies are further divided into two
types, aggressive and passive (i.e., strong and weak in Pomerantz (1984)). Five of them
are aggressive and six of them are passive. The aggressive types are correction,
challenge, criticism, minimal disagreement token, and dispute. In contrast to the strong
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forms, the passive forms include account, modesty, suggestion, pure humor,
clarification, and evasion. The aggressive and passive strategies in disagreement are
summarized in Table 1.
To compare the classifications in Lin (1999) and Tu (2014) with the refusal
strategies in Jong (2012), it seems that the strategies used in these two speech acts share
a great similarity with each other. In other words, the functions and definitions of some
refusal strategies are quite similar to those in disagreement although they are elicited
by different speech acts and termed differently. For example, verbal avoidance in
refusal is similar to evasion in disagreement; alternative identified in refusal resembles
suggestion in disagreement. Regardless the type of speech act, the strategies denoting
opposition do overlap.
Focusing on children’s disagreement, some studies concerned the aggravation and
mitigation of disagreement, such as Goodwin (1983). She explored the features of
aggravated correction and disagreement in the spontaneous conversations of urban
black children. Several formats dealing with a trouble source in prior speaker’s talk
were found, including aggravated partial-repeat correction, aggravated contradiction
and replacement correction (Goodwin, 1983). In addition, features like intonation
contour (e.g., falling intonation refers to challenge), turn shapes, and patterning in
sequences were examined to prove the aggravation in disagreement. Eisenberg &
Garvey (1981) and Eisenberg (1987) introduced strategies for children to encode the
negative responses. The verbal strategies include insistence and repetition (i.e., direct
counter-assertion and reiterating), verbal support (e.g., related reasons and
justifications), mitigation, appealing to another individual, verbal abuse (e.g., mocking,
threatening, name-calling and taunting), temporizing (i.e., to postpone compliance),
and offering compromise. Similar strategies are found in Mandarin-Chinese speaking
children, as in Wang (2007) and Chen (2016), focusing on mother-children interactions.
Here in the study, the strategies in Goodwin (1983) and Eisenberg (1987) are
observable. Among the strategies, it seems that some of them slightly correspond to Lin’s and Tu’s classifications. For example, we find that children may provide reasons
to show opposition. Such a linguistic behavior can be identified as ‘verbal support’ in
Eisenberg and Garvey’s words or ‘account’ in Lin (1999) and Tu (2014). The strategy
‘temporizing’ in Eisenberg & Garvey (1981) resembles ‘evasion’ in Lin (1999) and Tu
(2014). ‘Temporizing’ and ‘evasion’ both attempt at minimizing possible aggravated
disagreement via postponing or shifting the current topic. To account for the data in the
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current study, we adopt Lin’s and Tu’s classifications but with some modifications. For
instance, we delete those strategies rarely seen in children’s talk (e.g., ‘modesty’), and
take Eisenberg’s ‘verbal abuse’, unmentioned in Lin (1999) and Tu (2014), into account.
The revised classification is further elaborated in Chapter Three.