In the previous section, we have demonstrated that shi-o can be used by the recipient to withhold his/her agreement and provide a weak agreement afterwards.
In this section, we will focus on shi-o prefacing a dispreferred response, which comprise 6.1% (20/330) of all the uses. When a news announcer holds a view contrastive with the recipient’s, i.e. the chatter’s perspective constitutes an unexpected and dispreferred informing to the recipient, the recipient replies with shi-o first and proposes a disagreement immediately afterwards. The disagreement is dispreferred in that when a speaker is doing the informing, he/she expects the recipient to show
agreement or support.11
In the following excerpt, the two participants are discussing whether to choose a general senior high school, a vocational school or a five-year junior college after attending an entrance exam held recently.
(3.13) CK1: ni you xiang shang taibei shangzhuan ma 你 有 想 上 台北 商專 嘛[嗎]
2SG have think go Tapei college-of-business PAR
‘Do you want to go to Taipei College of Business?’
JA1: bu hei ba 不 會 吧 NEG can PAR
‘I don’t think so.’
wo zhishao yingkai you yongchun 我 至少 應該 有 永春 1SG at-least should have Yongchun
‘I should at least be admitted to YongChun, I guess.’
CK2: gaosu ni bu hei bi youngchun cha 告訴 你 不 會 比 永春 差 tell 2SG NEG can than Youngchun bad
‘Tell you something. The popularity (of Taipei College of Business) is better than YongChun.’
JA2: wo jiu bu hui xiang shang gaozhi or 我 就 不 會 想 上 高職 or 1SG just NEG can think go vocational-school or wuzhuan ba
五專 吧 five-year-jonior-college PAR
‘But I just don’t want to enter vocational schools or five-year junior colleges.’
CK3: wo jie ye shi dudao xianzai cai houhei 我 姐 也 是 獨[讀] 到 現在 才 後悔 = = 1SG sister too COP stiudy reach now just regret
‘My elder sister didn’t feel regret (entering a senior high school) until
11 Here the disagreement excludes the type that is performed after self-deprecation since disagreements are the preferred response units after self-deprecation (Pomerantz 1984:83).
now.’
ÆJA3: shi o wo bu zhidao la bukuo benneng fenyin jiu shi bu 是歐~ 我 不 知道 啦~不過 本能 反應 就 是 不 RT 1SG NEG know PAR but intuition reaction just COP NEG xiangiao nian gaozhi or wuzhuan
想要 唸 高職 or 五專
want study vocational-school or five-year-jonior-college
‘Is that so? I don’t know. But my first intuition is not to go to vocational schools or five-year junior college.’
CK4: nusheng du gaozhi mei kaotou 女生 讀 高職 沒 搞頭 girl study vocational NEG promising
‘Girls who go to go to vocational schools do not have a promising future.’
wuzhuan bijiao hao 五專 比較 好
five-year-jonior-college compare good
‘It would be better (for a girl to go to) the five-year junior college.’
JA4: beishishang ie shi goazhi a 北士商 也 是 高職 ㄚ[阿]
Beishishang too COP vocational-school PAR
‘(The popularity of a vocational school is not always bad.) Shilin High School of Commerce is also a vocational school (, but most people consider it a good school).’
bu zhidao fenzheng wo you yongchun jiu bu hei kaolu 不 知道~ 反正 我 有 永春~ 就 不 會 考慮
NEG know anyway 1SG have Youngchun just NEG can think gaozhi or wuzhuan
高職 or 五專 vocational-school
‘(Although most people consider Shilin High School of Commerce a good school,) I don’t know. Anyway I just won’t consider vocational schools or five-year junior colleges because I can enter Yongchun.’
The two chatters in the conversation above upheld two different positions. CK in his second and third turns try to persuade JA to agree with CK’s opinion, but JA is nonetheless in a position of disagreeing with CK. However, a turn which houses disagreements may usually draw on delay devices (e.g. English uh,well or agreement
prefaces yeah or I don’t know with the contrastive component but discussed in Levinson (1983) and Pomerantz (1984)) since the preferred second of a proposal is agreement, according to preference organization (Levinson 1983; Pomerantz 1984;
Yule 1996). Thus JA in JA3 utters disagreement prefaced by a delay device, namely, shi-o to tone down the following implicit disagreement, which displays reluctance.
The qualifier “I don’t know” in JA3 and JA4 is also a characteristics of a dispreferred second (Levinson 1983:334), revealing that the speaker intends to delay the turn that disagrees with the prior speaker’s position.
To summarize, extract (3.13) illustrates how shi-o is housed in an action of disagreement. This usage examined in conversation suggests that shi-o is essentially used to be a delay device when one is not willing to agree with the other. The primary reason for the occurrence of shi-o prefatory to disagreement is for the attention of a disagreement, which is a dispreferred response, namely, a marked response (Levinson 1983; Pomerantz 1984; Yule 1996). Since it costs a disagreeing respondent more effort in response, shi-o downplays the negative force of the disagreement to reduce the potential face threat to the addressee.