兒童在同儕互動中的對立語言

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語學系碩. 士. 論. 文. Master’s Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 兒童在同儕互動中的對立語言. Strategies of Opposition in Children’s Interaction. 指導教授：蘇席瑤博士 Advisor: Dr. Hsi-Yao Su 研究生：林宜葶 Student: Yi-Ting Lin. 中華民國一零五年七月 July, 2016.

(2) 摘要. 本篇論文旨在研究臺灣兒童於同儕互動間產生對立時的語言表達策略，及其與成人間的差異。文中語料來源為台北市某小學三十二位低年級學生，於課間活動的對話。參與觀察的兒童共使用四大類不同的語言策略以表達自身的反對立場，包括挑戰 (Challenge) 、言語攻擊 (Verbal abuse) 、拒絕 (Refusal) 及異議語 (Disagreement)，這四大類語言策略可以更進一步細分為二十四種策略。兒童透過比較、挑戰、與批評以強調自身的優越；使用語言遊戲、禁忌語達成語言攻擊目的；拒絕和異議語則以不同的語用策略呈現。在質化與量化的比較下，語料分析結果顯示此年齡層的兒童跟成人同樣偏好使用強異議語，但相較於成人的表現，兒童表達不同意見的方式更為直接，不使用減弱詞來淡化其反對語言對與話者產生的面子威脅。從語言社會化的觀點來看，低年級的兒童在語言層面的使用上已有相當成熟的能力，能善用語言表達反對意見，但就其語用層面來看，仍無法充分使用符合華人社會所冀求的委婉、保全雙方顏面的表達方式。. 關鍵詞：對立，兒童語言，語用策略，文字遊戲，同儕互動. i.

(3) Abstract. Opposition is prominent in children’s interaction, but a systematic analysis among Mandarin-Chinese speaking children in Taiwan is still lacking. This thesis aims to investigate children’s oppositional strategies in peer interaction and to compare children’s strategies with adults’. The analysis is based on the twenty-five hours of audio-and videotaped interactions in a public elementary school in Taipei. A total of 32 children in lower-grades (i.e., aged around 7 to 8) participated in the study. This study examines the data both quantitatively and qualitatively. On the basis of the spontaneous data, children’s opposition falls into four main types, including challenge, verbal abuse, refusal, and disagreement. Each type can be subdivided into various categories. Children may compare themselves with others, purposely challenge others’ courage, and criticize others’ performance and behavior in an attempt to show their superiority. Language play and taboo words/expressions are exploited as linguistic resources for verbal abuse. Refusal and disagreement are expressed by pragmatic strategies, including 10 refusal strategies (3 strong and 7 weak forms) and 9 disagreement strategies (5 strong and 4 weak forms). This study and previous research on adults’ opposition (Liao, 1994; Lin, 1999) suggests that both children and adults prefer aggressive strategies to passive ones. Nevertheless, children oppose more directly than adults with a great deal of minimal disagreement tokens. They seldom avoid confrontations. Different from adults, children rarely use downtoners, such as modals, contrast markers, and qualifiers. From the perspective of language socialization, it is suggested that lower-graders are linguistically competent but still learning to oppose in culturally appropriate ways since ‘saving face’ is highly valued in Chinese community.. Keywords: opposition, child language, pragmatic strategies, language play, peer interaction ii.

(4) Acknowledgements 撐到年限的最後一年，原以為畢業無望、準備休學，沒想到意外順利地寫到了謝辭，心中的喜悅與激動難以言喻，四年的畢業歷程有苦有樂：研究是愉快的；時間、精神壓力讓身心是痛苦的，我要自私地先給自己掌聲，感謝自己沒有放棄，反轉負面能量，以開朗樂觀過關斬將，我想，玻璃心在過程中經過「加壓」，也悄悄變成強化玻璃了吧! 在師大八年間遇到了許多貴人和朋友，首先要感謝我的指導教授：蘇席瑤博士，大二時在「語言與性別」與老師結下緣份，老師從不設限我的想法，當我有好的想法時給我很大的支持與鼓勵，靜靜聆聽並不厭其煩地歸納、整理我雜亂的思緒，討論過程中亦從不同面向切入，讓我能更深入思考，老師把我當成一名 Young scholar，給我很大的研究空間，很幸運自己能在老師門下學習。感謝口試委員張妙霞教授與徐嘉慧教授的建議，讓我的論文更完整，妙霞老師在我 Proposal 後提供不少的建議和想法、也一邊關心我的進度；徐嘉慧老師在 Defense 前忍受我的信件轟炸，還因為颱風沒收到我的論文紙本，口試當天甚至提早 30 分鐘出現，她的親切紓緩了我口考的緊張情緒。接著要感謝師大教授們的諄諄教誨，大學時蕙珊老師的語音學激發我對語言學的樂趣；Joy 的幫助讓我有機會接觸學術殿堂；謝妙玲老師和李臻儀老師讓我了解語言學不同面向；曉虹老師寫作課堂上種種的開心回憶與笑料令我難忘；要不是有玉秀老師、葉老師聲聲催促著我畢業，我現在可能還沒從懶惰病中痊癒；很感恩陳純音教授在我碩一下時，給了我擔任研究助理的機會，一年半的助理經驗磨練了我資料整理和語料收集能力，人家說風雨生信心，在擔任助理的壓力下不僅生出耐力，也訓練出了執行力，之後在老師的引薦下，一年的代課時光激發了我對兒童互動語言的好奇心，催生了這篇論文的產生。在語料收集過程中感謝有許多幫助我的同仁，如：高校長、蔡主任、盧老師、邱老師與潘老師，也謝謝每位我曾教過小天使願意參與觀察研究，觀察期間還常常提醒我哪裡可以拍攝，你們的貼心 Ms. Lin 都記得。除此之外，很幸運地有同學、學妹、朋友在身旁鼓勵著徬徨無助的我，雖然同學們都去實習了，但一年中 Kevin、Jan 和 Ivy 如沒離開過校園般，還是常常替我打氣；神經語言實驗室的大家是我每次 Meeting 前的避風港，Ken 和 Lilian 是溫暖穩定、時而搞笑的磁場的來源；系圖是我的秘密堡壘，秉融助教、伶霖的體貼，Lucy 則把「支柱門神」功能發揮得淋漓盡致，驅趕我後半段衝刺期的孤寂，適時給我信心與溫暖；焦慮時還有「臉友」陪我垃圾話紓壓，也謝謝好友淑萍的義氣相挺與相伴。最後，我要特別感謝我的家人，因為有個玻璃心的女兒/大姊，要一直按捺想問論文進度(何時畢業)又不敢問的情緒，只能透過有寫過論文的經驗的人(就是我表哥)來試著體會我的感受，盡量不讓我感到壓力，也無條件支持我任何的決定，我想這篇論文對我的父母來說就是最好的禮物了吧!. iii.

(5) Table of Contents Chinese Abstract ........................................................................................................... i English Abstract ........................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements .....................................................................................................iii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................ iv List of Tables ............................................................................................................. viii List of Figures .............................................................................................................. ix Chapter One Introduction .......................................................................................... 1 1.1 Background and motivation ................................................................................. 1 1.2 Overview of the study .......................................................................................... 2 1.3 Organization of the thesis ..................................................................................... 4 Chapter Two Literature Review................................................................................. 5 2.1 Children’s language practices in peer interaction ................................................ 6 2.2 Children’s conflict talk ....................................................................................... 10 2.3 Major elements in opposition: refusal and disagreement ................................... 16 2.3.1 Refusal ......................................................................................................... 16 2.3.2 Disagreement ............................................................................................... 20 2.4 Language play .................................................................................................... 28 2.5 Linguistic and pragmatic strategies in joking..................................................... 32 2.5.1 Linguistic triggers ........................................................................................ 33 2.5.2 Pragmatic strategies ..................................................................................... 35 Chapter Three Methodology ..................................................................................... 41 iv.

(6) 3.1 Data collection.................................................................................................... 41 3.2 Data analysis ...................................................................................................... 44 3.2.1 Data transcription ........................................................................................ 44 3.2.2 Unit for analysis .......................................................................................... 44 3.3 Classification scheme ......................................................................................... 46 3.3.1 Challenge ..................................................................................................... 48 3.3.2 Verbal abuse ................................................................................................ 49 3.3.3 Refusal ......................................................................................................... 51 3.3.4 Disagreement ............................................................................................... 55 3.3.5 Interim summary ......................................................................................... 57 Chapter Four Results and Discussions .................................................................... 60 4.1 Overall distribution of strategies ........................................................................ 60 4.2 Challenge ............................................................................................................ 64 4.2.1 Comparing ................................................................................................... 65 4.2.2 Daring .......................................................................................................... 68 4.2.3 Criticism ...................................................................................................... 70 4.3 Verbal abuse ....................................................................................................... 71 4.3.1 Teasing ........................................................................................................ 73 4.3.2 Insulting ....................................................................................................... 85 4.3.3 Teasing vs. Insulting .................................................................................... 92 4.4 Refusal ................................................................................................................ 95 4.4.1 Simple negation ........................................................................................... 97 v.

(7) 4.4.2 Account........................................................................................................ 97 4.4.3 Suggestion ................................................................................................... 98 4.4.4 Evasion ........................................................................................................ 99 4.4.5 Threat ......................................................................................................... 100 4.4.6 Refutation .................................................................................................. 102 4.4.7 Counterclaim ............................................................................................. 103 4.4.8 Negated ability........................................................................................... 104 4.4.9 Conditional acceptance .............................................................................. 105 4.4.10 Dissuasion................................................................................................ 106 4.5 Disagreement .................................................................................................... 107 4.5.1 Simple negation ......................................................................................... 108 4.5.2 Account...................................................................................................... 109 4.5.3 Suggestion ................................................................................................. 110 4.5.4 Evasion ...................................................................................................... 110 4.5.5 Threat ......................................................................................................... 111 4.5.6 Refutation .................................................................................................. 112 4.5.7 Correction .................................................................................................. 116 4.5.8 Clarification ............................................................................................... 117 4.5.9 Minimal disagreement token (MDT)......................................................... 118 4.6 Comparison of children’s and adults’ oppositions ........................................... 121 4.6.1 Refusal in children and adults ...................................................................... 122 4.6.2 Disagreement in children and adults .............................................................. 124 vi.

(8) 4.7 Linguistic and pragmatic competence in children ............................................ 140 Chapter Five Conclusion ......................................................................................... 145 5.1 Summary of the findings .................................................................................. 145 5.2 Implications and limitations ............................................................................. 148 Appendix 1. Consent form ...................................................................................... 150 Appendix 2. Transcription conventions ................................................................. 151 References ................................................................................................................. 152. vii.

(9) List of Tables Table 1. Aggressive and passive strategies in disagreement Table 2. Features of language play Table 3. Summary of the strategies denoting opposition Table 4. Frequencies of the strategies in opposition Table 5. Comparison of aggressive and passive strategies in refusal and disagreement Table 6. Frequencies of the strategies in challenge Table 7. Frequencies of the strategies in verbal abuse Table 8. Frequencies of the strategies in refusal Table 9. Frequencies of the strategies in disagreement Table 10. Comparison of children’s and adults’ disagreements Table 11. Distribution of aggressive and passive strategies by different ages. viii.

(10) List of Figures Figure 1. Continuum of phonetic consonance and semantic dissonance Figure 2. Analyzable figure format Figure 3. Aggravation-mitigation continuum of verbal abuse Figure 4. Continuum of phonetic consonance. ix.

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(12) Chapter One Introduction 1.1 Background and motivation In children’s interaction, conflict is not uncommon. As children hold different views about the same thing, argument, contradiction, and opposition will appear. Different from adults who have a tendency to avoid arguments and show a concern for deference (Goodwin 1983, p. 658), children consider conflict a preferred activity (Goodwin, 1983; Goodwin & Goodwin, 1987; Goodwin, 2002). Conflict, thus, serves as a good analytic basis for children’s social competence. Also, it is a pertinent arena for the production of social organization among children, as argued by Goodwin and other studies (Corsaro & Rizzo, 1990; Goodwin, 1983; Maynard, 1985a). To date, many researchers have been investigating children’s conflict talk. In those studies, conflict talk is termed differently, such as ‘dispute’ in Brenneis & Lein (1977), ‘adversative episode’ in Eisenberg & Garvey (1981) and ‘argument’ in Maynard (1985a). Here in the study, those different terms are considered to be synonymous. The term ‘opposition’ is also used to refer to an argument in the following sections. Among the previous studies, some pay attention to the forms and structures (e.g., Brenneis & Lein, 1977), while others aim at not only the structural aspects but also the functions of dispute (e.g., 1.

(13) Boggs, 1978; Maynard, 1985b). Still others integrate the influence of peer culture into discussions, such as the examination of the differences between American and Italian children’s disputes in Corsaro & Rizzo (1990). Some even connect children’s arguments to gender (e.g., Farris, 1991, 2000; Ardington, 2006; Kuo, 2011). The above studies reveal certain similarities among children’s conflict across cultures and linguistic groups, but there are also cultural and language-specific patterns. Among the literature of children’s dispute, how Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese children show their opposition is not fully explored yet. The previous Mandarin Chinese studies pay more attention to gender constructions and gender differences than linguistic and pragmatic strategies (e.g., Farris, 1991, 2000; Kuo, 2011). Existing literature in opposition mostly focuses on a specific strategy, such as refusal and disagreement (e.g., Liao, 1994; Wang, 2007; Jong, 2012). Few of them provide a systematic analysis of the overall conversational strategies. It seems that children’s strategies of opposition, especially those in Mandarin Chinese, can be further investigated. 1.2 Overview of the study Unlike the previous studies about disputes in Mandarin Chinese, we do not take gender as our research focus. Instead, the present research aims to examine. 2.

(14) conversational strategies that children commonly employ as they have divergent point of views. Through children’s arguments, we can have a better understanding of the ways they construct their own social organization and their development of social competence. The research questions of this study are addressed as follows. (1) What kind of strategies are employed as children perform their opposition in interaction? (2) What are the differences between children’s and adults’ strategies of opposition? To answer these questions, observations were executed a public elementary school in Taipei. Based on the twenty-five hours of authentic conversations among children, children’s opposition is categorized into challenge, verbal abuse, refusal, and disagreement. Each type can be subdivided into various categories. The percentages of each strategy is calculated. The results indicate that the children express their opposing stance more directly than adults. They rarely make use of linguistic features (e.g., modals, contrast markers, and qualifiers) to diminish the threats to face. More than focusing on the linguistic and pragmatic strategies, we try to account for children’s performances from the view of language socialization. It is suggested that lowergraders are linguistically competent but still learning to oppose in ways preferred by. 3.

(15) Chinese community. This study not only provides a systematic analysis among children’s opposition in Taiwanese Mandarin but also sheds some light on the studies related to first language socialization and children’s social organization. 1.3 Organization of the thesis The present study is organized as follows. The next chapter provides a literature review. We review from five perspectives, including studies on children’s language practices in their peer interaction, children’s conflict talk, oppositional elements (i.e., refusal and disagreement), language play, and strategies for enhancing playfulness. Following the second chapter, the third chapter presents the method employed in this study, including methods of data collection, the unit of data analysis, and the classification scheme. Then, the results and discussions are given in Chapter Four. Following the classification scheme we devise, the detailed explanations of each opposition strategy are provided. Besides, we make a comparison between children’s and adults’ strategies of opposition. The differences between these two age groups are highlighted, and the possible accounts of the disparities are mentioned. Lastly, Chapter Five concludes the current study. The research questions addressed here are answered. Implications and limitations are mentioned as well.. 4.

(16) Chapter Two Literature Review The theoretical background of the present study is provided in Chapter Two. This chapter is composed of five sections. The first section is an overview of language practices in children’s peer interaction. Children’s language practices like dispute, gossip, directives, and collaborative talk are reviewed. Section 2.2 narrows down the scope of language practices to conflict talk, in which opposition is commonly situated. Related studies, such as the discussion of features and function in conflicts (e.g., Brenneis & Lein, 1977; Boggs, 1978), are included. As conflict talk can be classified into two types, serious one and non-serious one (Eder, 1990; Garvey & Shantz, 1992), not only a serious type but a playful one is mentioned. We take a look at the functions of children’s playful conflicts, especially those among girls. Section 2.3 pays attention to two specific strategies (i.e., refusal and disagreement) used to display opposition. Linguistic markers and pragmatic classifications denoting refusal and disagreement are summarized. To deal with disputes with a teasing tone, Section 2.4 introduces a few studies related to language play. The strategies for enhancing playfulness and making fun are introduced with examples in Section 2.5.. 5.

(17) 2.1 Children’s language practices in peer interaction Peers have more influence than parents on children’s language structures (Goodwin, 1997). Peer talk increasingly plays an important role in children’s socialization. In children’s interaction, there are two major concerns, inclusion and power (Kyratzis, 2004). That is, once children share an activity with a peer, they try to prevent it from being intruded by others. For those who want to get involved, they have to come up with some access strategies. Once their access to play becomes an enduring quality of a specific relationship, it is regarded as inclusion. In contrast, if the uninvolved children are still not allowed to participate in the activity, exclusion occurs. In attempt to construct their own social organization, children make use of different embodied language practices (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2011). Language practices include directives, disputes, gossip, storytelling, collaborative narration, and collaborative teasing (Hadley, 2003). Goodwin has been dedicated to studying forms of language in children’s interaction for several decades. She has explored various language practices in peer interaction, such as disputes, gossip1, and directives. Dispute and gossip, parts of social. 1. As noted in Goodwin (1980), gossip is often defined as a talk between two co-present parties concerning an absent third party. 6.

(18) fabric of peer groups, are two issues Goodwin is concerned with, especially those within female groups. Goodwin (2002) documented girls’ ability to negotiate disputes in the midst of games. In girls’ arguments, it seemed that practices of exclusion are omnipresent. According to Goodwin (2002), exclusion was accomplished not only in a rather covert way but also in a direct and explicit way. Girls made use of resources like assessments, bald imperatives, insults, and stories to portray the target in a negative way (Goodwin, 2002, p. 396). Despite the omnipresence of exclusion, Goodwin (2002) argued that dispute is still downplayed in female social organization since girls are often portrayed as inclusive, cooperative and collaborative. Also, she analyzed and examined the procedures for organizing the ‘he-said-she-said’ gossip event used by black female children (Goodwin, 1980). She claimed that the ordering and negotiation are achieved through language, such as the syntactic structure of opening accusation statement. In some cases, the ‘he-said-she-said’ led to confrontations. To take actions against the offense from others, girls were likely to make use of multiple types of stories, such as instigating stories, retold stories, hypothetical stories, and harvested parallel stories (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2011). In addition to disputes and gossip, Goodwin also explored the use of directives.. 7.

(19) For example, she studied fourth graders’ jump rope games and found that the grammatical structure of directives varied during different phases of the activity (Goodwin, 2001). To develop the rope activity, for instance, children commonly used bald imperatives (e.g., ‘Faster. Come on!’). She claimed that both girls and boys in the position of power use direct forms to organize the activity and exclude others. It was suggested that directives may play a role in accomplishing social order (Goodwin, 2001). Moreover, she noticed the use of threat in directives. She discussed how threat enhances seriousness of the directives (Goodwin, 2005). Rather than focusing on hierarchical relationships and exclusion as in Goodwin (2001, 2005), Eder (1988, 1998) paid attention to the collaboration in adolescent talk. Collaborative talk, in her definition, refers to a type of talk in which utterances ratify or support the previous utterances in some manner, and the support can be presented via explicit agreement, utterance expansion, or repetition (Eder, 1998). Eder (1988) examined strategies for delivering collaborative personal narratives in naturally occurring conversations. She claimed that the strategies reflect sociolinguistic rules (e.g., dividing the different speech function of description and evaluation among the different speakers) and grammatical rules (e.g., exploiting repetition and sentence. 8.

(20) completions to maintain coherence) of narratives. According to Eder (1998), collaborative narration makes a contribution to the formation of adolescent peer culture because it provides chances for adolescents to negotiate their individual identities. It also verifies that peer culture is different from adult culture. She also found that adolescents use collaborative narration and collaborative teasing to mock others (Eder, 1998). Precisely, she asserted that girls use both collaborative narration and collaborative teasing, whereas boys count on collaborative narration (Eder, 1998, p. 89). The primary difference between collaborative narration and collaborative teasing is that teasing has an association with directing mocking at others while narration has more to do with self-mocking. Eder’s results showed that collaboration in the talk brings about a feeling of solidarity (Eder, 1988, p. 226). In respect of Mandarin-speaking children’s interaction, Hadley (2003) observed Taiwanese kindergarteners in school settings, and paid attention to a particular language practice, word play. She advocated that word play is not merely a source for fun but a mechanism to display children’s social agency as to enact and resist the teacher’s desire for them to behave as good students. Meanwhile, a sense of collective group identity and sharing was highlighted (Hadley, 2003, p. 204).. 9.

(21) Farris (1991, 2000) composed a longitudinal study to investigate how gender was constructed among Taiwanese preschoolers. Through her examination of verbal and nonverbal interactions in same-sex groups, it showed that boys created a childish ethos centering on action, competition, and aggression. Girls, dissimilar to boys, created a feminine ethos focusing on the construction and maintenance of relations or on authoritarian roles based on teacher models. In cross-sex interactions, she signified that peer leaders played a part in producing gender. Both boys and girls worked hard on maintaining and highlighting gender boundaries. In addition, she found that girls used not only a mitigated but an aggravated style (i.e., a masculine sex-typed style) in crosssex conflicts. Similarly, Kuo (2011) suggested that young girls make initial oppositions as likely as boys do. It indicated that young girls are not inclined to maintain social harmony. 2.2 Children’s conflict talk 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. 10.

(22) 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. 11.

(23) 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. 12.

(24) 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’. 13.

(25) 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 samesex and cross-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 heterogeneoussex 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. 14.

(26) 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. 15.

(27) 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. 2.3 Major elements in opposition: refusal and disagreement According to Maynard (1985), the concept of opposition is important in conflicts. Opposition, in general, contains disagreements, refusals, denials and objections (Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981). Among the four basic elements in the opposition, we find that refusals and disagreements are frequently observed in children’s opposition. This section attempts to review the strategies of these two speech acts. 2.3.1 Refusal Refusal is a face-threatening speech act and usually appears as the second part of an adjacency pair (Levinson, 1983). It has been widely discussed and many strategies have been explored, such as in Beebe et al. (1990), Liao (1994), Guo (2001), and Jong (2012). Some studies explored the influence of culture on refusals (e.g., Beebe et al., 1990). Others related refusal to gender, which indicated that gender is an important. 16.

(28) factor in the choice of refusing (e.g., Farris, 2000; Kyratzis & Guo, 2001; Jong, 2012). Still others showed particular interest in children’s refusal (e.g., Liao, 1994; Guo, 2001; Jong, 2012). To concentrate on the refusal strategies, Beebe et al. (1990) provided a detailed classification used by Japanese learners of English, English native speakers, and Japanese native speakers. A cross-cultural comparison was made. Besides, they investigated the influence of social status on the use of strategies. Their classification was frequently employed, and it had an impact on other studies. For instance, Chen (2012) and Li (2012) made use of the questionnaires given in Beebe et al. (1990) to investigate the strategies used by Taiwanese adults. Although Beebe et al. (1990) targeted at adults, their classification could fit children’s refusal (Jong, 2012). Centering on the refusal strategies in Mandarin Chinese, the strategies are rooted in preserving face, as cited in Chen, Ye, & Zhang (1995). Liao (1994) did both a qualitative and quantitative study on Mandarin Chinese refusals. Liao’s qualitative study was based on her own intuition as a native speaker, her own retrospection, interviews, informants’ observation, and Realistic Conversation Writings. The quantitative data were from Discourse Completion Tests done by native Mandarin Chinese speakers. She, concerning the notion of politeness, identified twenty-two first-. 17.

(29) order strategies. Those strategies, then, were further classified into the maxims of Sincerity, Agreement, Tact, Address, Modesty, and Economy. Then, she summarized three common strategies used in particular contexts, including ‘the use of lie, excuse, reason or explanation’, ‘the use of alternatives’, and ‘the composite of the two prior strategies’. According to Liao (1994), the composite strategy is especially used in refusing someone in a higher status. Chen, Lei, & Zhang (1995) distinguished refusals into substantive and ritual refusals. They adopted the questionnaire in Beebe et al. (1990) to discuss these two refusals. Wang (1997) identified three refusals in her data, including appreciation components (i.e., negated appreciation búyào xièxiè ‘no thanks’), excuses for refusing, and keeping silent. With respect to Taiwanese children’s refusal, Liao (1994) conducted several experiments to investigate children’s communicative competence in refusing. She showed that elementary school children, similar to adults, used lying, making excuses, giving reasons, and explaining; in some cases, composite strategies were used (Liao, 1994). Guo (2001) studied a two-year-old Southern-Min speaking boy. She classified his refusal into five categories, including direct refusal (with no explanations), reasons, changing topic, a combination of direct refusal and reasons, a combination of direct. 18.

(30) refusal and changing topic. The findings in Guo (2001) suggested that direct refusal is mostly exploited. By adopting the classification in Beebe et al. (1990), Yang (2003), Wang (2007), Wu (2010), and Jong (2012) investigated children’s refusal strategies. Yang (2003) explored the developmental process through elicited data. Social factors like gender, age, and parents’ social status were taken into account. Wang (2007) and Wu (2010) studied mother-child interactions. Jong (2012) particularly examined children’s refusal in peer talk. Following Yang (2003) and Wu (2010), she also classified refusal strategies into direct refusals and indirect refusals. Direct refusal includes simple negation and physical force while indirect type includes citing negated ability, giving reasons, offering alternatives, dissuading, making counterclaims, conditional acceptance, verbal avoidance, and non-verbal avoidance (Jong, 2012). In the present study, we focus on verbal strategies. Non-verbal strategies are overlooked. Except nonverbal strategies, the strategies in Jong (2012) are reproduced as follows. (1) Simple negation: It means a direct denial of compliance without reservation (e.g., 不要 búyào ‘no’). (2) Negated ability: It refers to utterances that present inability of responding to one’s request.. 19.

(31) (3) Reason: It refers to the explanation or justification given by a speaker. (4) Alternative: It refers to utterances providing suggestions to the rejected request. (5) Counterclaim: A speaker refuses the request by repeating the interlocutor’s plan. (6) Conditional acceptance: It means an interlocutor’s request can be accepted under certain conditions. (7) Dissuade interlocutor: It attempts to persuade the refusee to give up his/her plan. (8) Verbal avoidance: It refers to utterances used to avoid a direct response to a proposed action, such as a postponement and a topic change. Jong (2012) did provide a systematic analysis framework, which plays an important role in our data analysis. The classification in Jong (2012) was based on the refusals done by preschoolers (aged four to five). Different from Jong (2012), we pay attention to elementary school children. With a target at children older than those in Jong (2012), therefore, we find some strategies unmentioned in her classification. The additional strategies are further elaborated in the next chapter. 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. 20.

(32) (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., duìbú 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),. 21.

(33) 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. 22.

(34) 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.. 23.

(35) (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’),. 24.

(36) 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 25.

(37) 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. 26.

(38) 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. 27.

(39) 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. 2.4 Language play Verbal humor and language play are two similar and complementary concepts. Language play, as mentioned in Crystal (1996), refers to the ability to manipulate certain elements of a language, while verbal humor has been psychologically theorized in three ways, as a form of aggression and superiority, as a way of enabling the release of inhibition, and as a response to incongruity (Forman, 2011). In contrast to verbal play, the definition of language play is much broader. Generally, language play itself can be viewed in two ways, individual (non-social) practice of language, or fun and amusement (Forman, 2011). The current study focuses on the function of fun and entertainment rather than individual language practice. In the following, a review of language play is addressed. Language play occurs as people manipulate the forms and the functions of language in order to make fun for themselves or for others (Crystal, 1996). Elements. 28.

(40) and components of language (e.g., a sound, a word, a phrase) are directly employed for an unusual function or meaning. There have been several studies examining language play in written forms, such as in advertisements (Crystal, 1998) and in playful online communication (e.g., Werry, 1996; Su, 2003, 2009). Language play, also, is especially important to children’s language development. The ability to manipulate language randomly has a crucial relation to children’s language development and metalinguistic awareness (Crystal, 1996). By far, many studies have been documenting the characteristics of children’s language play (Clark, 1978; Dunn, 1988; Ely & McCabe, 1994; Hudson & Nelson, 1984; Kuczaj, 1982; Winner, 1988). At the early stage of children’s language development, children are primarily engaged in sound play even though some syntactic manipulation can still be observed (Kuczaj, 1982). During their process of language acquisition, the playful manipulation is gradually inspected in the metaphors (Winner, 1988), overextensions (Hudson & Nelson, 1984) and lexical inventions (Clark, 1978). Despite various types of linguistic manipulation, sound play is still the major resource for children at different ages (Dunn, 1988). Besides, children’s speech play is more likely to be social (Ely & McCabe, 1994). It becomes common to observe wordplay,. 29.

(41) verbalized fantasy, nonsense, and play with pragmatic conventions (Dunn, 1988). Despite a number of studies working on language play, few of them were conducted in the naturalistic settings. To make up the insufficiency of authentic data, Ely & McCabe (1994) provided the functions and types of spontaneous language play used by kindergarteners. Unlike previous studies distinguishing between language play and verbal humor2, Ely and McCabe defined language play in a broad way by bringing verbal humor into discussion. They suggested that language play appear in a variety of forms more than typical sound and word play. For example, they observed that children’s humor had a derisive and sarcastic tone. Much teasing occurred on the sound and the meaning of children’s names. As the frequency of teases got higher, it turned to represent an institutional classroom insult. Alongside a great number of typical language play and teases, an exceptional case of the use of taboo words or obscene behavior was found. It showed that the diversity of children’s language play correlates with measures of literacy and metalinguistic development (Ely & McCabe, 1994). From a developmental perspective, Crystal (1996) summarized different studies. 2. The significant difference between language play and verbal humor is the pragmatic appropriateness. In general, verbal humor is established through violating the maxims of discourse intentionally or unintentionally (Raskin, 1985). On the contrary, the utterances of language play are pragmatically appropriate. Ely & McCabe (1994), however, took these two as the same since verbal play relies on many of the same linguistic features of language play. Verbal humor was considered a form of word play. 30.

(42) and provided an overview of the developmental process of language play. It was found that sound play is developed the earliest (from age one). Around two, children play with syllable structures via reduplication, sound swapping and addition of pause within a word. They recognize and produce rhyme with ease. Then, there might be morphological play by five. By six, verbal play exists in many forms and rapidly increases in sophistication over the next few years (Crystal, 1996, p. 333). After the age of seven, verbal games become prevalent and riddle comprehension keeps growing while the type of riddle increases in complexity. Finally, around ten, children play pseudo-intellectual games that continues into the early years of high school. After a general idea about children’s development of language play, the focus is switched to the features of language play. Cook (2000) viewed the features from three perspectives, linguistic forms, semantics, and pragmatics. Each linguistic level is introduced in Table 2. In this study, language play can be recognized through the presence of these features (e.g., repetition, emphasis, reference to an alternative reality, and so on), even though some of them are not evident. To focus on the children’s language play in Mandarin Chinese, Hadley (2003) investigated word play in a Taiwanese kindergarten classroom. She found the name-. 31.

(43) centered wordplay was common. Children played with syllables in words or created new words to manipulate names of their teacher, class, and peers. Besides, she observed that some insulting phrases were transformed into funny punch lines (e.g., the second syllable in ZhuBaJiè ‘Pig Eight’ was replaced with different numbers). She argued that word play helps children to enact, explore and resist their teachers’ socialization goals. Table 2. Features of language play (Cook, 2000, p. 123) A. Repetition (of parts or of the whole texts) Linguistic forms. B. Patterning of forms (rhythms, phonological, and grammatical parallels) C. Emphasis on exact wording. A. Undetermined meaning (foreign or archaic language, ambiguities or obscure words). Semantics. B. Vital or essential subject matter (e.g., birth, death, sexual relations, health, etc.) C. Reference to an alternative reality D. Inversion of language/reality relation. A. Focus on performance and on the speaker/writer B. Use in intimate interaction. Pragmatics. C. Creation of solidarity and/or aggression and competition D. No direct usefulness E. Preservation or inversion of the social order F. Enjoyment and/or value. 2.5 Linguistic and pragmatic strategies in joking As mentioned earlier in Section 2.2, arguments can be serious or playful. In attempt to explore non-serious conflicts, it is necessary to review some analyses of linguistic strategies that help to create humorous effects. As noted in Ely & McCabe 32.

(44) (1994), verbal humor relies on the linguistic features. This section reviews some studies in relation to linguistic and pragmatic strategies in jokes. 2.5.1 Linguistic triggers In humor research, many scholars have focused on grammatical categories, which are considered to be sources of humor (Milner, 1972; Pepicello & Weisberg, 1983; Deneire, 1995). In accordance with Pepicello & Weisberg (1983), linguistic ambiguity is one of the most frequent strategies used in jokes. They examined verbal humor and provided a classification of linguistics strategies. Their classification is split into four linguistic aspects, phonological, morphological, syntactic, and others. Dienhart (1999), on the other hand, provided a new point about linguistic triggers used in riddles. He claimed that the classification of linguistic triggers has something to do with the similarity in forms. To discuss the similarity factors, he took both orthographic and phonetic forms into consideration. He proposed a continuum with ‘total identity’ at one end and ‘total dissimilarity’ at the other, as presented in Figure 1. He borrowed the terms, such as ‘polysemy’, ‘homonymy’, and ‘homophony’, from semantic theory and added two extra terms, ‘paraphony’ and ‘hahaphony’, to compensate some linguistic phenomena unable to be fully explained by the pre-. 33.

(45) proposed classifications. The figure below presents the relative ranking of the various degree of similarity.. Figure 1. Continuum of phonetic consonance and semantic dissonance (Dienhart, 1999, pp. 108–109) Polysemy, for instance, locates the highest position of the scale. It is identical to the true identity from the perspective of forms. In terms of meanings, however, it is involved in multiple meanings. That is to say, polysemy and the total identity are semantically dissonant. Likewise, homonymy, from the top, is at the secondary position in the continuum. It refers a pair of linguistic signs sharing the same sound and spelling but differing with meanings. The next category, homophony, refers to words that are pronounced the same but the spelling forms do not need to be alike. Under homophony, there are two innovative terms, paraphony and hahaphony. They are too uncommon to be seen. Their definitions are particularly listed below. (1) ‘Paraphony’ (or near-homophony) refers to a pair of words that are similar but not identical in phonological forms. Each of them has its own meaning and orthographic 34.

(46) form (e.g., gnawing vs. knowing) (Dienhart, 1999, p. 109). (2) ‘Hahaphony’ (or hahapfunny) refers to an artificial type of (near) homophony which sound similarity is produced by a means of pseudo-morphemic analysis (e.g., Nobel Prize vs. No-bell Prize) (Dienhart, 1999, p. 109). The current study shows that children tend to manipulate sounds and semantic meaning in playful conflicts. In addition, linguistic ambiguity is also observed. The classifications in Pepicello & Weisberg (1983) and Dienhart (1999) seem to play an essential role in our data analysis. 2.5.2 Pragmatic strategies As humor is discussed from a pragmatic level, Grice's (1975) Cooperative Principle (CP) is a prominent strategy that would definitely be mentioned without a doubt. In CP, there are four basic maxims, maxim of quantity, quality, manner, and relevance. The obedience and the flouting of the four maxims can fully account for various linguistic interactions. In jokes, Grice’s maxims are usually flouted for the purpose of creating incongruities to achieve a humorous effect. Raskin (1985) adopted Grice’s CP and further proposed a set of maxims specifically corresponding to the joketelling mode. In addition, four different situations for jokes to take place were listed. 35.

(47) (Raskin, 1985). The four situations are derived from speaker’s intention and hearer’s expectation, as presented below. (1) A. The speaker jokes intentionally. B. The speaker jokes unintentionally. (2) A. The hearer expects a joke. B. The hearer does not expect a joke. The first situation refers to the combination of (1)A and (2)A. Both the speaker and hearer are all involved in the mode of joke. Situation two is with the combination of (1)A and (2)B, the speaker intends to make fun while the hearer is unaware of the joke. In the third situation (i.e., the combination of (1)B and (2)A), the speaker does not notice the joke while the hearer detects the joke. The last situation is derived from (1)B and (2)B. Neither the speaker nor the hearer perceives the occurrence of a joke. The humor is not evoked. In the present study, it is regular to observe the third situation. The speaker makes a joke unintentionally (e.g., tongue slips) while stating his/her own opinion. The interactant detects a joke and then makes use of it to attack the speaker intentionally. Also, joking has been discussed by Brown and Levinson on the whole as a strategy. 36.

(48) of ‘positive politeness’ (Culpeper, 1996; Kotthoff, 1996). However, Kotthoff (1996) argued that for most parts of humorous activities are not polite; to some extent, they are quite impolite. Then, a specific concept, impoliteness, was brought up. Culpeper has been studying impoliteness for years. He firstly defined impoliteness as the employment of strategies to attack interactant’s face and cause social disruption (Culpeper, 1996, p.350). To discuss impoliteness and humor, Culpeper (2005) examined the relationship between verbal creativity and impoliteness for entertainment. He stated that impoliteness occurs as in certain conditions: (1) the speaker communicates face-attack intentionally, or (2) the hearer perceives and/or constructs behavior as intentionally face-attack, or a combination of (1) and (2). The conditions are quite similar to those given by Raskin (1985), as listed above. His definition includes not only the speaker but the hearer, which makes it different from the speakeroriented model proposed by Brown and Levinson (Culpeper, 2005). Besides, the intention is a key to identifying impoliteness. It implies that the identification of impoliteness should go beyond the speaker’s utterances. Although Culpeper had provided a rather precise definition, he found that it might not cover all cases of impoliteness. Owing to the unaccountability of some cases, he. 37.

(49) scrutinized all the definitions regarding impoliteness (see Culpeper, 2011, pp. 19–20) and noticed some common features among them. He observed that the existing definitions all mentioned face, social norms, intentionality, and emotion (Culpeper , 2011). By weaving those notions, he modified his definition proposed in 2005. The revised one is given as follows: “Impoliteness is a negative attitude towards specific behaviours occurring in specific contexts. It is sustained by expectations, desires and /or beliefs about social organisation, including, in particular, how one person's or group's identities are mediated by others in interaction. Situated behaviours are viewed negatively when they conflict with how one expects them to be, how one wants them to be and/or how one thinks they ought to be. Such behaviours always have or are presumed to have emotional consequences for at least one participant, that is, they cause or are presumed to cause offence. Various factors can exacerbate how offensive an impolite behaviour is taken to be, including for example whether one understands a behaviour to be strongly intentional or not.”. (Culpeper, 2011, p. 23). According to Culpeper (2010), there is a pragmatic side and a semantic side of impoliteness. With respect to impoliteness strategies, he was inspired by Brown and Levinson. He proposed five strategies that are somewhat abstract and with different linguistic realizations. The strategies parallel to Brown and Levinson’s include ‘baldon-record impoliteness’, ‘positive impoliteness’, ‘negative impoliteness’, ‘sarcasm and mock impoliteness’, and ‘withhold impoliteness’ (Culpeper, 1996, pp. 356–357). The degree of impoliteness of each strategy is unknown. It was argued that their degree of impoliteness orders are interculturally different (i.e., they may vary from community to. 38.

(50) community) (Cashman, 2006). As for the forms, a list of impoliteness formulae was devised on the basis of frequency in specific types of contexts. Several types were identified, including ‘insults’,. ‘pointed. criticisms/complaints’,. ‘unpalatable. questions. and/or. presuppositions’, ‘condescensions’, ‘message enforcers’, ‘dismissals’, ‘silencers’, ‘threats’, and ‘negative expressives’ (Culpeper, 2011, pp. 135–136). Intriguingly, not all impoliteness events are concerned with those conventionalized formulae mentioned above. Some informants of his study interpreted what was said or unsaid in particular contexts as impolite (Culpeper, 2015). He referred to this type of impoliteness as ‘implicational impoliteness’, defined as “an impoliteness understanding that does not match the surface form or semantics of the utterance or the symbolic meaning of the behavior” (Culpeper, 2011, p. 17). The key notion of the definition is a ‘mismatch’. He offered a model of impoliteness triggers for implicational impoliteness that consists of ‘convention-driven’, ‘form-driven’, and ‘context-driven’ (Culpeper, 2015, p.16). Culpeper, indeed, organized a systematic classification of impoliteness triggers. The identification of impoliteness was based on the judgment of the informants that did avoid the subjectivity of the researcher. His works, however, were restricted to English. 39.

(51) data yet analyzed only from British cultural perspectives. He seldom paid attention to other cultures and languages, such as Chinese.. 40.

(52) Chapter Three Methodology This chapter explains the method of the present study. Firstly, we describe the sources of the data. The subjects and the data collection process are introduced. Then, the transcription system and the unit for analysis are mentioned. Lastly, the classification scheme used to code children’s opposition strategies is presented. 3.1 Data collection The data analyzed in this study were collected in a public elementary school in Taipei. Unlike Farris (1991, 2000), Hadley (2003), and Jong (2012) that investigated preschoolers’ language (i.e., at the age of four to five), the children we targeted were older. We focused on the interactions between lower-graders (around age seven or eight), who were at the stage of being gradually familiar with the rules for friendly peer interactions but not fully competent. The data collection process was administered in two sessions. The research was firstly carried out in an after-school care class during the summer vacation (暑期課後照顧班) in 2015, as a pilot study. It lasted for more than a month (from the middle of July to the end of August) and it involved with eleven students (i.e., eight first-graders and three second-graders). They were from different. 41.

(53) classes as the school was in session. However, each of the participants had known each other for a period of time. During the summer break, they were assembled at the same class and I was their homeroom teacher. The other observation was executed during the regular school days in May, 2016. Thirty-two children were involved. Five of them did take part in the first observation. The participants were from two different second-grade classes. Permission to videotype was obtained from children, parents, and teachers. In congruence with the research ethics, children’s parents were informed in advance. The informed consent form is presented in Appendix 1. In attempt to protect the participants, pseudo-names were used to conceal their identities. The participants’ natural interactions were audio- and videotaped during recess. While they were playing, we also observed and took fieldwork notes. Since the focus was on children’s interactions with their peers, the involvement of adults (e.g., their teachers) was carefully avoided. If the researcher was occasionally involved in the conversations (e.g., children liked to tell on each other), only passive responses were given (e.g., ‘hmm’). The recording we collected was approximately twenty-five hours in length.. 42.

(54) During the break time, children often played with toys in their classrooms or on the playground. On the playground, they played on the swings, and the slide. As the number of playmates increased, they played chasing games (e.g., tag, and Red Light, Green Light) and ball games. In their play, there was no obvious gender preference when they chose playmates. They were often engaged in cross-sex interactions. It seemed that gender was not the main concern for them to join one activity. During the game, if participants found themselves not highly involved (i.e., to have no chance to lead or to be overlooked for a while), they might have withdrawn and then turned to another activity. Typically, every child had an equal chance to play in a game. They freely shared their opinions and provided suggestions. No special peer leader was found. However, an exception was observed in dodge disc games (i.e., a type of game inspired by dodgeball that involves throwing a flying disc rather than a ball). The more skillful a player was, the more chances for him/her to take a lead. The leaders were usually boys. As above-mentioned that children were equal to share their ideas, their divergent opinions sometimes resulted in disputes. In consistency with Eisenberg (1987), the possession or the use of objects, the child’s action, the opponent’s action, and a. 43.