Abstract
The present study attempts to investigate how Taiwanese perform the speech act of disagreement, to examine the classification of features and strategies of disagreement based on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory, and to explore the influences of various contexts, such as in Bulletin Board System, among friends, and in media. Besides, four social factors, including power, social familiarity, formality of context, and imposition of topic, can also influence speaker’s choices of disagreement. Our spontaneous data are gathered through natural recording and from BBS. The speech act of disagreement is a face-threatening act that holds a default value of dispreference intrinsically. Thus, it may generally affect people to consider self and other’s face-wants and to alleviate their expression when they disagree with interlocutors. However, when speakers have other prior considerations ranking higher than the default value of disagreement, they may tend to choose more direct or aggravated strategies. Our findings of the influences of contexts and social factors on disagreement are as below: 1. In the context of BBS, speakers prefer to choose more on record strategies such as judgmental and contradictory statement and off record strategies such as irony and rhetorical question since the private context and heavy imposition of topic make the default value become recessive and form their tendency of disagreement. 2. With respect to the interaction among friends, the private context and social familiarity are their prior considerations that influence them to choose more direct and offensive disagreement, rather than mitigated forms. 3. In terms of the context in TV or radio programs, under the influence of the public setting, speakers tend to use softened disagreement with positive or negative politeness for considering others’ face-wants. Sometimes, they may be affected by other less prior considerations, such as interactive targets, power, social familiarity, and imposition of topic, to their choices of strategies. 4. The more powerful speakers tend to use more direct disagreements with less politeness than the less powerful speakers. In addition, the familiarity between speakers can show its effects in that close friends tend to use non-softened disagreements without hurting their solidarity. Moreover, speakers tend to show their disagreement more directly in private than in public. Finally, as we can see, the speakers have tendency to use aggravated disagreement as their personal value, quality, or professionalism are jeopardized by others. With our observation, we anticipate making a better understanding of the speech act of disagreement in Mandarin used in Taiwan society.