Disagreement Expressions in the Discourse of Young Persian Speakers

Abstract

Among various social variables such as power, solidarity, age and gender, this study seeks to explore how the speech act of disagreement is produced by Iranian male and female speakers in two contexts of formal and informal. The data of the study included: a) DCT questionnaire which contained contexts of disagreement speech in different gender as well as different formality levels, and b) interviews, observations, and audio- visual conversations involving the speech act in question used for the qualitative analysis. The data were analyzed in the framework of Speech-Act theory and the theory of Face being considered as an explanation of the motive for employing appropriate strategies of politeness. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analysis showed that there is a positive correlation between the conservativeness of disagreement and the degree of formality of the situations, on the one hand; the gender effect was observed through female speeches in the greater degree of formality of disagreements.