Disagreements in casual Taiwanese Mandarin conversations: A gender-based study

Abstract

Adopting a Conversation Analysis approach, this study examined disagreements in casual Taiwanese Mandarin conversations, with a focus on the role of gender, in recorded spoken interactions. The data consisted of 281 spontaneous conversations in ordinary settings among family members, friends, classmates, roommates, and colleagues and were categorized into three broad categories according to relative severity of disagreement: (1) softened disagreements; (2) disagreements neither softened nor strengthened; and (3) strengthened disagreements. The results showed that the three main types of disagreements had similar distributions in the data. In softened disagreement responses, negative politeness was most often used as mitigation, and contrastive markers such as keshi, danshi, and buguo (all meaning ‘but’) were the most commonly used linguistic markers. In neither softened nor strengthened disagreements, clarification was the pragmatic strategy used most frequently, and in strengthened disagreements, rhetorical questions were used most often. The data were further analyzed with respect to inter- and intra-gender interactions. Furthermore, the results also indicated that females were generally more polite than males in intra-gender interactions than in inter-gender interactions. This apparent impoliteness in the female-to-male interactions could indicate that the females feigned mock impoliteness in order to show solidarity with their male interlocutors. Some instances of this mock impoliteness were in the form of sajiao (‘buttering up someone’) by the females in order to persuade males into accepting their opinions.