Opposition in Modern Greek discourse: cultural and contextual constraints

Abstract

This paper investigates opposition strategies in three contexts: (1) conversation in Greek among family members, (2) a conversation in Greek among friends, and (3) classroom discourse by Greeks in English, using tape-recorded data. The study operates within an interactional sociolinguistic framework of discourse analysis and analyzes strategies that fall in the middle of a continuum that ranges from aggravation to mitigation. Using both linguistic and paralinguistic criteria, it illustrates how context at the macro- and micro-level shapes and reflects the various strategies found in the data. Based on the nature of opposition and the forms it took, the study proposes that in Modern Greek discourse, disagreement serves as a ritualized form of opposition. It suggests that disagreement constitutes a social practice that is pervasive and ‘preferred’ because it is expected and ‘allowed’. This paper, therefore, contributes to studies which posit that the speech action of disagreement is constrained by cultural and contextual constraints.