Disagreement Strategies Research Articles

Disagreement Strategies in the Discourse of American Speakers of Arabic

This study attempts to investigate the disagreement strategies that are used by American speakers of Arabic with a view to identifying which disagreement strategies they use in equal and non-equal status situations. In addition, it aims to see whether variables like gender and social status affect the linguistic choices and disagreement strategies that they use. The subjects of the study are 28 (14 male and 14 female) American speakers of Arabic who were learning Arabic and were residing in Jordan at the time of data collection. The researchers analyze their interactional recorded responses to a set of stimuli included in an oral (recorded) discourse completion task (ODCT) prepared for this purpose. The ODCT comprises six scenarios in which the respondent is requested to disagree with two peers, two higher-status interlocutors, and two lower-status interlocutors. The findings of the study show that the American speakers of Arabic use two main disagreement strategies, non-confrontational and confrontational disagreements, which are in turn divided into sub-strategies. Further, they employ the non-confrontational strategies slightly more than the confrontational ones, as the percentage for the former is 51% while for the latter is 49%. Interestingly, the study suggests that the topic of discussion significantly influences the choice of strategy, sometimes resulting in women being more confrontational than men, which contrasts with common perceptions reported in the literature about gender-based communication styles.

Cross-Cultural Gender-Based Investigation of Filipino and Chinese Facebook Users’ Disagreement Strategies

Cross-Cultural Gender-Based Investigation of Filipino and Chinese Facebook Users’ Disagreement Strategies

The Impact of Power Distance and Gender on the Choice of Disagreement Strategies in Saudi Colloquial Arabic

The purpose of this study was to examine the potential impact of power distance and gender on the choice of disagreement strategies by speakers of Saudi colloquial Arabic (henceforth “SCA”) in same- and cross-gender interactions. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) consisting of three situations reflecting the three different combinations of power status (high-low, low-high, and equal) was used to collect the data. To have a comprehensive account of the impact of gender, four groups of participants (Male®Male, Male®Female, Female®Female and Female®Male) were included. Each group consisted of 40 participants. The collected data were compared and analyzed using Maíz-Arévalo’s (2014) taxonomy of disagreement strategies. The data analysis revealed two patterns; firstly, when there was no power distance between interlocuters or when the speaker expressing disagreement had a higher power position than the addressee, gender appeared to have an impact on the choice of disagreement strategies by the speakers of SCA. When disagreeing with the same gender, both male and female speakers of SCA tended to use strong disagreement strategies but mitigated disagreement strategies when disagreeing with the other gender; and secondly, when the speaker expressing disagreement had a lower power position than the addressee, the gender of either the speaker or the addressee did not seem to have an impact on the choice of disagreement strategies. In this pattern, power appeared to be the decisive factor which both male and female speakers of SCA tended to use in mitigated disagreement strategies regardless of the gender of the addressee.

(Im)politeness employed by multilingual Indonesian EFL learners in argumentative conversations

Politeness might lessen imposition in argumentative conversations which potentially result in conflict. However, different conventions on politeness among different cultures may cause problems for EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners who often transfer their native communication preferences to their target language usage. This article explores the (im)politeness employed by multilingual EFL learners in casual agreeing-disagreeing exchanges among peers. Using explanatory sequential mixed method design, students’ utterances in role plays were analyzed based on Leech’s (2014) politeness theory, Kakava’s (1993) disagreement strategies, as well as Locher’s (2004) mitigating strategies on disagreement. It is found that in conversations with people of equal status and power, the observance of politeness maxims is more apparent than the violation. It indicates that maintaining others’ faces is essential irrespective of age differences, even in arguing conversations. The more frequent use of positive politeness than negative politeness strategies represents their greater orientation to others than to themselves. The prevalence of mitigated disagreement and the frequent use of an appreciation preface also show their priority to maintaining good relationships. Those findings support the view of Asians as a collectivistic group whose primary concern in communication is group membership. This suggests that awareness of politeness in argumentative conversations among EFL learners must be increased by giving them different perspectives from non-Asian cultures.

Disagreement strategies and institutional face attack in Chinese mainstream media editorial comments on Weibo

Abstract This paper explores how readers of Chinese mainstream media editorials use disagreement strategies to attack the institutional face of the mainstream media organizations on Weibo. By quantitative and qualitative analysis, the disagreement strategies in Weibo comments were elaborated based on the logos-oriented and ethos-oriented distinction. It was found that logos-oriented disagreements were employed to criticize the content of the editorial, ethos-oriented ad-hominem disagreements were employed to attack the trustworthiness and impartiality of the mainstream media organizations, and ethos-oriented ad-personam disagreements were pure insults to express their negative emotions to the mainstream media organizations. The findings suggested that the online commenting space of Chinese mainstream media editorials is a public sphere of combined deliberation and liberal individualism. This study adds to existing literature the disagreement strategies used in online comments while shedding light on the role of online comments in the public sphere building in the Chinese social media context.

Arabic Culture and Disagreements in Political TV Conversation

In intercultural studies, Arabic society has been described as high-context culture that rely more on indirect message and little room is provided within verbalized articulations. This study attempts to prove out this basic insight relating to communication pattern of a culture in other settings, by analyzing Arabic disagreements in TV interaction. Little investigation about disagreements have been done in Arabic context. The current study will fill this gap and seeks to explore the realization of speech act of disagreement within the context of televised political discourse by analyzing and comparing direct and mitigated disagreement strategies in Arabic political TV talks. In order to achieve these research objectives, a total of twelve Arabic recorded TV programs were transcribed and analyzed through qualitative and quantitative methods. Disagreement responses in the corpus were classified and adjusted based on application framework suggested by some previous studies. The procedures for conducting this study involve data collection, transcription and analysis, using Conversation Analysis (CA) technique. This study reveales that the general percentage of direct disagreements were obviously higher and preferred to that of alleviated disagreements (64.9%-35.0%) which challenges the generalizations about cultural distinctions. Arabic disagreement features such as negation particle, explicit oppositional phrases and disagreement with apology were identified. When the Arab interactants engage in conflict, employing vocative particle with calling the name of the other speaker is one of the unique features found in this research. For future studies, researchers should be mindful of integrating polite and conflict framework for more comprehensive interpretation of human communication.

Beyond the sentence: Shared reading within a high secure hospital.

Ashworth Hospital provides care for inpatients detained under the Mental Health Acts who present a danger to themselves or others. Rehabilitative interventions can help support the best outcomes for patients, their families, care providers, and society. The efficacy of weekly Shared Reading sessions for four patients with experience of psychosis and a history of self-harm was investigated using a 12-month longitudinal case series design. Session data were subjected to psychological discourse analysis to identify discursive strategies employed to accomplish social action and change over the duration of the intervention. Archetypes of interactional achievement across sessions emerged. Broadening of capacity to consider was demonstrated through increased hedging and less declarative language. Increased assertiveness was achieved through reduced generalisation marked by a transition from second-person plural pronouns to more first-person singular pronouns. Avoidance of expression and disagreement strategies diminished over time. In addition, heightened engagement was accomplished through the increased tendency to employ functionally related and preferred responses within adjacency pairs, which mirrored non-verbal communicative strategies. Shared Reading shows promise for promoting the interactional accomplishment for individuals within high secure settings, who are ready to undertake a recovery-related activity. Pathways of interaction should continue to be explored, with consideration to the current study's strengths and limitations. This study contributes to the understanding of efficacious reading study design and the interactional outcomes of therapeutic reading.

An Analysis of the Participants Disagreement Strategies in Computer- mediated Intercultural Communication (CMIC)

This study explores disagreement strategies in the context of a multicultural Computer-mediated-classroom (CMC) with English as a medium of instruction and communication. It studies how disagreement strategies are influenced by the participants' own cultural pragmatic rules and pose problems for others to follow them as intended. The speech acts of strong and mitigated disagreement are analyzed in detail, with different participants employing different strategies as adopted from their respective cultures. CMC, being a contemporary medium of communication in its own right, is rich in new possibilities for intercultural exchange and collaboration in virtual rather than physical space in which the participants' strategies express differing opinions, or a change in the interpretation of an idea, in the form of contrastive connectives and concussive transition markers. The study concludes that speakers with a lower level of linguistic competence need to be equipped with essential pragmalingusitc strategies and skills in disagreement strategies in intercultural situations.

Verbal Disagreement Strategies in Political Discourse (on the Material of Vietnamese Parliamentary Discourse)

Verbal Disagreement Strategies in Political Discourse (on the Material of Vietnamese Parliamentary Discourse)

Disagreement realizations in Arabic

Abstract This paper examines disagreement strategies employed by speakers of Jordanian Spoken Arabic (JSA) with a view to finding out whether variables like gender and social status affect the linguistic choices and disagreement strategies they employ. The subjects are 28 Jordanian Arabic-speaking students at the University of Jordan. The researchers analyze the students’ interactional recorded responses to a set of stimuli included in an oral (recorded) discourse completion task (ODCT) prepared for this purpose. The ODCT comprises six scenarios in which the respondent is requested to disagree with two peers, two higher-status interlocutors and two lower-status interlocutors. The findings show that male and female subjects’ disagreement strategies tend to be influenced by the topic under discussion rather than by the gender and status of their interlocutor. However, some topics are found to be more provocative to females than to males.

Disagreement Strategies on Chinese Forums: Comparing Data From Hong Kong and Mainland China

Prior research on disagreement has mainly focused on its negative impact, suggesting that disagreement should be avoided in communication. Consequently, disagreement is rarely studied in computer-mediated communication, particularly in the Chinese context. Adopting the interactional approach, this project pioneers the investigation of disagreement strategies on online forums in Hong Kong and mainland China, in hopes of providing insights into a better understanding of disagreement in the Chinese online context and shedding light on politeness theory in intercultural communication among Chinese people. Two threads on a similar topic were selected, from which 400 comments were collected and annotated for further analysis. Our results showed that, instead of being a face-threatening act, disagreement maintained and enhanced the interlocutors’ face and advanced the communication of information within each thread. Moreover, although the distribution of the five disagreement strategies was similar in the two sites, there were notably more disagreement tokens and negative comments on the Hong Kong forum. The observed divergence has been attributed to the different degrees of collectivism–individualism in the two regions, the internet censorship in mainland China and the nature of the two forums selected, which remain to be confirmed in future studies.

Active learning for event detection in support of disaster analysis applications

Disaster analysis in social media content is one of the interesting research domains having an abundance of data. However, there is a lack of labeled data that can be used to train machine learning models for disaster analysis applications. Active learning is one of the possible solutions to such a problem. To this aim, in this paper, we propose and assess the efficacy of an active learning-based framework for disaster analysis using images shared on social media outlets. Specifically, we analyze the performance of different active learning techniques under several sampling and disagreement strategies. Moreover, we collect a large-scale dataset covering images from eight common types of natural disasters. The experimental results show that the use of active learning techniques for disaster analysis in social media images results in a performance comparable to that obtained using human-annotated images with fewer data samples, and could be used in frameworks for disaster analysis in images without the tedious job of manual annotation.

Training Robust Deep Neural Networks on Noisy Labels Using Adaptive Sample Selection With Disagreement

Learning with noisy labels is one of the most practical but challenging tasks in deep learning. One promising way to treat noisy labels is to use the small-loss trick based on the memorization effect, that is, clean and noisy samples are identified by observing the network’s loss during training. Co-teaching+ is a state-of-the-art method that simultaneously trains two networks with small-loss selection using the “update by disagreement” strategy; however, it suffers from the problem that the selected samples tend to become noisy as the number of iterations increases. This phenomenon means that clean small-loss samples will be biased toward agreement data, which is the set of samples for which the two networks have the same prediction. This paper proposes an adaptive sample selection method to train deep neural networks robustly and prevent noise contamination in the disagreement strategy. Specifically, the proposed method calculates the threshold of the small-loss criterion by considering the loss distribution of the whole batch at each iteration. Then, the network is backpropagated by extracting samples below this threshold from the disagreement data. Combining the disagreement and agreement data of the two networks can suppress the degradation of the true-label rate of training data in a mini batch. Experiments were conducted using five commonly used benchmarks, MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, NEWS, and T-ImageNet to verify the robustness of the proposed method to noisy labels. The results show the proposed method improves generalization performance in an image classification task with simulated noise rates of up to 50%.

Gender Differences in Disagreement Strategies in Oral Academic Discourse

The research aims to identify the gender differences in expressing disagreement in oral academic discourse. Examples containing explicit and implicit ways of expressing disagreement are collected through reading a corpus of texts chosen from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), including speech genres of seminar, discussion, defense of the dissertation and colloquium. Our study confirmed previous observations that utterances of explicit unmitigated disagreement or criticism are generally not typical of the American academic environment. The research findings reveal that both men and women tend to express disagreement explicitly using basic mitigation strategies. Unmitigated utterances with straightforward disagreement are infrequent and used mainly by teachers, which is most likely due to the other sociolinguistic variables apart from gender, and in particular by the status of speakers in teacher-student situations. Contrary to previous claims, men prefer the tactics of down-toning, represented by language patterns with the meaning of problematic certainty and subjectivity, as well as the use of lexical hedges. Female teachers recurrently use particular ways of implementing the tactics of mitigating implicit expression of disagreement, which may be specific of their individual styles. The research confirms that the distribution of particular language patterns across speakers should be taken into account when studying the gender aspects of communication.

Cross Cultural Pragmatics: Compliment Response Strategy Used on the British and Indonesian Talk show

This research aims at comparing the pattern of compliment response strategy used by two different cultures between British’s and Indonesia’s talk show. The method used is descriptive qualitative research. The data is taken from “Loose Women” (British Talk Show) and “Tonight Show” (Indonesian Talk Show). The data collections are done as follows: first, download the video of “Tonight Show” and “Loose Women”. Second, observed both videos and then compared the video. The last transcribed the compliment response and then choose the pattern of compliment response strategy based on the theory of (R. Herbert, 1989) to be analyzed further. The result shows that strategy of no acknowledgment gets a higher percentage in “Tonight Show” that is (31.03%), this strategy as the first usage in the compliment response strategy, disagreement strategy gets (23.07%) and as the second usage in the compliment response strategy, the third usage is appreciation token strategy (17.24%) in responding the compliment. Meanwhile, the Talk Show entitled “Loose Women” (British Talkshow), the higher strategy is comment acceptance (28%), appreciation token, return, and no acknowledgement strategy(16%). It can be concluded that the most prominent used in both Talk show are no acknowledgement strategy and comment acceptance strategy. Those both strategies is included rejection pattern in responding the compliment. In this case, British tends to receive the praise and respond to what was discussed and even they provide additional information with the intention of keeping the communication going, it means that they are open in responding to what was discussed, but that contrasts with Indonesia culture, Indonesian people intended to humble themselves and minimize the things commented on praise as an expression of humility. It means that they do not want to be seen as an arrogant artist or public figure. They only want to keep their image as an artist.

A discursive approach to disagreements expressed by Chinese spokespersons during press conferences

Most previous research on (im)politeness in Chinese has not centered on disagreement in unequal-status situations. This paper examines the discursive processes which are involved in the construction and negotiation of disagreement expressed by government spokespersons when they are confronted with a diverse range of journalistic questions. Drawing on 40 h of video-recorded press conferences released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, we will argue that spokespersons often respond to questions by employing a number of disagreement strategies (giving opposing opinions, making negative comments, raising rhetorical questions, taking a personal stance, making an ironic statement and providing facts). Through the use of such forms of disagreement behavior, the spokesperson not only manages the (potential) face-threats that are triggered by the questions, but also positions the government as a ‘moral actor’ in the media. A close look at these conversations between spokespersons and journalists reveal that cultural and socio-political issues could provide possible reasons for these usages of disagreement expressed in Chinese press conferences.

Disagreement Strategies used by Speakers of English as a Lingua Franca in Business Meetings

Numerous studies have attested to the consensus-orientation and cooperative nature of English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions. However, limited attention has been given to moments of disagreements in ELF communication, with most of the little existing work focusing on disagreements in ELF academic or informal contexts. Consequently, little is known about how ELF users display disagreement in real-life business contexts. For this reason, this study examined disagreement expressions in five ELF business meetings drawn from the VOICE corpus to understand the nature of disagreement in ELF interactions. Following the identification of disagreement instances, the study used Stalpers’s (1995) framework to investigate whether the disagreement was accompanied by a mitigation strategy that reduces its impact. It was found that the examined ELF business speakers express their disagreement in both mitigated and unmitigated forms with a marked preference for using mitigated expressions, indicating that the appropriate linguistic choice for expressing disagreements in a between-company business meeting is a mitigated disagreement form. Another main finding is the frequent use of disagreement utterances, suggesting that ELF speakers do not merely seek consensus, but they also raise objections and state their different opinions. One implication of these findings is that ELF encounters might not be as consensus-seeking and mutually supportive as suggested in previous works. Taken together, the findings of the present study extended the existing body of work on ELF disagreement and, in general, added further to our understanding of ELF interaction.

Disagreement and (im)politeness in a Spanish family members’ WhatsApp group

The present paper explores disagreement and impoliteness in a WhatsApp interaction within a Spanish family that took place during the 2018 International Women’s Day. The conversation is linguistically examined using categories of disagreement strategies proposed by previous authors (Pomerantz 1984, Brown and Levinson 1987, Rees-Miller 2000, Locher 2004, Kreutel 2007, Malamed 2010, Shum and Lee 2013). Furthermore, multimodal analysis (Dresner and Herring 2010, 2013, Jewitt 2013, Bourlai and Herring 2014; Herring 2015) is used to consider not only participants’ linguistic strategies for expressing disagreement, but also the function of multimedia elements and emojis (Dresner and Herring 2010, 2013, Yus 2014, 2017, Sampietro 2016a, 2016b, Aull 2019). The analysis is followed by an interview to better understand the participants’ communicative intentions towards disagreements in relation to (im)politeness. A total of 427 instances of disagreement are identified, with the most common strategies being giving opposite opinions and emotional or personal reasons. This is to be expected since the group is divided from the very beginning into detractors and supporters of feminism, and they are also defending their opposite viewpoints by giving examples from their own life experience. Based on the participants’ opinions, the most significant result is the fact that, although disagreement may lead to face-threat, and thus impoliteness in other contexts (Langlotz and Locher 2012, Sifianou 2012, Shum and Lee 2013), in this WhatsApp interaction, the Spanish family members did not consider it to be impolite, and it is even evaluated in positive terms by some of the participants (Angouri and Locher 2012).

Investigating (Im)politeness in online forums between English speakers and English as a foreign language learners

This study investigated the use of (im)politeness and disagreement in online discussion forums among English speakers and English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. It also explored how internet forum browsers judge (im)politeness and parameters of relational work ((in)appropriateness and negatively/positively marked behaviour) in disagreement. Three hundred and sixty disagreement responses were analysed following a list of disagreement strategies. The most frequent strategy applied by English speakers was 'making scornful and humiliating statements', while EFL learners used 'showing unmitigated disagreement' and 'showing smileys' as the highest and lowest ones. Most of the strategies used by English speakers were judged as polite and appropriate, but neither negatively nor positively marked, while 13 types of EFL strategies were considered as polite, but neither appropriate and positively marked nor inappropriate and negatively marked. Further, the three parameters had positive relationships with one another. This study provides worthwhile information for improving teaching communication skills in EFL courses.
 Keywords: (Im)Politeness, disagreement, English as a foreign language learners, interactional and discursive approach, online forum

ANALYZING THE SPEECH ACT OF DISAGREEMENT PRODUCED BY IRAQI EFL LEARNERS: A GENDER STUDY

Purpose of study: This is a pragmatic study dealing with the speech act of disagreement at the production level. The aim of the study is to investigate whether gender (the independent variable) affects the production of disagreement strategies (dependent variables) used by Iraqi EFL learners. The study is meant to help educators through diagnosing the learners’ pragmatic abilities which were reported by Iraqi scholars as weak and underdeveloped. The study also intends to enrich thespeech act literature which lacks gender consideration in the Iraqi context.Methodology: The study is limited to the analysis of the pragmatic strategies of disagreement within the theory of speech act in relation to gender. The study adopts a descriptive quantitative approach using a Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT) as a tool for collecting data. The tool consists of 10 open-ended situations to elicit data from 80 fourth-year Iraqi English as a foreign language (EFL) learners who equally were split into 40 males and 40 females. The study utilized MS Excel 2016 for statistical analyses of directness strategies with their dependent explicitness strategies.Results: It was revealed that both males and females employed similar amounts of explicit disagreement strategies but as far as the indirect strategies are concerned, females significantly used more indirect disagreement strategies than their male counterparts.Novelty/Originality: The current study is gender-based dealing with the speech act of disagreement at the directness and explicitness levels at the Iraqi EFL learners context. It revealed the learners’ current state of affair in terms of their pragmatic ability in the production of disagreements. It acted as a call for educators and syllabus designers to consider the teachability of the indirect aspect inherent in the act under study.