“What are you talking about? That is not true” — Men’s and women’s disagreements in English and Italian interactions

Vittorio Napoli
University of Bologna
Abstract

The present research aims to uncover cross-linguistic differences (involving British English and Italian), as well as cross-gender differences (men and women) concerning use and preference of strategies and pragmatic modification, in verbal disagreements. The analysis of spontaneous conversations from the Spoken BNC2014 corpus (McEnery et al. 2017), for the English sample, and from the KIParla corpus (Goria and Mauri 2018), for the Italian sample, has brought to light divergences in the realization of disagreements, both at the cross-linguistic and at the cross-gender level. Methodologically speaking, models of analysis used for past empirical studies (Muntigl and Turnbull 1998; Rees-Miller 2000; Johnson 2006; Paramasivam 2007) were drawn from for the annotation and codification of strategies and pragmatic modifiers. Results obtained from quantitative analyses are explained in the light of previous research findings, although the latter are partially disconfirmed and thus call for further future investigations.

Keywords:
Publication history

Date received: 12 August 2023

Date accepted: 23 April 2024

Published online: 16 January 2025

Table of contents

The pragmatic act of disagreement comes about when the speaker voices an opinion which differs from the one previously expressed by another party in the conversation, thus leading to a disalignment of viewpoints which, using Brown and Levinson’s (1978) terminology, can be face-threatening in terms of politeness. Schegloff (2007, 60), who theorized on disagreements from the angle of Conversation Analysis, defined them “dispreferred second pair parts”, preferred ones being agreements because, on the contrary, they signal alignment with the previous speaker’s opinion.

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