A cross-cultural analysis of disagreement in spoken Chinese and French from a frame-based approach of politeness
This study explores how Chinese and French native speakers express disagreement in an informal context through a corpus of spoken French and Chinese (33,169 words in French; 52,176 characters in Chinese). Adopting a frame-based approach (Terkourafi, 2001, 2005, 2015), the research classifies expressions of disagreement based on a directness scale, resulting in four distinct categories: performative disagreement, explicit disagreement, implicit disagreement, and allusive disagreement (Stadler, 2006, 2011). The findings reveal that both Chinese and French native speakers use performative and allusive disagreements less frequently. Notably, while the Chinese tend to employ more implicit disagreement, and the French lean predominantly towards explicit forms of disagreement, the variation in the use of explicit and implicit forms is evident. The contrast between implicit and explicit forms of disagreement is more pronounced in French than in Chinese. Consequently, there is minimal disparity in the use of explicit and implicit forms of disagreement in Chinese. These results highlight the critical importance of understanding cross-cultural pragmatic norms for fostering effective intercultural communication between China and France.
References
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Terkourafi, M. (2015). Conventionalization : A new agenda for im/politeness research. Journal of Pragmatics, 86(9), 11‑18.