Verbal Disagreement in Saudi Arabic and British English Casual Conversations: Cross-cultural and gender comparisons

Abstract

The current study investigates cross-cultural similarities and differences in the realization of disagreement exchanges in Saudi Arabic (SaA) and British English (BrE) casual conversations. It particularly focuses on both pragmatic and structural patterns of naturally-occurring disagreements in the two cultural groups. In addition to examining the variable of cultural background, the impact of the two variables of discussion topics and participants’ gender on disagreement production is also examined.

The present study adopts a mixed-method approach to gather data. The main source of the study’s data is recorded naturally-occurring conversations between friends in casual gatherings. Ten groups of three participants from each cultural set (SaA and BrE) constitute that main study population. To examine the influence of gender variable on disagreement production, participants in each cultural population set consisted of 4 All-female groups, 4 All-male groups and two mixed-gender groups. To frame the elicited conversations, the participants (in both cultural sets) were instructed to discuss two kinds of topics: 1. planning a future trip and 2. the pros and cons of the increasing use of technology and social media. As a supplementary and secondary research method, a judgment task/questionnaire was used to obtain insights into how participants perceive each other’s general conversation interaction and contributions in terms of (im)politeness.

The examination of recorded data draws on and employs Conversation Analysis (CA) as an analytical approach to examine data at two levels, linguistic/pragmatic and structural. The examination of the pragmatic patterns is conducted from a politeness perspective, and it is mainly based on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theoretical framework of politeness. Structural patterns are examined at a conversational-turn level with a reference to the organizations of conversation, e.g. Turn-taking.

Through a comprehensive investigation of the participants’ elicited conversations, a number of 542 disagreement exchanges (represented in the fixed analytical unit of “conversational turn”) were found in the SaA conversations and 416 in the BrE data set. The main and general results displayed that although there is a tendency to use politeness strategies over on-record bald or aggravation strategies among disagreement expressions, SaA participants had more significant rates of production of disagreement episodes, and of employing fewer politeness strategies. SaA and BrE disagreements were structurally expressed in different ways: SaA ones tended to involve a more straightforward tactic e.g. more instances of overlaps with previous turns and fewer prefaces. A qualitative and context-based account of disagreement episodes was also taken to explain how face is managed, how disagreement episodes are responded to, and how some cultural specific features influence the interaction.

As for gender-based comparison, in both cultural data sets, similarities in the pragmatic and structural patterns of disagreement were more than their differences. Though BrE disagreements produced by females and males were almost identical, a significant difference emerges in SaA mixed-gender settings. In these groups, SaA females tended to produce fewer disagreement expressions and employ more negative politeness strategies than SaA males.

As for the interlocutors’ perceptions of their peers’ conversational responses to them, the questionnaire responses were similarly distributed, in both cultural data sets. All participants described the others’ conversational responses as either very polite, polite or appropriate, and no judgments of talk as impolite were found.

The current study sought to contribute to the disagreement field of research at both methodological and analytical levels. Arguably, it is the first study t