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

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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: English disagreements, Italian disagreements, cross-cultural pragmatics, cross-gender pragmatics, disagreement (im)politeness, disagreement strategies, disagreement illocutionary modification
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1The pragmatic act of disagreement
    • 2.2Disagreement strategies
    • 2.3Cross-cultural empirical research on disagreements
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1The corpora
    • 3.2Data collection process
    • 3.3Parameters for data annotation
  • 4.Data analysis
  • 5.Discussion of results
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Author queries
  • References
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