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

Cover Page

Cite item

Full Text

Abstract

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).

About the authors

Lucía Fernández-Amaya

Pablo de Olavide University

Email: lferama@upo.es
Lecturer in English at the Department of Philology and Translation, Pablo de Olavide University, Seville Carretera de Utrera, Km 1, 41013, Seville, Spain

References

  1. Ahad, Annie Dayani & Ariff Lim, Syamimi Md (2014). Convenience or nuisance?: The ‘WhatsApp’ dilemma. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 155, 189-196. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.10.278
  2. Andújar-Vaca, Alberto & Cruz-Martínez, María Soledad (2017). Mobile instant messaging: Whatsapp and its potential to develop oral skills. Comunicar, 25 (50), 43-52. doi: 10.3916/C50-2017-04.
  3. Angouri, Jo & Locher, Miriam A. (2012). Theorising disagreement. Journal of Pragmatics, 44 (12), 1549-1553. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2012.06.011.
  4. Angouri, Jo & Tseliga, Theodora (2010). ’You HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT!’ From E-disagreement to E-impoliteness in two online fora. Journal of Politeness Research, 6, 57-82.
  5. Aull, Bethany (2019). A study of phatic emoji use in WhatsApp communication. Internet Pragmatics, 2 (2), 206-232. doi: 10.1075/ip.00029.aul.
  6. Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen, Sabrina Mossman & Heidi E. Vellenga (2015). The effect of instruction on pragmatic routines in academic discussion. Language Teaching Research, 19 (3), 325-331. doi: 10.1177/1362168814541739.
  7. Barhoumi, Chokri (2015). The effectiveness of WhatsApp mobile learning activities guided by activity theory on students’ knowledge management. Contemporary Educational Technology, 6 (3), 221-238.
  8. Baron, Naomi S. (2008). Always on: Language in an online and mobile world. New York: Oxford University Press.
  9. Bernal, María (2007). Categorización sociopragmática de la cortesía y de la descortesía: Un estudio de la conversación coloquial española. Estocolmo: Stockholm University.
  10. Bou-Franch, Patricia, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus & Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2012). Social Interaction in Youtube text-based polylogues: A study of coherence. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 17 (4), 501-521.
  11. Bouhnik, Dan & Deshen, Mor (2014). WhatsApp goes to school: Mobile instant messaging between teachers and students. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, 13, 217-231. doi: 10.28945/2051.
  12. Bourlai, Elli & Susan C. Herring (2014). Multimodal communication on Tumblr: ‘I have so many feels!’ Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference on Web Science. Bloomington, Indiana, 171-175. doi: 10.1145/2615569.2615697.
  13. Bravo, Diana (2008). Situación de habla, recursos comunicativos y factores lingüísticos en la inter­pretación de objetivos de cortesía. Cortesía y conversación: de lo escrito a lo oral. Valencia: Universitat de València, 12-24.
  14. Brown, Penelope & Stephen C. Levinson (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  15. Calero Vaquera, María Luisa (2014). El discurso del WhatsApp: entre el Messenger y el SMS. Oralia, 17, 85-114.
  16. Church, Karen & Rodrigo De Oliveira (2013). What's up with Whatsapp?: Comparing mobile instant messaging behaviors with traditional SMS. Proceedings of the 15th international conference on human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services, 352-361.
  17. Crystal, David (2006). Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  18. Culpeper, Jonathan (1996). Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics, 25 (3), 349-367.
  19. Dresner, Eli & Susan C. Herring (2010). Functions of the nonverbal in CMC: Emoticons and illocu­tionary force. Communication Theory, 20 (3), 249-268. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2885.2010.01362.x.
  20. Dresner, Eli & Susan C. Herring (2013). Emoticons and illocutionary force. In Riesenfeld, D. & G. Sca­rafil (eds.) Perspectives on theory of controversies and the ethics of communication. Dordrecht: Springer, 81-90.
  21. Dynel, Marta (2015). The landscape of impoliteness research. Journal of Politeness Research, 11 (2), 329-340. doi: 10.1515/pr-2015-0013.
  22. Edstrom, Anne (2004). Expressions of disagreement by Venezuelans in conversation: Recon­sidering the influence of culture. Journal of Pragmatics, 36 (8), 1499-1518. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2004.02.002.
  23. Ersöz, Selva (2019). Understanding Whatsapp parent groups’ dynamics: Group communication and information sharing. Manas Sosyal Araştırmalar Dergisi, 8 (1), 1167-1183.
  24. Fernández-Amaya, Lucía (2019). Managing conflict originated by feminism: A case study from WhatsApp interaction among Spanish family members. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict. http://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00032.fer
  25. Fernández-Amaya, Lucía, Hernández-López, María de la O & Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2014). Spanish travellers’ expectations of service encounters in domestic and international settings. Tourism, Culture and Communication, 14 (2), 117-134.
  26. Flores-Salgado, Elizabeth & Teresa A. Castineira-Benitez (2018). The use of politeness in WhatsApp discourse and move ‘requests’. Journal of Pragmatics, 133, 79-92.
  27. Fundación Telefónica. 2018. “Informe de la sociedad digital en España.” https://www.fundaciontelefonica.com/ arte_cultura/sociedad-de-la-informacion/sdie-2018/.
  28. Ganasegeran, Kurubaran, Pukunan Renganathan, Abdul Rashid & Sami A.R. Al-Dubai (2017). The m-Health revolution: Exploring perceived benefits of WhatsApp use in clinical practice. Inter­national Journal of Medical Informatics, 97, 145-151. doi: 10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2016.10.013.
  29. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar (2010). A genre approach to the study of im-politeness. International Review of Pragmatics, 2, 46-94.
  30. García-Gómez, Antonio (2018). Managing conflict on WhatsApp: A contrastive study of British and Spanish family disputes. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 6 (2), 318-340. doi: 10.1075/jlac.00015.gar.
  31. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2001). Arguing about the future: on indirect disagreements in conver­sation. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 1881-1900.
  32. Goodwin, Marjorie Harness (1983). Aggravated correction and disagreement in children’s conversa­tions. Journal of Pragmatics, 7 (6), 657-677. doi: 10.1016/0378 2166(83)90089-9.
  33. Graham, Sage (2007). Disagreeing to agree: Conflict, (im)politeness and identity in a computer-me­diated community. Journal of Pragmatics, 39, 742-759. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2006.11.017.
  34. Gray, Peter H. (2001). A problem-solving perspective on knowledge management practices. Decision Support Systems, 31 (1), 87-102. doi: 10.1016/S0167-9236(00)00121-4.
  35. Hay, Jennifer (2000). Functions of humor in the conversations of men and women. Journal of Prag­matics, 32 (6), 709-742.
  36. Hernández Flores, Nieves (2003). Cortesía y contextos socioculturales en la conversación de familiares y amigos. Actas del primer coloquio del programa EDICE ‘La perspectiva no etnocentrista de la cortesía: identidad sociocultural de las comunidades hispanohablantes’. Estocolmo: Pro­grama EDICE, Universidad de Estocolmo, 121-127.
  37. Hernández-López, María de la O (2016). Disagreement and degrees of assertiveness in service en­counters: Purchase vs problem-solving interactions. International Journal of Society, Culture & Language, 4 (2), 87-104.
  38. Hernández-López, María de la O & Lucía Fernández-Amaya (2019). What makes (im)politeness for travellers? Spanish tourists’ perceptions at national and international hotels. Journal of Politeness Research, 15 (2), 195-222. doi: 10.1515/pr-2016-0060.
  39. Herring, Susan C. (2015). New frontiers in interactive multimodal communication. In Geor­gopoulou, A. & T. Spilloti (eds.) The Routledge handbook of language and digital communica­tion. London: Routledge, 398-402.
  40. Jewitt, Carey (2013). Multimodal methods for researching digital technologies. In Price, S., C. Jewitt & B. Brown (eds.) The SAGE handbook of digital technology research. London: SAGE Publi­cations, 250-265.
  41. Johnston, Maximiliam, Dominic King, Sonal Arora, Nebil Behar, Thanos Athanasiou, Nick Sevdalis & Ara Darzi (2015). Smartphones let surgeons know Whatsapp: An analysis of communication in emergency surgical teams. The American Journal of Surgery, 209 (1), 45-51. doi: 10.1016/j.amjsurg.2014.08.030.
  42. Jones, Rodney H. & Hafner Christoph, A. (2012). Understanding digital literacies: A practical introduction. London: Routledge.
  43. Kakavá, Christina (1993). Negotiation of disagreement by Greeks in conversations and classroom discourse (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Georgetown University, USA.
  44. Kakavá, Christina (2002). Opposition in modern Greek discourse: Cultural and contextual constraints. Journal of Pragmatics, 34 (10), 1537-1568. doi: 10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00075-9.
  45. Kamel Boulos, Maged, Dean Giustini & Steve Wheeler (2016). Instagram and WhatsApp in health and healthcare: An overview. Future Internet 8 (3), 37. doi: 10.3390/fi8030037.
  46. Kreutel, Karen (2007). “I'm Not Agree with You.” ESL Learners’ Expressions of Disagreement. TESL-EJ, 11 (3), 1-20.
  47. Langlotz, Andreas & Miriam A. Locher (2012). Ways of communicating emotional stance in online disagreements. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 1591-1606.
  48. Locher, Miriam A. (2004). Power and politeness in action: Disagreement in oral communication. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York.
  49. Maíz Arévalo, Carmen (2018). Emotional self-presentation on Whatsapp: Analysis of the profile status. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 22 (1), 144-160. doi: 10.22363/2312-9182-2018-22-1-144-160.
  50. Malamed, Lewis H. (2010). How to disagree agreeably. In Martínez-Flor, A. & E. Usó-Juan (eds.) Speech act performance: Theoretical, empirical and methodological issues. Amsterdam/Phila­delphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 199-216. doi: 10.1075/lllt.26.12mal.
  51. Masoumeh, Mehregan, Abbass Eslamirasekh, Dabaghi Azizollah & Jafari Seresht Davood (2013). Disagreement expressions in the discourse of young Persian speakers. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 70, 598-604.
  52. Netz, Hadar (2014). Disagreement patterns in gifted classes. Journal of Pragmatics, 61, 142-160. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2013.09.007.
  53. O'Hara, Kenton, Michael Massimi, Richard Harper, Simon Rubens & Jessica Morris (2014). Everyday dwelling with WhatsApp. Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing, 1131-1143.
  54. Pérez-Sabater, Carmen (2012). The linguistics of social networking: A study of writing conventions on Facebook. Linguistik Online, 56 (6), 81-93. doi: 10.13092/lo.56.257.
  55. Pérez-Sabater, Carmen (2015). Discovering language variation in Whatsapp text interactions. Ono­mázein: Revista Semestral de Lingüística, Filología y Traducción, 31 (1), 113-126. doi: 10.7764/onomazein.31.8.
  56. Petitjean, Cécile & Etienne Morel (2017). ‘Hahaha’: Laughter as a resource to manage WhatsApp conversations. Journal of Pragmatics, 110, 1-19. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2017.01.001.
  57. Pomerantz, Anita (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/ dispreferred turn shaped. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  58. Rees-Miller, Janie (2000). Power, severity, and context in disagreement. Journal of Pragmatics, 32 (8), 1087-1111. doi: 10.1016/S0378 2166(99)00088-0.
  59. Rubio-Romero, Juana & Marta Perlado de Espinosa (2015). El fenómeno WhatsApp en el contexto de la comunicación personal: una aproximación a través de los jóvenes universitarios. Revista ICONO14. Revista científica de Comunicación y Tecnologías emergentes, 13 (2), 73-94. doi: 10.7195/ri14.v13i2.818.
  60. Sacks, Harvey (1987). On the preference for agreement and contiguity in sequence in conversation. Talk and Social Organization, 54, 54-69.
  61. Sampietro, Agnese (2016a). Emoticonos y multimodalidad. El uso del pulgar hacia arriba en WhatsApp. Aposta. Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 69, 271-295.
  62. Sampietro, Agnese (2016b). Exploring the punctuating effect of emoji in Spanish Whatsapp chats. Lenguas Modernas, 47, 91-113.
  63. Sánchez-Moya, Alfonso & Olga Cruz-Moya (2015a). Whatsapp, textese, and moral panics: Discourse features and habits across two generations. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 173, 300-306. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.02.069.
  64. Sánchez-Moya, Alfonso & Olga Cruz-Moya (2015b). ‘Hey there! I am using Whatsapp’: A prelimi­nary study of recurrent discursive realisations in a corpus of Whatsapp statuses. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 212, 52-60. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.11.298.
  65. Schiffrin, Deborah (1984). Jewish argument as sociability. Language in Society, 13, 311-335.
  66. Schnurr, Stephanie (2010). Humour. In Locher, M. A. & S.L. Graham (eds.) Interpersonal pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 307-326.
  67. Shum, Winnie & Cynthia Lee (2013). (Im)politeness and disagreement in two Hong Kong Internet discussion forums. Journal of Pragmatics, 50, 52-83.
  68. Sifianou, Maria (2012). Disagreements, face and politeness. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 1554-1564.
  69. Sornig, Karl (1977). Disagreement and contradiction as communicative acts. Journal of Pragmatics, 1 (4), 347 374. doi: 10.1016/0378 2166(77)90028-5.
  70. Swales, John (1990). Genre analysis. English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  71. Tannen, Deborah (1981). New York Jewish conversational style. International Journal of the Socio­logy of Language, 30, 133-149. doi: 10.1515/ijsl.1981.30.133.
  72. Tannen, Deborah (1984). Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press.
  73. Tannen, Deborah (1990). You just don't understand: Women and men in conversation. New York: Ballantine.
  74. Tannen, Deborah (1998). The argument culture. New York: Random House.
  75. Tjosvold, Dean (2008). The conflict-positive organization: It depends upon us. Journal of Organiza­tional Behavior, 29 (1), 19-28. doi: 10.1002/job.473.
  76. Xu, Lingling (2017). Disagreement studies reviewed and my coy disagreements. Studies in English Language Teaching, 5 (4), 679-694. doi: 10.22158/selt.v5n4p679.
  77. Yus, Francisco (2011). Cyberpragmatics. Internet-mediated communication in context. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. doi: 10.1075/pbns.213.
  78. Yus, Francisco (2014). Not all emoticons are created equal. Linguagem em (Dis)curso, 14 (3), 511-529. doi: 10.1590/1982-4017-140304-0414.
  79. Yus, Francisco (2017). Contextual constraints and non-propositional effects in Whatsapp communica­tion. Journal of Pragmatics, 114, 66-86. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2017.04.003.
  80. Zhu, Weihua (2014). Managing relationships in everyday practice: The case of strong disagreement in mandarin. Journal of Pragmatics, 64, 85-87. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2014.01.010.

Copyright (c) 2019 Fernández-Amaya L.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

This website uses cookies

You consent to our cookies if you continue to use our website.

About Cookies