A Pragmatic Analysis Of Disagreement In Chinese Pedagogical Context

Studies on the speech act of disagreement, by so far, have been much less than those on other kinds of speech acts. According to Brown and Levinson, disagreement is a kind of face-threatening act (FTA); to perform such an act, some relevant politeness strategies, guided commonly by social (power/social distance), situational (seriousness/necessity) and psychological (attitude/face) parameters, are needed to make face-saving repairs. Although disagreement is not incongruent with politeness maxims, it has different specific forms and corresponding strategies in specific contexts, particularly in the pedagogical context, in which disagreement occurs frequently and naturally between interlocutors, but the purpose of disagreement is to present their different academic points of view in an effort to find out the final correct solution to the arguments, and on most occasions interactive meaning overweighs the considerations of the addressee while both of interlocutors will not feel face being threatened. This research takes some examples from the pedagogical context in the Chinese university and finds out that some Chinese disagreement speech acts in the context cannot get tenable explanation from western politeness theories, since these theories neglect the fact that politeness phenomena have no universal standards in all cultures, and politeness in a specific culture is refined to and governed by its own specific cultural values.This thesis adopts a theoretical model-Adaptation Theory proposed by Jef Verschueren from pragmatic perspective to analyze the speech act of disagreement in Chinese pedagogical context by Chinese conception of politeness in its cultural background, the analysis includes disagreement's structural models, pragmatic functions and corresponding appropriate strategies in an effort to achieve successful communicative and pedagogical purposes.