| Disagreement expression is a common and frequent linguistic phenomenon in daily communication. Proper disagreement expression can promote the conversation going smoothly and maintain a harmonious relationship. Otherwise, the conversation will be forced to terminate and the relationship will break down at the same time. Among the existing studies on the disagreement expression or conflict talk, the attention was focused on the native speakers'language or communication, and most of the data such studies based on were collected from the conflict dialogues in the novels, drama and some other artificial texts. Studies on disagreement expressions or conflict talk based on learners'oral communication are hardly to be seen even until recently. It is mainly due to the difficulty of collecting the learners'spoken language on the one hand, and on the other hand it is hard to guarantee the representation and effectiveness of the corpus collected. However, the construction of the Chinese Learner Spoken English Corpus (COLSEC) makes the study become possible on the grounds of ample authentic learner spoken data and the scientific design principles. Therefore, on the basis of the COLSEC, this research attempts to analyze the main features of Chinese EFL learners'disagreement expressions in discussion.This research adopts Conversation Analysis, Speech Act Theory, and Brown and Levinson's (1978) Politeness Theory as the main theoretical rationales to do studies on the student-student discussion corpora in the COLSEC. So the author firstly makes use of the software PowerGREP to extract and construct the sub-corpus of group discussion among students (SCD) on the basis of COLSEC. In order to alleviate the processing cost in time and energy and at the same time guarantee the validity of the results, this study adopts the random sampling method based on the table of random numbers and extracts 100 files as the sampling which represents the SCD. The major research questions are as follows: (1) what are the forms of the disagreement expressions in the SCD? And how many types are these forms categorized into? (2) What are the pragmatic functional features of the disagreement expressions in the SCD? (3) What are the influencing factors that affect the frequencies and form choices of disagreement expressions?To settle problems above, this research takes the following research steps: firstly, in order to have a general idea of the disagreement turn and expressions, the author does a pilot study; secondly, according to the pilot study, annotate the disagreement turn by the help of the software. After the machine annotation process, the author corrects the wrong annotated ones and re-annotated the other disagreement turns; thirdly, extract the annotated disagreement turn and annotate the disagreement expressions in each turn. Then analyze the disagreement expressions and abstract the forms and categorize the types of disagreement expressions in the sampling; fourthly, according to the speech act theory analyze the pragmatic functions of disagreement expressions; and finally, in the light of Brown and Levinson's politeness theories and previous studies to interpret the influencing factors which affect the disagreement expressions in the SCD. Through the results and analysis, the forms of disagreement expressions in the sampling are a continuum ranging from a simple word"no,"and frame"yes…but…"to sentences. On the basis of the inclusion of the overt linguistic components, it can be concluded that it is relatively monotonous and dull of the students'disagreement expressions since they are only limited to the few tokens"but, no, agree, think, and well."The disagreement expression forms can be primarily divided into explicit and implicit ones according to the dependence of the context and the inclusion of overt linguistic disagreement markers or components. The explicit disagreement can be sub-divided into direct and indirect ones on the basis of the composition of the agreement part. There are 17% of direct disagreement expressions in the sampling, and 32% of indirect disagreement expressions. The implicit disagreement expressions, whose judgment as disagreement need depend on the context, can be sub-divided into declaratives, questions and imperatives based on the sentence structure. The results show that declaratives in the sampling to express disagreement expressions are predominant making up 38%, questions are 11% and imperative sentences 2%. Different linguistic forms reflect different aims thus produce various pragmatic functions. Apart from the universal functions of objection and persuasion, the pragmatic functions of the disagreement expressions in the sampling mainly include complement, suggestion, request, satire, insult, and challenge. Finally, the research still finds that people's physical face saving needs, the topic itself, the language learners'proficiency, and especially the traditional Chinese politeness thoughts greatly influence the frequencies and form choices of disagreement expressions. Besides, during the research process, we still find some other problems. One serious problem is that the linguistic mistakes even exist in the daily most frequently used expressions, though it is inevitable for the language learners to make mistakes. Another one is that some students stray away from the designated topics and can not make any logical and penetrative comment in the discussions which reflect the serious lack of real practice and communication skills.The analysis above, to some extent, reveals the features of Chinese EFL learners'disagreement expressions in real communication, and provides some reference for the EFL teaching and learning. At the same time, it offers the possibility of the comparative study with Chinese native speakers'oral disagreement expressions so as to analyze the L1 transfer effects on the EFL learners'spoken English, through which it is useful for the better cultivation of students'communicative speaking and writing ability, and the same to the success of the students'inter-cultural communication in the future. |
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