The Impact of Power Distance and Gender on the Choice of Disagreement Strategies in Saudi Colloquial Arabic
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the potential impact of power distance and gender on the choice of disagreement strategies by speakers of Saudi colloquial Arabic (henceforth “SCA”) in same- and cross-gender interactions. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) consisting of three situations reflecting the three different combinations of power status (high-low, low-high, and equal) was used to collect the data. To have a comprehensive account of the impact of gender, four groups of participants (Male®Male, Male®Female, Female®Female and Female®Male) were included. Each group consisted of 40 participants. The collected data were compared and analyzed using Maíz-Arévalo’s (2014) taxonomy of disagreement strategies. The data analysis revealed two patterns; firstly, when there was no power distance between interlocuters or when the speaker expressing disagreement had a higher power position than the addressee, gender appeared to have an impact on the choice of disagreement strategies by the speakers of SCA. When disagreeing with the same gender, both male and female speakers of SCA tended to use strong disagreement strategies but mitigated disagreement strategies when disagreeing with the other gender; and secondly, when the speaker expressing disagreement had a lower power position than the addressee, the gender of either the speaker or the addressee did not seem to have an impact on the choice of disagreement strategies. In this pattern, power appeared to be the decisive factor which both male and female speakers of SCA tended to use in mitigated disagreement strategies regardless of the gender of the addressee.
References
Al-Marrani, Y., & Sazalie, A. (2010). Polite request strategies by male speakers of Yemeni Arabic in male-male interaction and male-female interaction. The International Journal of Language, Society, and Culture, 30, 63-80.
Almathkuri, J. (2021). Influence of social power and distance on request strategies in Saudi Arabic. International Journal of Linguistics, 13(3), 95-109. https://doi.org/10.5296/ijl.v13i3.18770
Almutairi, S. (2021). Disagreement strategies and (im) politeness in Saudis’ twitter communication. Journal of Languages, Texts, and Society, 5, 1-40.
Alrashoodi, S. A. (2020). Gender-based differences in the realization of the speech act of refusal in Saudi Arabic [unpublished doctoral thesis]. Indiana University.
Alzahrani, M., A. M. (2022). The role of requestee’s gender in the choice of request strategies by female speakers of Saudi colloquial Arabic. Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 8(2), 108-121. https://doi.org/10.32601/ejal.911546
Austin, J. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bavarsad, S. S., Eslami-Rasekh, A., & Simin, S. (2015). The study of disagreement strategies to suggestions used by Iranian male and female learners. International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, 49, 30-42. https://doi.org/10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.49.30
Benyakoub, N. E. H., Alghazo, S., Altakhaineh, A. R. M., & Rabab'ah, G. (2022). A cross cultural analysis of disagreement strategies in Algerian and Jordanian Arabic. International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies, 26, 253-275.
Blum-Kulka, S. (1980). Learning to say what you mean in a second language: A study of the speech act performance of learners of Hebrew as a second language. Applied Linguistics, 3(1), 29-59.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Furkatovna, S. A., Jurabekovna, T. M., & Mamurjonovna, T. P. (2021). Gender aspects of politeness strategy in speech acts. Linguistics and Culture Review, 5(S2), 1488-1496. https://doi.org/10.21744/lingcure.v5nS2.1962
Guiller, J., & A. Durndell. (2006). “I totally agree with you”: Gender interactions in educational online discussion groups. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 22, 368-381. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2006.00184.x
Harb, M. (2021). Disagreement among Arabic speakers in faceless computer-mediated communication. Journal of Politeness Research, 17(2), 233-264. https://doi.org/10.1515/pr-2017-0045
Heidari, A., Eslami Rasekh, A., & Simin, S. (2014). Speech act disagreement among young men in Iran. International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences (ILSHS), 37, 97-109. https://doi.org/10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.37.97
Holmes, J. (1995). Women, men, and politeness. New York: Longman.
Kakavá, C. (1993). Negotiation of disagreement by Greeks in conversations and classroom discourse [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
Khammari, H. (2021a). Strategies and mitigation devices in the speech act of disagreement in American English. Studies in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, 2(1), 26-39. https://doi.org/10.48185/spda.v2i1.243
Khammari, H. (2021b). Disagreeing in Tunisian Arabic: A politeness and pragmatic study. International Journal of Linguistics and Translation Studies, 2(3), 46-64. https://doi.org/10.36892/ijlts.v2i3.141
Koczogh, H. V. (2012). The role of gender in verbal disagreement: A study of disagreement strategies employed by Hungarian undergraduate students. Gender Studies, 11(1), 233-244. https://doi.org/10.2478/v10320-012-0042-5
Kreutel, K. (2007). I’m not agree with you: ESL learner’s expressions of disagreements. TESL-EJ, 11(3), 1-35.
Lakoff, R. (1975). Language and woman’s place. New York: Harper and Row.
Locher, M. A., & Watts, R. J. (2005). Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research: Language, Behavior, Culture, 1, 9-33.
Maíz-Arévalo, C. (2014). Expressing disagreement in English as a lingua franca: Whose pragmatic rules? Intercultural Pragmatics, 11(2), 119-224. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2014-0009
Mohajer, L. (2015). "Take over take over/you are teachers/take over": Disagreements and the construction of power among women. International Journal of Social Science and Humanity, 5(12), 1017. https://doi.org/10.7763/IJSSH.2015.V5.597
Muntigl, P., & Turnbull, W. (1998). Conversational structure and facework in arguing. Journal of Pragmatics, 29, 225-256.
Ogiermann, E. (2018). Discourse completion tasks. In A. Jucker, K. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 229-255). Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110424928
Parvaresh, V., & Eslami Rasekh, A. (2009). Speech act disagreement among young women in Iran. Comparative Literature and Culture, 11(4), 2-8. https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1565
Pilkington, J. (1998). “Don’t try and make out that I’m nice!” The different strategies women and men use when gossiping. Language and gender: A reader, 254-269.
Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. Maxwell Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 57-101). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rees-Miller, J. (2000). Power, severity, and context in disagreement. Journal of Pragmatics, 32(8), 1087-1111.
Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2001). Intercultural communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Searle, J., (1976). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5(1), 1-23.
Sharqawi, M. A., & Anthony, E. M. (2019). Analyzing the speech act of disagreement produced by Iraqi EFL learners: A gender study. Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews, 7(2), 118-134. https://doi.org/10.18510/hssr.2019.7213
Tannen, D. (1990). You just don’t understand: Men and women in conversation. New York: William Morrow and Company.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
