Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Similarities Of Expressing Disagreement By Chinese And American College Students, Yanling Yu, Yanrong (Yvonne) Chang, Zhan Long

Communication Faculty Publications and Presentations

To explore the ways in which modern Chinese and Americans express their disagreement in intercultural communication and to reveal the reasons for their usage from the perspectives of sociolinguistics and persuasive communication and with the rapport management as the theoretical framework, this paper focuses on the discourse analysis of implicit disagreement expressions between 11 pairs of Chinese and American college students. The analysis of the four-month communication corpus reveals that Chinese and American students tend to use implicit disagreement when they disagree with each other and there are more similarities than differences in the usage of implicit disagreement. The reasons …