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

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).

A Qualitative Inquiry of Politeness Approaches through Gender Category: Evidences from University Students in Aceh

“…Conversely, P1 replies to the same situation by "... that ideas are mine..." as we can also see that he exercises a positive politeness. Also, the result shows that this strategy is typically triggered when people shield their aspiration, something that was also noticed in the study conducted by Fernández-Amaya (2019). Alternatively, this strategy is also used when they want to give a remark or idea and voicing self-identification of power (Prayitno et al, 2018).…”

Online disagreement in WhatsApp groups: A comparative study of Spanish family members and work colleagues

“…Although disagreements were initially described as negative, face-threatening and associated with impoliteness (Brown and Levinson, 1987;Culpeper, 1996;Pomerantz, 1984;Sacks, 1987), gradually these views were reversed. A second wave of studies, in fact, support the idea that disagreement is an unmarked speech act (Angouri and Locher, 2012;Fernández-Amaya, 2019;Zhu, 2014), which can even be viewed by interlocutors as something positive, a sign of close relationship that creates solidarity and affiliation (Angouri and Tseliga, 2010;Georgakopoulou, 2001;Kakavá, 2002;Locher, 2004;Schiffrin, 1984;Sifianou, 2012). Locher (2004) mentions the following factors when determining if disagreement is preferred or not: -culture: for example, British indirectness differs from the Spanish predisposition to express views more openly (Hernández-López, 2016).…”

“…In fact, it reached 93% users in 2019 1 with 30.5 million people using it. 2 It comes as no surprise, therefore, that WhatsApp is increasingly attracting researchers' attention (Aull, 2019;Cruz-Moya and Sánchez-Moya, 2021;Fernández-Amaya, 2019Maíz Arévalo, 2018, among others). This paper seeks to contribute to the existing academic research on this IM tool by analysing disagreement in two different Spanish WhatsApp groups: one made up of family members and another of work colleagues.…”

La hiperconversación, el diálogo aumentado del mundo móvil a través del WhatsApp

“…This opportunity for constantly receiving information from afar provides us with more opportunities for communicating' (Celaya et al, 2015: 12). As to its disadvantages, the communication context, mediated by screens, has led to the use of languages and resources very different from those of face-to-face and simultaneous and spoken telephone conversations, which influences the coding and decoding of messages evidenced by situations of disagreement, because 'it evolves through multiple turns, since it has not developed linearly, with the different replies of several members who are sometimes even writing simultaneously' (Fernández-Amaya, 2019: 1082. In this respect, it is necessary to consider differences in age, education and genre (Rosenfeld et al, 2018: 21), which have a special impact on the domestic sphere, for, although Taipale and Farinosi (2018: 1) claim that WhatsApp is a tool that facilitates intergenerational family interaction, it is also a source of distraction during conversations, thus undermining interpersonal relationships between friends and relatives (Chan, Yong and Harmizi, 2020: 16).…”