Disagreements in Iranian dissertation defenses

• Authors: Ahmad Izadi
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Despite having unwelcome effects on interpersonal relationships, disagreements constitute the mainstream of talk in dissertation defense sessions. This paper reports on variations in the design of disagreement turns in 20 Iranian defense sessions in L2 English. Drawing on and modifying Locher’s (2004) classification of disagreement strategies, turns were classified into two main categories of “mitigated” and “unmitigated”. Then, for each category, linguistic and paralinguistic devices, which were used in framing disagreements, were identified. The data features almost an equal number of mitigated and unmitigated disagreements. “But with hedged contradictory remarks”, and “hedges” were the most frequent mitigating strategies, whereas “Direct opposite views” and “but with contradictory remarks” were the most frequent strategies in unmitigated and aggravated disagreements. Finally, the implications of the results for research on face and institutional talk are discussed.

Keywords

EN

disagreement; adissertation defenses; face; mitigation

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Journal: Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 199-224

Dates

published

2013-11

online

2013-11

Contributors

author

Ahmad Izadi

• Islamic Azad University

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/lpp-2013-0012