Kakava

Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 15371568 www.elsevier.
com/locate/pragma
Opposition in Modern Greek discourse: cultural and contextual constraints

Christina Kakava
Department of English, Linguistics, and Speech, Mary Washington College, 1301 College Avenue, Fredericksburg, VA 22401, USA
Abstract This paper investigates opposition strategies in three contexts: (1) conversation in Greek among family members, (2) a conversation in Greek among friends, and (3) classroom discourse by Greeks in English, using tape-recorded data. The study operates within an interactional sociolinguistic framework of discourse analysis and analyzes strategies that fall in the middle of a continuum that ranges from aggravation to mitigation. Using both linguistic and paralinguistic criteria, it illustrates how context at the macro- and micro-level shapes and reects the various strategies found in the data. Based on the nature of opposition and the forms it took, the study proposes that in Modern Greek discourse, disagreement serves as a ritualized form of opposition. It suggests that disagreement constitutes a social practice that is pervasive and preferred because it is expected and allowed. This paper, therefore, contributes to studies which posit that the speech action of disagreement is constrained by cultural and contextual constraints. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Disagreement; Argument; Conict; Classroom discourse; Conversation; Preference; Modern Greek; American English
1. Introduction I once had a conversation with an American professor, married to a Greek professor, who asked me what I was researching. Im investigating whether disagreement is a dispreferred action, I said, to which he replied: Thats what I thought until I met my wife. On the one hand, this anecdote illustrates the pervasive claim and nding that disagreement is structurally and socially a dispreferred action in Western discourse (e.g., Brown and Levinson, 1987; Goman, 1967; Leech, 1983; Pomerantz, 1975).
E-mail address: ckakava@mwc.edu (C. Kakava). 0378-2166/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(02)00075-9
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On the other hand, it signals that this assumption is not shared by everyone, especially if these individuals engage in what is assumed to be normal practice in their cultural or situational contexts. This paper will address this and related issues of opposition in Modern Greek discourse by investigating three dierent contexts: Tape-recorded conversations in Greek among (a) family members and (b) friends, and tape-recorded classroom discourse in English among (c) Greek and GreekAmerican students. It will use a qualitative analysis based on an interactional sociolinguistic framework of discourse analysisin other words, the goal is to provide a better understanding of how negotiation of disagreement is accomplished through some disagreement strategies. More specically, it will address the following questions: What are some of the forms of opposition that Modern Greek speakers use? Do dierent contexts shape these oppositional strategies dierently? And if so, what are the specic dierences? What is the meaning of opposition in Modern Greek discourse? In Kakava (1993a), I proposed a continuum of dierent types of disagreements ranging from strong to mitigated, using multi-levels of analysis. In this paper, I will discuss strategies that fall in the middle of the continuum, what I refer to as strong yet mitigated. I will demonstrate how context at the macro- and micro-level shapes and reects the various strategies found in the data, and then move to the second objective, which is to argue that, in Modern Greek discourse, disagreement serves as a ritualized form of opposition. I will suggest that disagreement constitutes a social practice that is pervasive and preferred because it is expected and allowed. In other words, this paper echoes Schirins (1984) claim for the positive value of disagreement in the East-European Jewish community, and aligns with other studies such as Katriel (1986), and Kottho (1993), among others, which also report similar positive evaluations of disagreement. The paper starts with working denitions of various types of opposition (Section 2) and describes the theoretical framework used (Section 3). It then discusses the notion of the dispreferred status of disagreement, along with both cultural and contextual constraints that have been noted in the literature and some existing evidence of the status of disagreement in Modern Greek (Section 4). Next, it describes its data and methodology (Section 5). It then proceeds to the description of some representative examples of strong yet mitigated disagreement strategies (Section 6) and provides evidence for the preferred status of disagreement in Modern Greek discourse (Section 7). Finally, it draws its conclusions (Section 8).
2. Opposition I use the term opposition to refer to an oppositional stance (verbal or non-verbal) issued to an antecedent verbal (or non-verbal) action (Kakava, 1993a: 36). Opposition can take dierent forms, from a mild disagreement to an aggravated form of
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verbal and/or non-verbal opposition (with gestures and/or physical violence). In addition, silence can serve as a form of opposition, albeit through the absence of speech. Disagreement falls under the general category of opposition, and involves the negation of a stated or implied proposition; in other words, it will always occupy the second conversational turn of an adjacency pair (which provides some methodological problems regarding the potential locus of disagreement in interaction, and its quantication). I consider the exchange of more than two oppositional turns an argument or dispute; that is, I dene argument as the activity in which the participants engage when they exchange oppositional moves to challenge and/or oer support for a position. This working denition is similar to Schirins (1987: 18), which denes argument as discourse through which speakers support disputable positions.
3. Theoretical framework The analysis in this paper is informed by the theoretical framework of interactional sociolinguistics (Tannen, 1989; Schirin, 1994), which views discourse as interaction. It also marries two notions of context, what I refer to as macro- and micro-levels of context. The macro-level furnishes information based on Hymes (1972) components of SPEAKING (e.g., scene, situation, participants, etc.), while the micro-level centers on the emergent nature of talk as framed by the participants (Bateson, 1972; Goman, 1981). This level is informed by the close examination of the sequential organization of talk and the way it leads to conversational inferencing through contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1982). More specically, it will furnish us with information about the alignments we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance (Goman, 1981: 128), what is commonly referred to as footing. This will be important in the analysis of examples, since a change in footing often signals a ` -vis the interlocutor(s) change in the way a speaker positions himself or herself vis-a and what is being discussed. Changes in footing also, at times, indicate a change in the overall frame (Goman, 1974) or the denition of a situation (e.g., whether it is friendly bantering or serious argument). Let us now examine both theoretical claims and empirical ndings pertinent to disagreement that inform the current study.
4. Disagreement as a dispreferred action The notion of disagreement as a dispreferred action is based on the concept of preference as evolved since Sacks (1973) introduced it. Sacks claimed that the preference for agreement should be seen as part of the structural organization of talk, as a formal apparatus, instead of a matter of individual preferences (1973: 65). In his words, people may not like to disagree because they are supposed to not like to disagree (1973: 69), not because they psychologically do not like to disagree.
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Sacks implied that it is societal expectations and not individual choice that govern disagreement. To support his claim, he pointed out that when a question invites an agreement, the agreement response will occur contiguously, whereas a disagreement will be pushed rather deep into the turn that it occupies (1973: 58). Pomerantz (1975, 1984) introduced the term dispreferred-action turn shape to refer to second assessments that display features such as silence or delays after an assessment has been introduced. Building on the notion of preference, as introduced by Sacks, she denes an action as dispreferred if it is not oriented to the talk as it was invited. These dispreferred actions are structurally marked, displaying what she calls dispreference features such as delays, requests for clarication, partial repeats, and other repair initiators, and turn prefaces (1984: 70), a list that Levinson (1983) later expanded. While some scholars working within the notion of preference do not openly admit a direct connection between preference and a speakers motivations, others use the structurally marked second turns to suggest a link between what speakers say and their consideration for face (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Goman, 1967), which is congruent with the principles of politeness as delineated by Brown and Levinson and by Leech (1983). Gomans (1967) analysis of face-to-face interaction was based on the assumption that, in conversations, adults tend to avoid discord and pay deference to their interlocutors face. A similar evaluation of contentiousness is found in the work of Brown and Levinson (1987), who include the principles of Seek Agreement and Avoid Disagreement as positive politeness strategies. Selecting safe topics that will not raise disagreement or using token agreements are some of the means by which these principles operate. Leech (1983: 132), moreover, includes an Agreement Maxim in his Politeness Principle, according to which one needs to minimize disagreement between self and other and maximize agreement between self and other. Even though he proposes that his principles have more or less universal power, he nevertheless admits that intercultural dierences may be present and the weighting of the principles may vary in dierent cultural, social, or linguistic milieus. Heritage (1984: 269) argues that the preferred format responses to requests, oers, invitations and assessments, namely acceptance and agreement, are uniformly aliative actions which are supportive of social solidarity, while dispreferred format responsesthat is, refusal and disagreementare largely destructive of social solidarity. Taylor and Cameron (1987), echoing Heritage, make a similar point. They argue that ethnomethodologists do not state the obvious, that a clear connection exists between the dispreference format of a turn and considerations of face, and as a result, a hiatus exists between the structure of an utterance and its interactional interpretation. This hiatus, they suggest, needs to be lled. As discussed, these previous studies argue that disagreement is a disaliative action that threatens solidarity and therefore it displays a dispreferred turn format. However, other studies have shown that, in some cultures, disagreement can be considered as a form of sociability that reects solidarity, while others have pointed to contextual parameters that may aect how disagreement is assessed.
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4.1. Cultural constraints A positive attitude towards arguing, in private and in public domains, is reported by the anthropologist Fox (1974) for the inhabitants of Roti island in eastern Indonesia, where he did his ethnographic eldwork. However, he notes there are some social constraints on the right to speak, such as class, gender, and age, since Rotinese society is very hierarchical. Israelis are also reported to engage in confrontation and express their disagreement directly. Exploring this type of forthrightness among Israelis, Katriel (1986) takes an ethnographic approach and focuses on a speech style called dugri (straight) talk among Sabra Israelis. She maintains that direct confrontation is a positive norm (see also Blum-Kulka and Olshtain, 1984). Dugri speech style is characterized by particular speech elements that Katriel identies as directness, simplicity, and brevity. Intentions are expressed as clearly as possible, with the use of simple, laconic types of utterances. Gomans (1967) rule of considerateness, Katriel claims, is not commensurate with dugri speech. Her explanation is that Sabra Israelis place more emphasis on true respectrather than consideration (Katriel, 1986: 177). The speakers assumption is that a listener has the strength and integrity required to take the speakers direct talk as sincere and natural. In a similar vein but from a sociolinguistic perspective, Schirin (1984) focuses on one form of confrontation, that of disagreement among American Jews of East European descent. She nds linguistic evidence showing that disagreement is not an action that threatens social interaction, but instead is a form of sociability. Building on Simmels (1961) notion of sociability, she denes sociable argument as a speech activity in which a polarizing form has a raticatory meaning (Schirin, 1984: 331). The features that she used to identify these kinds of arguments were the following: sustained disagreement, participation framework of talk, and competition for interactionally negotiable goods (1984: 316). Schirin found that the participants were constantly nonaligned with each other, yet managed to maintain their intimate relationships. This shows, she claims, the cultural relativity of a notion such as disagreement. Blondheim et al. (2002, this issue) trace this pattern to a cultural pattern developed almost two millennia ago. In her study of conict in Japanese conversations, Jones (1990) shows that the commonly cited harmony in Japanese interactions is a myth, which, however, does act as a constraint on the emotional expression of conict in conversations. She analyzed three dierent types of discourse: a television debate show, a casual conversation in a private home, and three teachers discussing job issues. She found that the participants in all three conversations discussed controversial topics, used explicit expressions of conict, sustained their conict by focusing on the issues, and very rarely compromised. However, seldom did participants express anger, Jones notes, and when the topic became too hot, participants either reframed it as play or chose another topic. When the interaction was framed as play, the confrontation was allowed to continue because then it was not seen as overt confrontation. Kakava (1993a) and Kottho (1993) also provide counter-evidence to the view of disagreement as a dispreferred action. Kakava nds that, in casual conversations among Greeks, disagreements do not often display dispreference markers, a nding
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that is echoed in Kotthos study on conversations among Chinese and German speakers. Moreover, Kottho found that within the context of an argument, concessions displayed the dispreference markers that Pomerantz had identied, once a dissent-turn sequence was established. Thus, these two empirical studies conrmed a claim that Bilmes (1988) had earlier made about the preferred status of disagreement, especially within the context of an argument. Let us now turn to some representative studies that have reported dierent types of disagreement based on contextual parameters such as dierent situations, age, gender, and interactive goals. 4.2. Contextual constraints Several studies have examined specic contexts in which disagreements occur and have reported ndings that contradict Pomerantzs claims. In their study of judicial discourse, Atkinson and Drew (1979) found that after accusations, the preferred lus response is an unmitigated disagreement. This is consonant with Bayraktarog lu reports that during troubles (1992) nding in Turkish troubles talk. Bayraktarog talk, the weakness displayed by the disclosing party is met with disagreement to repair the interactional equilibrium. Similarly, in psychotherapy groups, Krainer (1988) posits that the expression of discord is expected, since disagreement, complaints, and dissatisfactions should be discussed in the open. She found both strong and mitigated challenges in her data. The strong challenges were intensied by prosodic emphasis and other intonational features and included overt features of negation, negative evaluative lexical items, etc. Pauses, requests for clarications, and discord particles such as well marked mitigated challenges. Furthermore, Greatbatch (1992) argues that in the context of British television news interviews, the notion of preference is suspended due to the positioning and design of the turn allocation. Since the moderator controls the turn-taking, interviewees never address each other directly, which, Greatbatch posits, allows unmitigated disagreement to occur. Myers (1998), however, nds that participants in focus groups issued unprefaced disagreement when disagreeing with the moderator, but not when they disagreed directly with another participant, in part because the moderator encouraged disagreement. Yet, in another public discoursethe televised news show CrossreScott (1998) reports that participants engaged in two types of disagreements: backgrounded (lengthy, less explicit, calm disagreements) and foregrounded (direct), which ranged from collegial to openly hostile. A range of disagreement and agreement strategies are reported in another study, which addresses the concept of preference and the shape that oppositional turns take, but in a dierent medium: computer-mediated communication. Baym (1996) investigates agreement and disagreement patterns in a mostly female newsgroup. The disagreement patterns she discovered matched those suggested by Pomerantz, but some major dierences emerged due to the medium, gender, context, and interactive goals: disagreements included quoting, were linked to previous discourse, and had pervasive elaboration. Interestingly, accounts and justications emerged with agreements, and not just disagreements, as the notion of preference predicts.
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To summarize the main points of my discussion so far, I have presented claims being made about the status of disagreement as a turn and as a social action. Disagreement as a response to an assessment, within the framework of ethnomethodology (and later in conversation analysis), is viewed initially as a structurally dispreferred turn and action, and it emerges as a dispreferred or disaliative action that may aect an individuals wants not to be liked. The underlying principle of the framework is that, since disagreement is an act that creates conict, it may not be expressed, or when expressed, it is mitigated. I should note here that all theorists do not share this view. Simmel (1955), for example, believes that the expression of conict is a means of avoiding major communication breakdowns which may otherwise occur because of suppressed cases of conict, to preserve supercial harmony. In addition, other scholars, without necessarily referring to the dispreferred status of disagreement per se, have claimed that ones attitude towards disagreement and its means may vary by age (Goodwin, 1983, 1990a, b; Goodwin et al., this issue), by gender (Eckert, 1990; Makri-Tsilipakou, 1991; Sheldon, 1990; Tannen, 1990, 1994), and by other contextual parameters such as cultural norms (Johnstone, 1986, 1989; Kochman, 1981; Modan, 1994; Tannen, 1990, 1998), and situational constraints (Brown, 1990; Kakava, 1994a, b; Song, 1993; Yaeger-Dror, this issue). 4.3. Disagreement and Modern Greek discourse In a chapter of the book The analysis of subjective culture, Vassiliou et al. (1972) report results from attitude questionnaires and interviews that they conducted among Greeks and Americans regarding autostereotypes and heterostereotypes. Certain heterostereotypes reported by each group seemed to vary according to the amount of contact a person had with members of the other group. The Americans considered the Greeks competitive, emotionally uncontrolled, and egotistic before even having any contact with them. These conceptions seemed to be intensied when they actually did have contact with them. However, they characterized Greeks as witty and charming, a characterization that was also strengthened when actual contact had taken place. In contrast, Greeks considered Americans to be competitive and emotionally controlled but also systematic when they had no contact with them; the negative stereotyping decreased in strength when they actually did have contact. In addition, responses to questionnaires conrmed Greeks love for discussions and arguments, when the Greek respondents showed extreme agreement with statements such as I enjoy a good rousing argument and I like arguing with an instructor or supervisor (Vassiliou et al., 1972: 323); this may have led to their characterization as emotionally active and competitive. Attitudinal studies are useful in oering some insights about peoples conceptions and misconceptions, yet they are only self-reported generalizations about a group rather than individuals. Nevertheless, anthropologists who have done ethnographic work in Greece report a positive attitude towards engagement in argumentation, similar to the ones reported by the Greeks in the questionnaires of the study by Vassiliou et al. Aschenbrenner, an anthropologist, who conducted eldwork in a village in the Peloponnesos, in southwestern Greece, observes (Aschenbrenner, 1986: 42):
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The nearly universal trait of free expression of emotion, opinion, and disagreement lends village life a particular ethos, but it also sometimes threatens the facade. Parents reinforce this trait in children and they consider it normal in adults of both sexes. Not only do villagers freely vent feelings and opinions themselves, but also they delight in others doing so. They expect social interaction to often exceed relatively calm verbal exchange. One hears not only chatter and idle gossip but also moments of keen debate, heated argument, and occasional frenzied verbal duels (emphasis added). Friedl, an anthropologist who did her eldwork in a village in Boeotia (central Greece), also reports that argumentative skills in discussions were highly valued, but the aim of the discussion usually is not to arrive at a rationally based conclusion or to exchange information, but to display skill at allusions, verbal quips and niceties of expression (Friedl, 1962: 83). In addition, she reports that the Greek villagers associated Greek ethnicity with the love of freedom in all spheres to the point of unwillingness to take orders from anyone, or as the common saying represents it: Twelve Greeks, thirteen Captains (Friedl, 1962: 106). Anthropologists are not the only ones who have observed a positive attitude towards forms of argumentation in Greek culture. Mackridge (1992: 114), a British linguist who has written about Modern Greek, describes street arguments that seem serious and turn out to be amicable conversations, and pigadaki, a knot of people discussing issues of the day in a public place, during which they engage in impassioned and agonistic public debate. His remark about foreigners being perceived as cold, haughty, and secretive because they refuse to engage in an argument and thereby fail to enter into expected relations of solidarity, is consonant with Tannens remarks (in Tannen and Kakava, 1992: 23) about her interactions with Greeks. Tannen reports that her eort to sound agreeable in conversations led her to use markers of agreement which, however, often reaped a harvest of disagreement. Makri-Tsilipakou (1994) also shows how Greek women engage in the public destruction of the face of their male spouses, partners, friends, or relatives to protest their discontent with them through scorn, ridicule, or disapproval, which provides additional linguistic evidence to ethnographic claims about the free expression of emotion, opinion, and disagreement (Aschenbrenner, 1986: 42).
5. Data and methodology This study bases its analysis on the examination of three types of discourse collected by the author from three dierent contexts: family talk, conversation among friends, and classroom discourse. The participants I will concentrate on in all types of discourse belong to a Greek speech community. By Greek speech community, I refer to a group of people who share, in various degrees, Greek communicative norms for speaking either because they were born Greeks in Greece or they are Greek-Americans and bilingual in Greek and English. This does not mean, of
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course, that the speakers do not belong to any other speech community that overlaps with some other (Saville-Troike, 1982), or that a speech community may not be included within superordinate ones. What I examine, then, are dierent parts of a general Greek community that contains Greeks who have never been outside Greece, Greeks who have been, and Greek-Americans who were born in the US Although I use an external criterion to group the participants in the study, I investigate whether the mechanisms these participants employ to engage in opposition are indeed similar.1 5.1. Family conversation The family data consist of a 25-min-long segment of an after-dinner conversation among my family, which took place in my home, in Greece. There are four family members present: my mother, my father, my youngest sister Fonithen a 16-yearold high school studentand myself.2 The dinner took place during my visit to Greece for Christmas. Having been away for 4 months, I lacked information on several issues brought up during the family conversation. However, I did engage in several discussions with my family. Even though the participants were aware that they were being tape-recorded, they did not know specically the area in which I was interested (at that time, neither did I) except that I had to tape-record our conversation for my homework. Because I used to tape-record my familys conversations, they felt accustomed to being tape-recorded. So the participants did not seem to be aected by the presence of the Sony TCM-14 tape-recorder on the table. Once, though, my mother scolded my father for using a form of slang which she did not consider appropriate. Interestingly, my father responded that since it was in Greek, nobody would understand! 5.2. Friends conversation The friends data come from a two and a half-hour long conversation among four friends, one of whom is the author. This conversation was recorded during another Christmas break 2 years later than the previous one. The participants are: Alkisa 24-year-old physical education student, GiorgosAlkis brothera 27-year-old orthopedist, who was doing his residency at a hospital in Athens, and Petraa
1 Obviously the assumption taken here is in line with the community of practice model (Wenger, 1998; Holmes and Meyerho, 1999). In this paper, however, I do not explore the implications of applying this model, due to space limitations. 2 Another issue that needs to be addressed is my role as participant and later on as analyst for this and the second data set, talk among friends. As Tannen (1984) and Schirin (1984) also point out, there are advantages and disadvantages to this dual role. However, whatever I lost in objectivity and possible bias, I gained by being able to provide insights of the interaction that would not be otherwise available to a conversation analyst. This is why I have chosen to refer to myself in the rst person, as previous discourse analysts have done, to indicate that the analysis represents my insights and of course my subjectivity. In other work (Kakava, 1994b, 2000), I analyze extensively the extent to which my own ideology aected the stances I took.
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21-year-old student of Greek literature. At that time, Petra and Alkis had been going out for 3 years. I had known Giorgos and Alkis for almost 5 years, and Petra for 3 years. However, I had a much closer relationship with Petra than with the other two. We all lived in the same neighborhood and we had spent a lot of time together. The segment on which I am basing my analysis comes from the last hour of our conversation, when all participants were present. I chose the last hour because it had a balance of serious and non-serious talk, and because the participants seemed much more comfortable being tape-recorded. In addition, the segment of serious talk that I transcribed is an excellent sample of candid talk, because of the intensity of the topics discussed and the participants involvement in them. As Labov (1972: 209210) found in formal interviews, an interviewer can divert attention from the tape-recording by engaging his or her subjects in topics or questions that can create strong emotions. In my case, the intensity of the topics, which arose spontaneously, made the participants forget that they were being tape-recorded. For instance, one of them once saw the recorder and, surprised, commented, This is still recording us. 5.3. Classroom discourse The third type of data is from a corpus of 40 h of audio-taped classroom discourse of an undergraduate course on the history of Southern Europe in an American university. From the 40 recorded hours, I extracted and transcribed 2 h, which were composed of dierent excerpts containing opposition.3 I chose this class because it had students from dierent kinds of ethnic backgrounds, including Greeks, and because the class had a high degree of discussion as opposed to just lecture by the professor. Obviously, this is a completely dierent type of discourse than the other two. It takes place in a university class, a rather formal setting, in which most of the discussions are regulated by the professor, who mostly controls the turns of talk and the change of topics, thus making the participant structure (Philips, 1972) dierent from the other two, and obviously, the language in these data is English. I participated in class as an observer after I was granted permission by the professor. The class sessions (held twice a week for an hour and a half) were a good forum for the examination of opposition, since except for some lecture-type segments, students discussed assigned readings and expressed their often opposing views with their fellow students and their male professor. The class had 18 graduating seniors from dierent cultural backgrounds, including Americans, Greeks, Italians, and Spanish, and most of them came from the upper-middle class. There were two Greek students who were born in Greece, who I refer to as Amalia and Minas; one who was Finnish-Greek, who I call Petros, born in Greece but who spent most of his time overseas and attended an American high school, and a Greek-American named Andy, whose parents were Greek, but who
3 My initial goal was to use this corpus for a study of academic discourse but I then decided to use some of its data for an across-contexts study of opposition, struck by the similarities I observed with the Modern Greek data I had already collected.
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was born in the US and was bilingual in Greek and English. All of the Greek students and the student of Greek origin used to sit together on the same side of the class with the Italian students. In fact, Minas and Petros were housemates with one of the Italian students. At the end of the semester, I gave a small questionnaire to all students so that I could get information regarding their age, ethnic background, religion, and parents socioeconomic status (see detailed information on data and procedures in Kakava, 1993a). The excerpts which I focused on include discussions about issues concerning Italy and Greece, since these proved to be the most argumentative topics and had many students participating in them. Nevertheless, when Greek political issues were discussed, the professor really had to prompt other students besides the Greek contingent (as he referred to them) to participate. The Greeks seemed to know many facts about the period of Greek history they were discussing (post-World War II), which seemed to make many students reluctant to provide information and/or present their opinions. The professor actually said at times that students shouldnt be afraid of expressing their opinion about Greek political issues because there were Greeks in class. In contrast, the Greek students were not shy in expressing their opinion about any topic. As one can infer from the description of the data, some common aspects exist in the rst two types of conversation (the talk is among familiar and intimate people, the language spoken is Modern Greek). The third type of data diers in many respects from the other two, as discussed above, and it also diers in its overall focus. Unlike the rst two, the primary goal of the conversations in the classroom discourse was exchanging information rather than being supportive. However, in this context, certain topics generated supportive stances among the participants (e.g., a group of students aligned with the professor against some students; a student who had been supportive of a group of students formed an alliance with another, and so on), which demonstrates that the alignments (Goman, 1981) that participants took were emergent and not given and were contingent upon the topic discussed and how the participants decided to position themselves. Despite the overall dierences of the three contexts, the purpose of the study was to examine how dierent speakers who share a common origin and language tend to disagree in dierent circumstances. If one discovers similar patterns of argumentation despite the dierent factors shaping each context, then one can present an argument that the observed similarities can be indexical of the shared cultural communicative norms to which all of them had been exposed in various degrees.
6. Strong yet mitigated strategies Although mitigated disagreements were discussed by Pomerantz (1975, 1984) in terms of their structural markedness, Goodwin (1983) was the rst to use paralinguistic criteria in determining aggravated corrections and disagreements versus mitigated ones (see also Goodwin, 1990a, and Kuo, 1991 for Taiwanese discourse). Goodwin demonstrated that children in her data used both aggravated corrections
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and disagreements in addition to mitigated ones, based on intonation contours, turn shapes, and patterns of sequences of talk. In Kakava (1993a), I proposed a continuum of responses to an assessment ranging from enthusiastic agreement to strong disagreement. I showed that, in contrast to the binarity found in earlier studies, the force of an utterance varies along the dimension of mitigation and aggravation. Based on the disagreement data analyzed, and following both linguistic and paralinguistic criteria, I grouped the disagreement strategies as mitigated, strong yet mitigated, and strong. In this paper, I will discuss some representative examples from the three situations focusing on the strong yet mitigated strategies, which I placed in the middle of the continuum (to various degrees). These strategies did not have an aggravated type of disagreement or just explicit and strong disagreement (e.g., You are wrong), nor were they produced in a mitigated manner either linguistically or paralinguistically (e.g.,we need to look into this more carefully). In addition, they often occurred at disagreement relevant points (Gruber, 1998: 481)in other words, participants issued them as latches or overlaps, rather than at transition relevant places. Furthermore, these turns nested within an adversative round (Kakava, 1993a)that is, the exchange of at least two consecutive exchanges of oppositions in which the participants, rather than retreat, escalate their disagreement. They were also found to initiate or conclude an adversative round. I will start with some representative strategies that were found only in the family and friends data and then provide some examples from strategies that were found in all three contexts. 6.1. Friends and family conversations 6.1.1. Partial or total repetition marked by negative aect This type of strategy on the surface level seems to be an agreement. (It involves partial or total repetition4 of a prior utterance at the lexical and syntactic level.) However, it functions as opposition because it is reframed as a disagreement with the stated proposition through sarcasm (that indicates the presence of high aect). The following example illustrates this kind of strategy from the friends data. Alkis was presenting his priorities before he decides to get engaged. Petra repeats two of his utterances with sarcasm, conveying her disagreement with his propositions. All the examples from Greek are presented rst in transliteration, followed by a wordby-word gloss, and then in translation.5 (For transcription conventions, see the Appendix).
Tannen (1989) calls this allo-repetition, that is, the repetition of another speakers words. In Kakava (1993a), I discuss at length the advantages and disadvantages of transliteration vs. phonetic trascription when providing the text in its original orthography is not possible, as it was the case in this paper. In brief, I decided to use transliteration because as Catford (1965: 70) puts it, Transcription is a representation of phonological units: transliteration, however, gives a one-to-one representation of graphological units, and consequently can represent precisely the. . .orthography, and preserve the visual relatedness between forms, which a phonemic transcription tends to obscure.
5
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(1)
544 Alkis
Vasika proexei to ptuxio basically comes rst the degree
545 Christina Nai, kala to ptuxio = yes well the degree 546 Alkis 547 > 548 Petra =O strato:s, the army kai eidomen.= and see =Kai eidomen. [sarcastically] and see
549 Christina Kai eidomen? and see > 550 Petra Ti tha pei o aderfo:s. [sarcastically] what will say the brother
Translation 544 Alkis Basically, the degree comes rst.
545 Christina Yes, all right about the degree= 546 Alkis 547 > 548 Petra 549 Christina And well see? > 550 Petra What the bro:ther will say. [sarcastically] [falling int.] =The a:rmy, [falling int.] and well see.= =And well see. [sarcastically]
Alkis lists his priorities, rst the ptuxio degree and then the stratos army, i.e., his graduation from college and his required 2-year military service, and on line 547, he nishes with a noncommittal eidomen well see6 which is an expression commonly used by Greeks who do not want to commit themselves when they refer to future plans. Petra echoes his utterance (kai eidomen well see) with sarcasm, thus
Modern Greek had diglossia, which ended ocially in 1976 (see Mackridge, 1985, and Frangoudaki, 1992, for discussion of diglossia in Greece). The high form was called katharevousa the purifying language (Mackridge, 1985: 7), while the low was called dimotiki the peoples language (7). Occasional katharevousa forms are still used today by speakers of Standard Modern Greek for various stylistic purposes. In this example, the verb eidomen we see that Alkis uses is the katharevousa form of the verb oro see, which is in sharp contrast with the overall dimotiki language that he uses (the equivalent dimotiki form would have been vlepoume we see from the dimotiki verb vlepo see). His switch to a katharevousa form may have resulted from his desire to sound serious about his priorities.
6
1550
reframing it into a move of opposition. Her disapprobation of Alkiss priorities and his evasiveness regarding their relationship is further underscored when she continues Alkiss list adding the brothers opinion to it (line 550: what the bro:ther will say). Note that her contribution aderfo:s brother matches Alkiss prior word strato:s army (line 546) both morphologically (both end in the nominative singular masculine sux-os in Greek) and phonologically (both have the same gradually falling intonation and the stressed vowel in the sux is elongaged [o:s]). But it is the sarcastic tone that indicates a challenging rather than supportive alignment. In this case, Petra conveys her opposition indirectly by not openly challenging Alkis.7 6.1.2. Aggravated questions with or without endearment terms These are questions issued with high pitch and contrastive intonation, which Goodwin (1983) calls aggravated correction (a participant repeats the element that she or he does not agree with and corrects it herself or himself). In my data, these questions were not always followed by the correction part. Another dierence from Goodwins examples was that these questions were at times accompanied by a mitigating device (either by a rst name or an endearment term). Tannen and Kakava (1992) explore the paradox of addressing someone by his or her rst name or gurative kinship term while disagreeing, and interpret it as an expression of both power and solidarity (Tannen, 1986, 1990). Since a frame of familiarity is invoked by either the use of a rst name or an endearment term, the interactional force of the otherwise strong disagreement is mitigated. Please note that these types of address terms were issued without a sarcastic tone but rather with soft volume and with pitch falling at midrange and staying high, rather than having a sharp fall, which would have indicated aggravation. The following is an example of a question indicating disagreement followed by the gurative kinship term paidaki mou my little child which is used by younger speakers to adults and vice versa and it does not connote patronization although it may (if used with a sarcastic tone). The sux-aki is a diminutive marker in Greek which usually refers to something small and which functions as a marker of solidarity and aection (Sianou, 1992).8 After I told my family about a woman whom I had not seen for a year until we met by chance on the street, my mother still could not remember who that woman was, despite my fathers and my sisters prompting. My mother, still puzzled, seemed to think that I was talking about Kiki, another friend of mine. I disagreed with my mother and so did my father:
7 In Kakava (1994b), I demonstrate how this particular strategy was used by both females and males to mark opposition. 8 Daltas (1985) examined the use of diminutives and augmentatives (D/A) in Modern Greek and found that the frequency of D/A decreases as the formality of the situation increases. He also found that females used more diminutive and augmentative suxes than males. However, he notes that the womens interaction was mostly with children, which could have had an eect on the greater number of diminutive and augmentative suxes observed. Overall, adults used more D/A suxes when they addressed children.
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(2)
871 Mother
Auti, auti i periptosi, this this the case oxi i- i Kiki? no the the Kik
872
873 Christina Oxi: = No 874 Father =Oxi more, ti Kiki more? No interj. the Kik interj. [high rise]
>
875 Christina Ti Kiki, paidaki mou? the Kik child my [high rise] [pitch falling at midrange] 876 Milame giawe are talking forAuti pou eixe tis asfaleies. . . this who had the insurances
877
Translation 871 Mother 872 [Youre referring to] this, this situation, not to Kiki?
873 Christina No: = 874 Father > =No more9 what Kiki [are you talking about] more? [high rise] 875 Christina What Kiki [are you talking about], my little child? [high rise] [pitch falling at midrange]
According to Andriotiss ([1983] 1988) etymological dictionary of Modern Greek, vre and re ultimately come from the ancient Greek more meaning stupid. In Modern Greek, though, more has undergone semantic shift and it does have not this kind of connotation. Mackridge (1985: 56) refers to re or vre as an unceremonious term of exclamation or address, used on its own or in front of a noun, adjective, or pronoun. Holton et al. (1997) refer to all three of them as exclamatory words that are associated with informal registers. They indicate familiarity if used among intimates but they are considered rude if used to a stranger. Unfortunately no English equivalent exists, so the words are left untranslated. (No Greek or Greek-American speaker consulted from the Modern Greek Studies Association listserve could come up with an English equivalent and examples found in the above mentioned grammars omit the exclamations in English.)
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876 877
Were talking aboutThe woman who had the insurance company. . .
While I contest my mothers interpretation of the identity of the woman with the contrastive oxi no, my father latches to my talk and responds to my mothers question with the contrastive oxi no and the interjection more, which he accompanies with an elliptical wh-question. I then take a turn and address my mother, marking my disagreement with the gurative kinship term paidaki mou my little child. Thus, even though I disagree with her interpretation of the person I was referring to, the endearment form which is issued with soft volume functions as the contextualization cue that my challenging stance is mitigated. 6.2. Strategies found in all contexts 6.2.1. Initial disagreements followed by accounts First, let me point out that although the same strategy was observed in all contexts, the classroom discourse favored this type of strategy more than the familiar contexts, because of its participation structure and expectations about justifying ones claims in the classroom context. However, what is notable about this strategy is the choice the speaker makes to frame the upcoming talk as disagreement and then proceed with accounts and other mitigating strategies rather than the reverse. This was the strategy that only the Greek and the Greek-American students used in the classroom discourse, unlike the rest of the class that followed an account-position sequence (see Kakava, 1995 for a qualitative comparative/contrastive analysis of these dierences, as well as intra-speaker variation).10 The following example is a representative one of explicit disagreement followed by accounts. The discussion was about two authors, Carlo Levi and Edward Baneld, who had written books about Southern Italy. The professor had claimed that the two authors were very similar in their portrait of Southern Italians, a claim which Minas, a Greek student, disagreed with. (Due to its length47 intonation units, I only include an excerpt of his turn). (3) > > 470 471 472 473 Professor Minas (calling on Minas) Minas I disagree. [staccato rhythm] I agree that the- that they boththey both have similarities,
10 I am not claiming here that it is not possible to nd American students who will explicitly frame their talk as disagreement before they provide accounts, or for that matter Greek students who may not do that. What I simply report is my nding based on the data I collected in this American undergraduate classroom.
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474 475 > 476 477 478 . . . [lines omitted] > 513 514 515
and they both have similar obactually they both have similar observations. I disagree in how each one views the eectiveness of a solution to the problem. Or that- or something alleviating the problem.
But the fact that he does not claim, specically, and Baneld does, that- that any type of solution, any type of investment, or economic. . . eort, to economically develop the south will be doomed, it might be their dierence.
516 517
>
518
Minas explicitly frames his oncoming talk as disagreement: I disagree (line 471). Notice, however, that he subsequently raties the professors argument, actually they both have similar observations (line 475), but then he frames his ensuing talk with another explicit form of disagreement, I disagree in how each one views the eectiveness of a solution to the problem (lines 476477). Note that Minas indicates his disagreement with the professor even before he justies his point. For Minas, explicitly framing what follows as a disagreement takes precedence over the reason why it is a disagreement. Also, recall that Minas provides a point of dispute which undermines the professors dierent position. However, towards the end of his turn (line 518), Minas mitigates his observation with a hedge (the modal might), when he acknowledges that his interpretation of the texts might be their dierence. What is also interesting to note here is that, in this case, for dierent reasons, Minas aligns with Andy, the Greek-American, who had previously claimed that Baneld, an American, did not represent the Italian case accurately and that he would not have appreciated it if a foreign scholar did the same thing to his country. 6.2.2. Personal analogies These strategies involve personal deictic shifts or changes in the participation framework of talk (Goman, 1981), since interlocutors change their alignment either
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with their talk or with their discussants and create a situation analogous to the one under discussion. A personal analogy involves metaphorical shifts in both the local and the temporal level, thus generating immediacy and involvement, which transforms the stance to a strong one.11 Kakava (1994a) describes two patterns of personal analogy observed: positioning an interlocutor in an analogical situation or positioning oneself. Both types were found in the familiar contexts but only the latter was observed in the classroom discourse. An example of positioning the interlocutor in an analogical situation is found in the following excerpt from the friends data. I was engaged in a dispute with Alkis about young Greek womens restrictions to visit their boyfriends who are serving in the army unless they are engaged (the scenario that Alkis and Petra would face if they did not get engaged). Since Alkis denies that such restrictions still exist in Greece, I change footing and cast him in a similar scenario. (4) 764 Christina Den mu les, not me tell 765 ama itan i ader su afti, if were the sister your this Tha s arese afto, e? will you like this interj. [sarcastically] Dikeoma =tis, afto. right her this =A:, Den to [vlepo afto. interj. not it [see this =A bravo. Interj. bravo[sarcastically]
>
766
767 Alkis
768 Petra
769 Christina
Translation 764 Christina Tell me this, > 765 if she were your sister,
11 This nding (a tendency to personalize an argument) is in line with Tannens (1980) observations in her study of Greek and American female participants comments on the pear lm. (The pear lm was a 16 mm color and sound lm that was produced by a professional lmmaker, commissioned to provide the data for a collaborative eort led by Wallace Chafe, to conduct research on Language and Experience). Tannen found that Greek female participants personalized and philosophized, making value judgments about the characters of a lm rather than focusing on talking about the lm as a lm (65). Additionally, when I presented my ndings to an International Greek Conference held at Reading, UK (see written version in Kakava, 1994a), Greek linguists in the audience not only agreed with me but they also provided me with numerous anecdotes that supported my nding.
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766 767 Alkis 768 Petra 769 Christina
youd have liked that, eh? [sarcastically] (Its) her =right. =A:h, [I dont see that. =Ah, bravo. [sarcastically]
Instead of openly disagreeing with Alkiss assessment, I change the deictic center and ask him to position himself in a similar situation (if she were your sister. . .). The participant is driven into a dierent frame and he is asked to personalize the point and to take the role of a brother whose sister is going out with someone. This move tests the commitment of Alkis to his prior position that if Petra is not engaged to him, it wont be a problem for her family to visit him in the army. The ironic/sarcastic yes/no question on line 766 youd have liked that, eh forces Alkis to either accept the proposition or reject it. Alkis avoids going on record whether he would have liked it or not, and he opts instead to characterize the scenario as his hypothetical sisters right to do what she wanted. Petras disagreement with his point (line 768) and my ironic/sarcastic A bravo (line 769) indicate that none of us believes that he is telling us the truth. The strategy is less direct than openly disagreeing with someone but yet is strong enough, since it widens the base of an argument and makes it more personal and harder to attack ones claim.12 Now that I have illustrated some representative examples of dierent strategies used in the middle of the continuum, I will turn to discuss evidence of the preferred status of disagreement in Greek discourse.
7. Preference for disagreement In this section, I will show (1) that, in many cases, disagreement came as a rst response to an assessment and was not pushed further down the turn, nor was it prefaced with dispreference markers as the preference for agreement theory predicts; and (2) that disagreement was sustained but did not threaten the interpersonal relationship of the participantsa characteristic feature of sociable arguments as Schirin (1984) describes. 7.1. Unprefaced disagreement as a second turn An example from the family conversation illustrates this type of disagreement. My mother was describing to me how the appearance of an old acquaintance of the family had changed since the last time she and my father met her.
12 In this case I am adopting a claim that Schirin (1990) made about how stories broaden the base of support in the context of an argument.
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(5)
256 Mother
Xalia, xalia exei ginei = mess mess has become =Exei paxinei, has put on weight ap auti tin ennoia. = from this the sense =A mpa, den exei paxinei, Interj. Interj.not has put on weight exei kati pragmata edo, kati. . . has some things here some
257 Father
258
>
259 Mother
260
261 Christina Den einai san tin Mairi Xronopoulou. Not is like the Mairi Xronopoulou [a Greek actress and singer] 262 All Translation 256 Mother 257 Father 258 > 259 Mother in that sense. = =No way, she hasnt put on weight, she has some things here, some. . . [my mother illustrates through gestures of puy cheeks and a double chin] She looks awful, awful= =She has put on weight, Laugh
260
261 Christina Shes not like Mary Xronopoulou. [a Greek actress and singer]. 262 All [Laugh]
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My mothers description of the woman as looking awful is altered when my father explains to me what my mother really meant, by claiming that the woman has put on weight (line 258). Note, though, that his alignment is rather supportive; he didnt disagree with her assessment, but rather upgraded her assessment. My mother disagrees with his assessment in the form of a latch (line 259). Her disagreement is in the form of contrastive repetition prefaced by an interjection A and the negative interjection mpa no way that are stressed. My mother rejects my fathers assessment without mitigating it. Instead, initially, she accentuates her disagreement (both linguistically and paralinguistically) and, then, she explains what she really means. What is interesting here is that from my mothers non-verbal description, I perceived the woman as looking overweight (she used to be very thin), which prompts me to refer to a Greek actress (line 261) who seemed to have had cosmetic surgery (we had just seen that actress on TV the previous night).13 After everybody laughed, the argument shifted to whether the actress indeed had cosmetic surgery or not. 7.2. Sustained disagreement Although I have several examples that display sustained disagreement in my data (in the friends data, in particular, several examples had 40 turns of consecutive disagreement on dierent topics), I will discuss an example from the classroom discourse because one can posit that arguments in intimate settings that do not jeopardize interpersonal relationships can be observed in other communities than Greek.14 I therefore turn to an example of sustained opposition between two Greek students from the classroom data that illustrates features observed in the intimate conversations: Participants retain their position and keep ring arguments at each other, sustaining their opposing stances over several adversative rounds. The example also illustrates competition for interactionally negotiable goods (Schiffrin, 1984), including the oor, in that there are competitive overlaps and latches. Paralinguistic features such as accelerated tempo, high pitch, contrastive stress, etc., serve as the contextualization cues for the argumentativeness of the exchanges. The students were asked to evaluate Karamanlis, a former prominent Greek political gure.15 Amalia claimed that Karamanlis had dierent political ideas before he left Greece for his self-exile in Paris and after he came back to restore democracy in Greece in 1974. Minas disagrees with her claim, while the professor
13 This was not the only case where this kind of disagreement took place, although the participants should have been in agreement. Similar disagreements emerged concerning locations of shops, directions to streets, etc. In addition, the example cited here is in some ways similar to an example found in data collected by Tannen in Greece and discussed in Tannen and Kakava (1992). In that example, although Tannen agreed with a Greek female friends point, the woman framed her subsequent response as a disagreement, prefacing it with the conjuction alla but. 14 This is a point that was raised, justiably so, by one of the anonymous reviewers, whom I thank. 15 Karamanlis, a conservative politician, was the prime minister of Greece from 1956 to 1963, when he was obliged to resign over mounting opposition led by a coalition of liberal and conservative forces. Karamanlis exiled himself to Paris and came back after the fall of the junta (1974). He was elected prime minister of Greece, leading his New Democracy party to power.
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sides with Amalia, disagreeing with Minas. The example is rather lengthy but I provide it in its entirety so that features of sustained disagreement and lexical and structural repetitions of the adversative rounds can be illustrated. (6) 842 Amalia Like even if you speak to the mostly leftist politician, he would say that there is a Karamanlis before, uh, yes, whatever, when he left, and after 74. Theres a big.. split. I dont know. He really changed. In the years that he was.. in Paris. = =I think its > the same Karamanlis. 851 852 Amalia 853 Minas > 854 Professor 855 Students [laugh] 856 Minas 857 858 859 860 He had tohe had to play again, he had to play the anticommunist game. And he played it. And thats why the Americans loved him, He just=went with a =Yeah, so= =In fty =ve acc =Its the devious Karamanlis.
843
844 845 846 847 > 848 849 850 Minas
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861 862 863 864 865 866 867 868 869 870 Students 871 Minas
thats why Greece was able to rebuild in the sixties. After- after 63, I mean, he saw where it was going. After 67 he saw where it was going. Karamanlis is for Karamanlis. And uh and- and he knew what to do to become what he became. And hes a great statesman. I mean, I wont argue about his morality, cause its something dierent =but, =[laugh] But I dont think that its dierent ideologies, f he didnt change. He was always the =same. =No, he=adapts. =Hes always an opportunist. He adapts, f and he knows when to =move /?/ /?/ acc =Hes in politics again, can you believe it? [ironically] He adapts=to make the cake. acc =Hes the president of Greece now. acc
>
872 873
>
874 Amalia 875 Professor
>
877 Minas 878
879 Amalia 880 881
882 Minas
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883 Professor [laughs] 884 885 All right. Last word before we start u:h characterizing Mr. Karamanlis.
Amalia describes Karamanlis as someone who changed after he came back from his exile (line 848) He really changed, adding the intensier really to her assessment. In line 850, Minas assesses Karamanlis dierently: I think its the same Karamanlis. Notice that his statement is accompanied by the beginning of an explanation. However, it is anchored to a clause that contains the verb I think, a belief statement (Chafe, 1986). According to Brown and Levinson (1987), I think acts as a hedge that mitigates the force of an utterance. Schirin (1987), however, refers to it as bracketing and argues that it can either intensify or mitigate a statement. I consider the use of I think an intensier here because the whole utterance is pronounced with one breath, in one intonation contour, and there is stress on the I, which gives the utterance a rather assertive tone. It is important to note that the professor sides with Amalia on line 854, when he describes Karamanlis as devious (Its the devious Karamanlis). His utterance has structural and lexical repetition with Minass earlier utterance: (line 850) I think its the same Karamanlis. So Minas nds himself in opposition not only to Amalia, but also to the professor. Minas takes the turn and gives an account about the general political situation in Greece during that period, defending Karamanliss political moves and supporting his point of view. After his long account in lines 856869, Minas returns to the disputable point, i.e., whether Karamanlis changed or not, and he reiterates his disagreement with Amalias point: he didnt change (line 872). His point is further underscored by the paraphrase of his position he was always the same (line 873) that has focal stress on the intensier always. Amalia issues a competitive overlap disagreeing with his opinion marked with a contrastive no: No, he adapts (line 874). Her disagreement is contrastive at the propositional and structural level. Amalia insists on her earlier point that Karamanlis changes, while she makes it even more general by shifting the tense to simple present. She seems to convey the idea that, Not only did he change that time, but he adapts all the time. As we have seen, her disagreement was not followed by any accounts, nor was it prefaced with any pauses or hesitations. The focal stress on the verb adapts renders a challenging tone to her point. Let us now examine the use of repetition to sustain disagreement. Despite the structural cohesion that the use of repetition creates, polarity is retained, since participants use repetition not to support each others point, but rather to anchor their disagreement. The professor overlaps with Amalia and issues another negative assessment of Karamanlis on line 875: Hes always an opportunist, that also shows structural repetition and substitution with Minass previous utterance on line 873 (He was always the same), while Minas tries to regain the oor (see his competitive overlap on line 876). When he takes his turn, he seems to respond to Amalias comment rather than to the professors, since he repeats her utterance. Minas uses
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repetition to anchor his counter-challenge, since he presents Karamanliss adaptability as an advantage rather than a disadvantage (lines 877878): He adapts and he knows when to move. For him, the adaptability of Karamanlis is a virtue, but not for Amalia. Minas accepts that Karamanlis adapts (that could have been the end of their argument), but then, by evaluating his adaptability as a positive characteristic, he remains in non-alignment with Amalia, who views it as negative. Amalia overlaps with his talk, turns to the students and poses a rhetorical question full of irony (can you believe it?) that functions as further support for Karamanliss adaptability. She then issues a negative assessment of his adaptability that elaborates on her previous position. Amalia portrays Karamanlis as someone who adapts to make the cake (line 881).16 Thus the key notion adapt, even though it is issued as an allo-repetition (for Minas) and self-repetition (for Amalia), weaves structural and semantic coherence,17 yet it displays what R. Lako and Tannen (1984) call pragmatic homonymy,18 since it calls for dierent interpretations based on who the speaker is. The Greek students in the above example engaged in adversative rounds, disagreeing with prior assessments either in the form of competitive overlaps or latches, using structural repetition to anchor their disagreement with a prior speakers assessment. Their contest was not only reected in their exchange of opposing propositions, but also in their eort to be heard. Minass voice overlapped with Amalias; Amalias overlapped with Minass. Neither of them, however, retreated when she or he was overlapped, and both managed to convey their opposing messages by either accelerating their tempo or raising their tone of voice. Even though the debate is conducted between Amalia and Minas, they seem to turn their debate into a performance, both trying to outperform each other in front of their audience. For example, note Amalias ironic rhetorical question addressing the class Hes in politics again, can you believe it?. Their eorts may be seen as an attempt to outthink, outtalk, and outstyle, to cite Kochman (1981: 24). Political discussions very often generate disputes and heated discussions among Greeks in both private and public settings similar to the one presented above. It is no surprise that Amalia and Minas engage in a dispute over a political gure. What is interesting, however, is that they were the only ones in the classroom to engage in that type of dialogic debate in front of the whole class during the entire semester. We also saw some paralinguistic features such as accelerated tempo, high pitch, contrastive stress, and quickness to respond to propositions with which the participants did not agree. As a result, these elements rendered the opposition rather intense. Note, for example, that the professor laughs after the last exchange between Amalia and Minas, as if he is amused (maybe even amazed) by their sustained opposition. These representative examples illustrate not just the often unprefaced disagreement found in my data but also its naturehow sustained it was. Despite the fact
Most likely, the use of make instead of get is a slip of the tongue. See Tannen (1989) for a discussion of the use of repetition in discourse. 18 According to Lako and Tannen (1984: 330) pragmatic homonymy or ambiguity is the strategy in which similar linguistic devices are used to achieve dierent ends.
17 16
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that the participants remain non-aligned over several turns, this did not jeopardize their interpersonal relationship, which indicates that disagreement is expected and allowed in Greek discourse and does not threaten the participants solidarity. Actually, when, at the end of the class, I said how interesting the class was, Minas said we just had a kouvendoula (little informal talk).
8. Conclusion This study has presented examples, based on linguistic and paralinguistic criteria, of opposition strategies found in the middle of the continuum that ranged from aggravation to mitigation. It is important to note that all types of strategies were found in the three contexts, but in this paper, I focused on the strong yet mitigated ones and showed how they patterned across contexts and how they were used. The three contexts shared some but not all of the strategies. The most striking dierences between the intimate contexts (family and friends) and the classroom discourse were twofold: the intimate contexts in Greek displayed language-specic endearment address terms and exclamatory particles that counter-acted the force of an aggravated opposition;19 In addition, they included negative aect in the form of sarcasm (less for the family and more for the friends conversations). Some of the similarities were the foregrounding of disagreement followed by accounts or other mitigators, and the personalization of the argument. However, even the similarities observed had qualitative dierences. For example, in the classroom discourse, disagreement followed by some kind of justication was expected since the students had to buttress their points and counter-points with accounts; for example, they could not say: Youre wrong without explaining why they believed that to be the case. That was not required in the intimate contexts, although participants either volunteered accounts or were asked to provide the reasons they disagreed. Secondly, the participants in the classroom discourse mostly developed lengthy, monologic types of arguments, as opposed to the polyphonic ones found in the intimate conversations. (Schirin, 1985 denes these as rhetorical and oppositional arguments respectively). Monologic types of argument were rather rare in the intimate conversations, since the oor was more collaborative with multiple contributions, and with rather short turns. At times, the collaborative oor was suspended during stories told to support or challenge positions, but even then, participants had to strive to maintain a single-voiced oor. As a result, we cannot view the same strategy as operating in exactly the same way in the intimate conversations and classroom discourse. Even in the personalization of a situation, in the classroom discourse, speakers personalized a situation to support their position (see Kakava, 1994a). In contrast, in the intimate conversations, participants did not only personalize a situation to support and/or defend a position, they also asked others
19 This nding actually correlates with Pavlidou (2001). Pavlidou studied non-compliance in a Greek high school class. She reports that the nature of classroom interactions was characterized by minimal politeness investment (130), mostly by the students, who issued unredressed face-threatening acts.
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to use personalization so that they could challenge their position (see example 4). This dierence corresponds to the type of arguments present in each context (monologic vs. polyphonic respectively) and the dynamic nature of a polyphonic oor. Moreover, a preference for disagreement was observed in all contexts studied; most of the time disagreement was foregrounded rather than prefaced with dispreference markers or postponed. This nding is interesting because it contrasts with Kotthos ndings (1993); Kottho found that in similar situations among German students, disagreement was prefaced with dispreference markers, but as the argument became more intense, disagreement was unprefaced. However, both Kotthos and my ndings support Bilmes (1988) claim that, in the context of an argument, agreement is dispreferred. The other characteristic of these disagreements was that they were more likely to be sustained than carefully curtailed. In the intimate settings, disagreement was sustained over the course of various topics, both serious and non-serious. In the classroom discourse, it was hard to judge how sustained the disagreement was, since the professor orchestrated the turns. However, as I have shown elsewhere (Kakava, 1993b), the Greek and the Greek-American students had the highest number of turns, had some of the highest number of disagreement turns, and were the only ones that engaged in several disagreement exchanges among themselves (see example 6 above) or with the professor for more than one turn (Only Minas and the Italians had extended disagreement segments with the professor, and 89% of Minas disagreement turns were actually with the professor!) Based on these ndings and other scholars observations about Greek interactional patterns, I want to suggest that, for the Greek participants in this study, and probably for many other Greeks, disagreement is an interactional ritual that does not necessarily threaten solidarity and is preferred. This agonistic type of discourse represents an interactional practice in which participants engage to match their wits, compete for ideas, yet do not necessarily resolve their dierences. While agreement can enhance solidarity and present speakers as supportive and like-minded, in intimate contexts, Greek participants were cooperative by agreeing to disagree. Compare them with the Canadian French conversationalists who agree not to argue even in very intimate couples talk (Laforest, this issue), or with the speech analyzed by Muntigl and Turnbull (1998). In the classroom discourse, I found a similar orientation to opposition by the Greek-origin students. This context is more on the informative end of the continuum rather than the interactive (Biber and Finnegan, 1994) and one can argue that being supportive is of secondary importance. However, supportive alignments or stances were also present in this context: For example, in example 3, we saw how Minas argued against the professors assessment of the Italian and American authors who had written books about Italy and aligned with the Greek-American student. The Greek and Italian students talking next aligned with Minas against the professor, whereas the American students aligned with the professor (see Kakava, 1993b). In addition, the intimate context showed a greater variance in terms of the force of disagreement within the category of strong yet mitigated strategies. For instance,
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participants in the intimate conversations appeared to be interested in maintaining a supportive alignment through gurative kinship terms and rst names to cushion their opposition. Yet they also displayed negative aect in the form of sarcasm, which has been considered an indirect means of expressing disagreement, although it is interactionally powerful, since it can hurt more (Tannen, 1986; see also YaegerDror, this issue, on the preferred interactive stance in intimate situations). On the other hand, disagreements in the classroom discourse were for the most part rather direct but collegial and not openly hostile. Having discussed the most important contextual dierences and similarities, I should also point out that both inter- and intra-speaker variation was observed (Kakava, 1995). This variation warrants further investigation. Although I have argued for the positive value of opposition in Modern Greek discourse, I am not suggesting that all Greek speakers will display similar tendencies or that real opposition never exists in the Greek cultural context. Instead, following Johnstones (1989) argument for the correspondence between strategies, styles, and culture, I suggest that Greek culture may predispose its people towards the open expression of opposition. However, how people actually engage in this kind of practice does not depend only on culture. We saw that, at times, disagreement was expressed more openly, at times, it was not. This variance seemed to reect both macro- and microcontextual parameters such as the specic participant structure as well as partici` -vis their talk and their interlocutors. It is hoped pants emergent alignments vis-a that future research on additional situations at the informative end of the continuum, and on inter- and intra-speaker variation, will provide us with a much broader picture of how disagreement is negotiated in Modern Greek discourse, and how this culture of discourse diers from that of other societies.
Acknowledgements I want to acknowledge Deborah Tannens support of the original work (Kakava, 1993a) on which this study builds and elaborates on. I also want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and the editor of this issue, Malcah Yaeger-Dror, for her careful reading and suggestions. I also thank Paul Fallon for his editorial assistance. Any infelicities are my own responsibility.
Appendix. Transcription symbols (modied from Tannen, 1984) The following transcription conventions apply: a. Punctuation reects intonation, not grammar. b. =Equal sign shows latching (second voice begins without perceptible pause) and overlap (two voices heard at the same time) c. > Arrow to the left highlights lines relevant to analysis d. Arrow to the right indicates the speaker continues >
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e. f. g. h. i. j. k. l.
[??] Indicates inaudible utterance Underline indicates emphatic stress Bold indicates very emphatic stress Acc indicates the speaker is accelerating f forte (spoken loudly) /words/ in slashes show uncertain transcription : colon following a vowel indicates elongated vowel sound [comments added for clarity]
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Christina Kakava is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Mary Washington College (Virginia, USA). Her research interests are conict management in intra- and interethnic communication. Her work has appeared in The International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Georgetown Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, and Journal of Modern Greek Studies, among other books and journals. She recently wrote the review article on Language and Conict for Blackwells Handbook of Discourse Analysis.

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Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 15371568 www.elsevier.

Opposition in Modern Greek discourse: cultural and contextual constraints

C. Kakava / Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 15371568

C. Kakava / Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 15371568

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Vasika proexei to ptuxio basically comes rst the degree

Translation 544 Alkis Basically, the degree comes rst.

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Were talking aboutThe woman who had the insurance company. . .

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766 767 Alkis 768 Petra 769 Christina

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844 845 846 847 > 848 849 850 Minas

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874 Amalia 875 Professor

877 Minas 878

879 Amalia 880 881

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