Cross-Cultural Gender-Based Investigation of Filipino and Chinese Facebook Users’ Disagreement Strategies

Abstract

Objectives: This study analyzed how Filipino and Chinese individuals express disagreements on Facebook, focusing on gender dynamics. It further investigated the differences in the disagreement strategies and lexical features of male and female participants in their online disagreement discourses. Methods: A descriptive-qualitative design was used. The corpus consisting 50 discourses derived from the participants’ Facebook posts were analyzed using Leech’s (2016) Taxonomies of Directness and Levinson's (2017) Categories of Indirectness. Further, a bilingual Chinese participant, who is also a professional translator, translated the discourses. Results: Findings revealed that Filipino and Chinese participants employed different strategies, such as implicit performative strategies through non-elliptical expression and counterstatement with justification, declaration, and sarcasm, and indirect disagreement strategies through interrogative, declarative, and imperative statements. Interestingly, differences in disagreement strategies arise between genders. Filipino male participants are corrective and direct in expressing disagreement compared to Chinese male participants who employed justification and indirect strategy through statements. Concerning the female participants, Filipino participants used a direct strategy with negation, followed by downtoners and an indirect strategy through sarcastic questions. Meanwhile, Chinese participants used statements followed by clarification and compliments to express indirect disagreement. Finally, diverse linguistic elements indicated disagreement, as Filipinos utilized modal verbs, whereas Chinese participants employed discourse markers and softening language. Conclusion: The findings suggest that disagreement strategies are gender-based. Despite the participants shared cultural backgrounds, Chinese communicators demonstrate proclivity for indirectness, with more extensive linguistic features to save face and downtone their disagreements. The study offers research gaps on disagreement strategies across gender and for future research to cover larger samples and methods to warrant the generalizability of the key findings.