Couples bickering: Disaffiliation and discord in Chinese conversation

Abstract

This is an investigation into conflict and discord in conversations between couples (heterosexual partners) in ordinary households in mainland China. Based on a corpus of face-to-face and telephone conversations in Mandarin, our analysis shows that participants’ arguments are ‘kept under control’ through a variety of communicative (linguistic) practices that in a variety of ways mitigate or reduce the force of their arguments. Prominent among those mitigating practices are repair initiation through repetition, type-nonconforming responses, and turn-ending double particles. The result of employing these and other practices is that the couples in our data ‘bicker’ – they argue in such a way that the interactions do not result in breakdown (walkouts, shouting matches and the like), or otherwise in irreversible breakdown. The communicative practices reported here are mobilised so as to suppress, reduce or moderate the hostility that a complaint for instance might otherwise generate. Our analysis contributes to our understanding of disaffiliation and argument in ordinary interaction, especially in Chinese (Mandarin) domestic interactions.