Disagreement Speech Acts among Friends in Chinese and Japanese: A Corpus-Based Comparative Study

The study investigates remedial strategies for mitigating face-threatening acts in disagreement speech acts between friends in Chinese and Japanese, using a contrastive pragmatics framework and natural conversational corpora. Key findings show that both languages frequently employ compound politeness strategies characterized by “surface agreement + substantive disagreement,” with Chinese speakers favoring combinations of positive politeness strategies, while Japanese speakers prefer layered negative politeness strategies. Chinese constructs “alliance relationships” through explicit pronominal systems, whereas Japanese achieves “indirect negation” via subject omission and syntactic generalization. This reflects divergent communicative paradigms: Chinese “explicit solidarity” versus Japanese “implicit harmony,” and offers implications for cross-cultural pragmatics and business communication.