Managing relationships in everyday practice: The case of strong disagreement in Mandarin

•Mandarin speakers may co-construct strong disagreement in everyday practice.•Strong disagreement can maintain, enhance or threaten face.•Strong disagreement can maintain or enhance relationships and appear appropriate.•The findings suggest the importance of contextual effects on language use and revisiting stereotypes.•The study is a meaningful addition to research on Chinese pragmatics.

Most previous research on (im)politeness in Chinese has not centered on strong disagreement although a few studies have examined disagreement in Chinese via elicitation or in unequal-status situations. This study attempts to uncover strong disagreement emerging as a strategy for facework and relationship management employed by non-familial equal-status Mandarin-speaking participants in everyday practice in a southeastern city of mainland China. Spontaneous mundane conversations were collected through interactional sociolinguistic methods and analyzed by means of the discursive approach featuring the avoidance of overgeneralization, the elusiveness of (im)politeness and the inclusion of participants’ emic perspectives. The participants were found to co-construct strong disagreement to conduct facework and manage relationships without any manifestation of negative evaluations. Most of the instances of strong disagreement were face and relationship maintaining or face and relationship enhancing, although some appeared to be face threatening. A close look at the local specificities of the conversations reveals that these face-threatening instances still functioned to maintain the interactants’ relationships. The study suggests the importance of situating research in local contexts and the necessity to revisit stereotypes concerning Chinese. The findings can promote the understanding of intercultural communication that involves native Chinese speakers.