Disagreement Strategies used by Speakers of English as a Lingua Franca in Business Meetings - Article - mitigated and unmitigated forms

Oct 15, 2026

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This study investigates how English as a lingua franca (ELF) speakers express disagreement in real-life business meetings, where prior work largely emphasized consensus and cooperative interaction and focused less on workplace conflicts. Using five ELF business meetings from the VOICE corpus, the study identifies disagreement instances and applies Stalpers’s (1995) framework to test whether disagreement is mitigated. Results show both mitigated and unmitigated forms are used, with a clear preference for mitigated expressions.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages11

Reading Time28 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Background on ELF interaction

Disagreement as a face-threatening act

Politeness theory vs. pragmatic approaches

Methods (from abstract)

Data source: VOICE corpus

Framework for analysis

Findings (from abstract)

Mitigated vs unmitigated disagreement

Frequency and function of disagreement

Advances in Language and Literary Studies ISSN: 2203-4714 [www.alls.aiac.org.au](www.alls.aiac.org.au) | Disagreement Strategies used by Speakers of English as a Lingua Franca in Business Meetings
AlaaAhmedAlzahrani*
Department of English Language & Literature, Faculty of Arts, King Saud University Riyadh 12441, Saudi Arabia Corresponding Author: AlaaAhmedAlzahrani, E-mail: [alaa-zahrani@hotmail.com](alaa-zahrani@hotmail.com) | | | --- | --- | | ARTICLE INFO
Article history
Received: March 06, 2020
Accepted: May 28, 2020
Published: June 30, 2020
Volume: 11 Issue: 3
Advance access: June 2020 Conflicts of interest: None
Funding: None
Keywords:
Disagreement in ELF Interaction, Business ELF Interaction,
ELF Speaker’s Disagreement Strategies, Mitigated and Unmitigated Disagreement,
The VOICE Corpus | ABSTRACT
Numerous studies have attested to the consensus-orientation and cooperative nature of English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions. However, limited attention has been given to moments of disagreements in ELF communication, with most of the little existing work focusing on disagreements in ELF academic or informal contexts. Consequently, little is known about how ELF users display disagreement in real-life business contexts. For this reason, this study examined disagreement expressions in five ELF business meetings drawn from the VOICE corpus to understand the nature of disagreement in ELF interactions. Following the identification of disagreement instances, the study used Stalpers’s (1995) framework to investigate whether the disagreement was accompanied by a mitigation strategy that reduces its impact. It was found that the examined ELF business speakers express their disagreement in both mitigated and unmitigated forms with a marked preference for using mitigated expressions, indicating that the appropriate linguistic choice for expressing disagreements in a between-company business meeting is a mitigated disagreement form. Another main finding is the frequent use of disagreement utterances, suggesting that ELF speakers do not merely seek consensus, but they also raise objections and state their different opinions. One implication of these findings is that ELF encounters might not be as consensus-seeking and mutually supportive as suggested in previous works. Taken together, the findings ofthe present study extended the existing body of work on ELF disagreement and, in general, added further to our understanding of ELF interaction. | INTRODUCTION Numerous studies have attested to the consensus-orientation and cooperative nature of English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions (Jenkins, Cogo, & Dewey, 2011). Previous research has revealed that ELF speakers employ a variety of interactional cooperative strategies to reach mutual understanding such as repetition (Björkman, 2014; Cogo, 2009), paraphrasing (Alharbi, 2016; Björkman, 2014; Mauranen, 2010), utterance completion (Alharbi, 2016; Björkman, 2014; Cogo & Dewey, 2012) and backchannelling (Alharbi, 2016; Cogo & Dewey, 2012). While much of the early research on ELF interaction mostly focused on such cooperative aspects, more recently, other questions have been raised concerning ELF users’ disagreement practices. In particular, ways of expressing conflicting opinions in ELF interactions have been investigated in academic settings (Bjørge, 2012; Komori-Glatz, 2018; Matsumoto, 2018; Toomaneejinda & Harding, 2018), informal settings (Jenks, 2012; Konakahara, 2015, 2017), with little attention to professional business contexts (Marra, 2016). Consequently, little is known about how ELF users display disagreement in real-life business contexts. Thus, the present study examined the disagreement practices used in ELF business meetings in the VOICE corpus (Seidlhofer et al., 2013b) to extend this line of research further. Earlier views of politeness theory maintain that disagreement is a face-threatening act (FTA) since it is th

FAQs

What data source does the study use to analyze disagreement in ELF business meetings?

The study draws on five ELF business meetings taken from the VOICE corpus.

How does the study assess whether disagreement is mitigated?

After identifying disagreement instances, it applies Stalpers’s (1995) framework to determine whether disagreement is accompanied by mitigation.

What is the main result regarding mitigated versus unmitigated disagreement?

The speakers express disagreement in both forms, but there is a marked preference for mitigated expressions.

Oct 15, 2026

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