A Contrastive Study of Agreement and Disagreement Strategies In Facebook: Persian vs. English

Given the inevitable role of social networks in our social-linguistic interactions and because of the fact that social networks need to be analyzed and understood scientifically and that few studies have investigated social networks from a linguistic perspective, the aim of the present study was to investigate and describe agreement and disagreement strategies used by Persian and English native speakers in their comment tags in Facebook. To this end, a corpus of 1196 comments was collected and analyzed based on the existing models of speech act strategies. Also, their use of strategies to express their feelings while agreeing and disagreeing in their comments was analyzed. The findings revealed that there is a significant difference between English and Persian native speakers in terms of the strategies they use for agreement and disagreement speech acts and the expression of their feelings while agreeing and disagreeing. It was also found that there is a difference between males and females in terms of using agreeing and disagreeing strategies and the accompanying strategies for the expression of their feelings; females were observed to use more strategies on the whole. The results of this study can have a contribution to the researchers in the fields of communication sciences and pragmatics.