‘You would not want to be the murderer of our dreams and options, right?’

Abstract

Studies of how adult Chinese speakers express disagreement at work or in business have a well-established tradition; whereas, studies on young students and university lecturers are scarcer. In general, the description of relationships with authority figures has been characterised by evidence of greater distance and a greater rituality than equivalent Western uses. The objective of this work is to verify whether, in a mutated communicative situation, students express their opposition to lecturer via email using predominantly indirect and attenuated linguistic forms—as might be expected—or whether linguistics changes are evident. For this purpose, 149 university students wrote a letter to their language lecturer in which they express their disagreement with the grade received. The results of the analysis reveal that, contrary to what was predicted, acts of direct speech are prevalent.