Negotiating alignment and managing disalignment: Revisiting the function of haobuhao in Chinese talk-in-interaction

This study investigates haobuhao as an interactional resource for negotiating alignment and managing disalignment in Chinese talk-in-interaction. Drawing on Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, this study analyzes 255 naturally occurring instances from a 60-h corpus of spontaneous Mandarin conversation, examining how sequential positioning, epistemic-deontic dynamics, and prosody condition its interactional functions. The analysis reveals a systematic functional duality: in proposal, request, and invitation sequences, haobuhao operates prospectively as a collaborative device to solicit alignment, mitigate deontic asymmetry, and pursue recipient ratification, though ratification may be delayed, withheld, or negotiated over multiple turns, with haobuhao sustaining the interactional space for such negotiation; in rebutting, informing, and assessment sequences, it functions retrospectively as a stance marker to assert epistemic authority and manage disalignment. The findings demonstrate that haobuhao ’s inherent semantic structure, juxtaposing affirmative and negative poles, renders it adaptable for both soliciting collaborative decisions and asserting epistemic primacy, with specific functions activated by sequential context.