A Study On Cohesive Devices In Conflict Talk In Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy

Conflict talk is a type of speech act and is of great importance to literature, such as novels, essays and dramas. Conflict talk has a common feature that it is the conflict of utterances between two parties involved in the conversation, which means that the conflict talk occurs when two parties’opinions differ from each other. A large quantity of studies on conflict talks have been extensively done in many fields, such as linguistics, psychology and sociology, but researches on the cohesive devices of conflict talks, especially Chinese conflict talks are rather limited. Cohesion, however, is an important part of discourse analysis and is one of the primary topics in linguistic study. As there is not a systematic theory about conflict talk and are not sufficient researches on the cohesion and cohesive devices of conflict talk, this thesis attempts to use the theories related to cohesion and cohesive devices to analyze Chinese conflict talk, which is a new perspective to understand the conflict talk and learn the ways of getting discourse power and having the initiative.According to the properties of conflict talk, this paper based on the theory of cohesion and cohesive devices collects fifty examples of conflict talks in the Beijing opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. This thesis adopts the qualitative method to analyze the cohesive devices of selected conflict talks assisted by the quantitative method that uses excel software to make statistics about the distribution of cohesive devices. It is found that there are eight kinds of cohesive devices in total in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy:conjunction, repetition, ellipsis, reference, substitution, antithesis, collocation and hyponymy. There are more covert conjunctions because of the syntactic structure of Chinese data focusing on the cohesion of the meaning whose logical relationship among elements in the sentence is implicit conjunction. This paper also illustrates four special cohesive devices:the repetition of returning moves, recycling repetition, antithesis and metaphoric substitution, which are more flexible, artful and powerful and speaker can occupy the leading position, get discourse power and work for his interest better by the use of them.In this study, the conflict talks in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy provid us with a variety of flexible cohesive devices. This research trying to study cohesive devices and its distribution of conflict talk in literary works not only can help readers improve the understanding of literary works, but also has an enlightening effect on fields of both translation and linguistics.