A Pragmatic Study Of Chinese Teacher-student Conflict Talk From The Perspective Of Contextual Adaptation

Conflict talk is a common but complicated social and cultural phenomenon. In daily life, whenever people contact with each other, it’s normal that people sometimes argue or quarrel with each other, which is caused by people’s differences in ideas, needs, values and social status etc. It usually interrupts the flowing conversation, ruins the atmosphere of communication and brings uncertain consequences. Conflict talk is also an inevitable phenomenon in the teaching process between teacher and students. A failure to resolve their conflict talk may greatly affect and even hinder successful communications between them, which is detrimental to create a harmonious teacher-student relationship. Many researchers just study teacher-student conflict phenomenon from the perspectives of sociology, pedagogy, psychology and so on However, few studies of teacher-student conflict talk are carried out from linguistic perspective. Although linguists abroad and at home have carried out numerous studies of conflict talks, like martial conflict talk, parent-teenager conflict talk and great accomplishment has been achieved up till now, few work has been conducted to analyze the conflict talk on the basis of teacher-student conversation data from the perspective of Contextual Adaptation.This present study aims at investigating the linguistic features of Chinese teacher-student conflict talk, how teacher-student conflict talk adapts to the contextual correlates in the mental world, the social world and the physical world and exploring the pragmatic functions of teacher-student conflict talk. teacher-student conflict talk also has negative functions and positive pragmatic functions. For its negative functions have been studied many times, thus the present study explores its positive pragmatic functions. The present study is based on the qualitative research method. With the difficulty of collecting the natural data systematically and possible infringement of other’s privacy, the data of this study are mainly derived from second-hand examples provided by scholars who study the teacher-student conflict, some from TV series-Dangerous Mind and Ma La Gao Xiao Sheng, some from the internet and some from the author’s teaching experiences.The careful analysis of the data mentioned above indicates that the linguistic features of teacher in the teacher-student conflict talk are as follows:direct negation or negative language, irony, rhetorical questions, swear word, metapragmatic comment, imperative sentence, and threat utterance while the student’s linguistic features in the teacher-student conflict talk are nonsubmissive silence, modal particles, mumble, direct negation or negative language and rhetoric questions; the occurrence or the use of teacher-student conflict talk is adapted to the contextual correlates, namely the mental world, the social world and the physical world; the positive pragmatic functions of teacher-student conflict talk are as follows:The use of conflict talk can motivate the teachers and students to promote the communication and strengthen class cohesion; what’s more, the use of conflict talk helps people to maintain the classroom in order and promote common development; the use of conflict talk can also activate the student’s mind and spur the student’s creativity, finally the teacher-student conflict talk can help them vent their negative emotion and improve the effects of teaching and studying.As for the significance of the study, three aspects are involved. Firstly, there are few studies studying the teacher-student conflict talk from the perspective of linguistics and this thesis will enrich the linguistic researches. Secondly, this thesis conducts teacher-student conflict talk under the guidance of Verschueren’s Contextual Adaptation, and it can strengthen explanatory power of Adaptation Theory and extend its applicable scope. Thirdly, the present study gives some implications for the teacher’s talk, which can help achieve teacher-student harmony.