A Contrastive Study Of Conflict Talk Among Members In Chinese And Western Families

In family life, conflict talk always occurs between husband and wife, or parents and children. If family members can not handle this problem improperly, it may affect the normal communication and connection, and even destroy the harmony of family life. Because the physical worlds and social worlds are different, people that live in different countries may have different ways of living and thinking. Therefore, conflict talk will also differ from each other. At present, the domestic studies on conflict talk mainly focus on the pragmatic approach and seldom pay attention to the cultural factors behind conflict talk.This study chooses Wang Hailing’s novel New Age of Marriage and Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom as study object. Through conversation analysis, this study makes a contrastive study on the chosen data. The study also analyzes the cultural differences of conflict talk among family members. Thus, people will have a further understanding of cultural differences between China and western countries.Through the study, it has made the following findings:in the initiating stage of conflict talk, Chinese disputants are inclined to choose indirect statement and counterstatement while western disputants like to adopt direct formats of statement; in the maintaining stage, Chinese disputants may alter more indirect ways such as rhetorical questions to express their opposed attitudes; in the terminating stage, both Chinese and western disputants tend to choose the formats of compromise, withdrawal and stand-off. During the conflict talk, Chinese and western disputants are influenced by collectivism and individualism respectively.The author hopes that the findings of this study can be helpful to the domestic study of conflict talk.