Analysis On Response Patterns And Pragmatic Functions Of Conflict Talk Between Couples

Conflict talk is a universal language phenomenon in daily communication, which is inevitable and can not be ignored. Researchers at home and abroad had conducted a large number of studies on it from various perspectives, with sociolinguistics and pragmatics as the mainstream. By analyzing response patterns and pragmatic functions of conflict talk between couples, this study aims to answer the following three questions:(1) What are the impolite strategies in conflict talk between couples?(2) What are the response patterns in conflict talk between couples?(3) What are the main pragmatic functions of conflict talk between couples?Based on a review of previous research on conflict talk, this study taking conflict talks between couples in the American TV Play Desperate House-wives as discourse corpus carries out a qualitative research on conflict talk between couples following the pragmatic perspective.The study firstly shows that most of the impolite strategies summarized by Bousfield can find their realization in the data taking Bousfield’s Impolite Principle and the Response Framework as its theoretical foundation. And then, the observation of the response to a face threatening act reveals that there are mainly three kind of response patterns, that is, offensive-offensive response pattern, offensive-defensive response pattern, and offensive-compromise response pattern. At last, the study summarizes the pragmatic functions of conflict talks between couples, that is, conflict talk between couples not only embodies the deconstructive function on interpersonal relationship, but also has constructive function on interpersonal relationship.