| Conflict talk is a common but complex linguistic phenomenon in interaction. The termsused for conflict talk can denote narrow to broad concepts. No matter what kinds of term,they all have one core common feature, that is, one participant is disagreeing with anotherparticipant when they have different interests and opinions. However, linguistic means ofconducting conflict talk among adults did not receive much attention in linguistic research,because conflict talk is regarded as a type of disorderly discourse and the data is not easilygathered. Compared with the study on abroad, our study on conflict talk needs to getimproved both in range and quality, and there are lots of things we can do about this topic. Inprevious studies, the researches on conflict talk were from different angles, used differentmodes and got different conclusion. These studies are focused on the disciplines ofpsychology, rhetoric, anthropology, sociology, linguistics and so on. Most of the previousresearches are about English, Japanese and German. Few have done in Chinese context.Research on conflict talk in Chinese context can deepen our understanding about conflict talk,and find some regular patterns.A large number of investigations have found that pragmatic researches on the conflicttalk are rather limited and there are even fewer pragmatic researches on the conflict talkbetween couples in literature. Since there isn’t sufficient research on the speech act of conflicttalk between couples, this paper intends to contribute to fill this gap. This paper will have acarful study on the conflict talk between couples in Chinese verbal communication from thepragmatic perspective, including speech act theory, conversational analysis and politenesstheory. This paper will adopt quantitative and qualitative analysis, analyze the pragmaticstrategies and their functions involved in the data which is collected from Chinese TV seriesHunyinbaoweizhan. Conflict talk contains three stages: initiation stage, maintenance andescalation stage and termination stage. This study will analyze pragmatic strategies involvedin each stage. As for the couples’ difference choice of strategies, this paper will illustratefrom three aspects: changes in social status, cultural difference and differences of mental characteristics.As for the pervasion and complexity of conflict talk between couples and its importanteffect on family, it is necessary for us to do a thorough and systematic research on it, whichwill help us understand it easily and improve the quality of our daily life possibly. |
