| Conflict talk, as a common but complex language phenomenon, is a natural part ofeveryday communication caused by different behaviors, opinions and beliefs. This studyfirst presents a detailed review of linguistic studies on conflict talk, through which it canbe evidently seen that most of the previous studies focus on the initiation, escalation andtermination of conflict talk, and they mainly take conflict talks happened in TV plays orinstitutional discourse as their research corpus. However, there have been few researchesconducted on conflict talk in literature works. Fortress Besieged, as a world famous bookfull of cultural, literary and language values, has caught many attentions, and researcheson it have always been rich. Among them, studies of the rhetorical devices in this noveland the translation devices in the English version of it have occupied the main position.However, few researches put their attention on discourse studies especially conflict talkstudies of this novel. Therefore, in order to fill in the gap, by the employment of bothqualitative and quantitative approaches in data analysis, this study first classifies theconflict talks happened in Fortress Besieged from the perspective of quality, generationand patterns of expression. Then, it mainly discusses the reasons and terminationstrategies responsible for conflict talks happened in Fortress Besieged on the basis ofVerschueren’s Adaptation Theory.According to the analysis, failing to adapt to physical world (space, time, nonverbalfactors), social world (value systems, gender difficulties, kinship) and mental world(cognition, emotion and motivation) function in the occurrence of conflict talks inFortress Besieged, among which mental world factors contribute the most. Based on thedata statistics, the present study discusses such frequency distributions and explores theunderlying reasons lying behind the frequency distributions further.As for termination patterns, such nine strategies as submission, one-party success,third-party interferences, withdrawal, focus-shifting, humorous pattern, nip and tuck,external-factors interferences and silence contribute to the end of conflict talks in FortressBesieged, among which submission, withdrawal, focus-shifting and one-party success aremost frequently employed. Therefore, based on the data statistics, the present study has examined the target users of these four typical termination patterns and explored thegender differences between couples in their use of them. |
