A Study On The Third Party Intervention In Conflict Talks

In our daily life,conflict talks exit widely.Since 1970s,conflict talks have attracted the attention of more and more researchers.In recent years,scholars study conflict talks from different angles such as sociology,anthropology,linguistics and psychology and so on.By reviewing the present studies on conflict talks,it is found that disagreement,negative emotion,and interference constitute the three fundamental properties of interpersonal conflicts,reflecting the principal cognitive,affective,and behavioral elements.Now most researchers have agreed on the common identity that there are three parts in conflict talks,the beginnings,middles and endings.But most researches are based on dyadic interaction,in other words,the single pair of addresser and addressee,having little consideration of the third party intervention.However,in our daily life,conflict interactions are very complicated and can be affected by the third party intervention.Therefore,we construct a third party intervention model with both the physical presence or absence of the third party,focusing on the influence of the third party interference on conflict talks.This paper first defines the third party,regarding the third party as the participants of the conflict talks other than the addressers and addressees,and then,on the base of impoliteness model,we work out a third party intervention model.We choose the Chinese linguistic data from the TV series Empresses in the Palace to check the third party intervention in conflict talks.It is found that the third party intervention has different influence on the development of conflict talks,for instance to halt,to relieve,to transfer,or to intensify the conflict.The third party intervention can be distinguished as intentional or unintentional,in which the intentional intervention means the third party takes part in the conflict voluntarily and tries to play some roles in the conversation and the unintentional intervention means that the intervention of the third party is forced to join in.But the third party intervention cannot always have some influence on the development of the interaction due to the special situation or the power and status difference.In addition,the participants sometimes may take use of the third party who is not present to attack the recipients.Based on the influence of the third party intervention on conflict talks,this paper tries to complement the previous studies and expands the research field by presenting a model on the effect of the third party intervention in conflict talks.