A Pragmatic Study On College Students’ Discourse Of Conflict And Its Strategies Of Resolution

To achieve relaxed environment and harmonious interpersonal communication,conflict resolution is not only the inner need of the development of human society,but also the inherent requirement of human nature.As college is a microcosm of society,the study on the discourse of college students’ conflicts to explore the strategies of resolution is of practical significance.The research is carried on by means of corpus-based method.The corpus is collected through the methodology of ethnography with the help of recording-transferring,combined with questionnaire survey.The study aims to analyze types and features of college students’ discourse of conflict and investigate pragmatic strategies to reduce or cease conflict on the basis of the theory of face-threatening act(FTA)as well as principle of politeness.The findings include two major parts:In terms of pragmatic features,the college students’ discourse of conflicts is basically of middle degree.According to the degree,there are five types FTAs in conflicts,which are the minimal FTA,the middle FTA,the middle plus FTA,the high FTA and the great FTA.The minimal FTA happens between students and managers,individuals and groups,close friends,and strangers.The middle FTA involves disapproval,priding oneself on being old acquaintances,estranging from groups,ignorance of others’ care,and alienation of relationship.The middle plus FTA includes interruption or limitation,misunderstanding or blame,and offense.The high FTA is carried on in the forms of head-to-head repelling and indirect rejection.The great FTA erupts in the ways of bursting out at start and growing to blow up.Among the five types,the middle FTA and middle plus FTA are in largest proportion.As “reducing the distance of both sides of conflict” is more acceptable,the imposition of positive face-threatening act corresponding to the middle FTA is less than that of negative face-threatening act corresponding to the middle plus FTA.In terms of redressive strategies of politeness,to adopt an inclusive perspective,to apologize and to be intervened by the third-party are in prominent application in resolving conflict in college students’ discourse.Firstly,owing to the features of “economy” and “modesty” of the strategy,the negative politeness strategy is most popular among college students.Secondly,though there are variable ways to achieve negative politeness strategy,for college students,the most common and efficient methods include adopting an inclusive perspective and apologizing.Lastly,with the particular advantage of protecting face of both sides,the third-party intervention plays an important role in resolving conflict in the discourse of college students.And the “cost-cost” pattern and the “third-party cost” pattern occur more often.In the light of the shortage of this study,the further work should refer to features of Chinese culture,to propose pragmatic principles of politeness which are more perfect.In terms of corpus building,a sample of bigger range should be examined to guarantee the objectiveness of the study.