A Study Of Conflict Talks In Downton Abbey From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As a universal sociolinguistic phenomenon,conflict talks have begun to attract scholars’ attention in recent years.The term "conflict talk" was first put forward by Grimshaw in 1990,and scholars abroad and at home began to study it from various perspectives such as conversation analysis,sociolinguistics,and cross-cultural communication.Taking language adaptation theory by Verschueren(hereinafter referred to as "adaptation theory")as the theoretical framework,this thesis makes attempts to explore the causes of conflict talks,their linguistic features,and the adaptive strategies to end conflict talks from the perspectives of contextual correlates and structural objects of adaptability.All the corpora in this study are selected from the famous British historical TV series Downton Abbey,which has attracted numerous domestic and foreign audience for its gorgeous scenes and exciting plots since the release of the first season in 2010.Also,choosing Downton Abbey as the corpus can not only facilitate the study of British aristocratic community in the last century but also enrich the study of British social conflict talks,for the sake that it unfolds the rise and fall of the British aristocracy in the last century.Based on previous studies at home and abroad,the thesis studies three questions:First,why do conflict talks occur in people’s communication?Second,what are the linguistic features of the conflict talks?Third,how can conflict talks be stopped?In order to answer these questions,a qualitative method is applied to classify and analyze the causes of conflict talks;then,quantitative method is used to analyze linguistic features of conflict talks at the lexical and syntactic level and conclude several adaptive strategies.The thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter I introduces research background,significance,methodology,and structure of the thesis.According to the existing literature,this chapter puts forward the significance of the study.Meanwhile,the research questions,the collection of data,and the specific research methods are introduced.Finally,the overall structure of the thesis is presented.Chapter Ⅱ reviews the literature at home and abroad.On the one hand,empirical methods are applied to foreign conflict talks studies from the perspective of sociolinguistics,ethnography of communication and conversational analysis.On the other hand,domestic studies mainly focus on the analysis of classic movies and TV series from the perspective of conversational analysis and cognitive linguistics.Chapter Ⅲ introduces key notions of adaptation theory and correlates them to conflict talks.Firstly,language is a continuous choice-making process according to Verschueren.Communication is developed in the process of making choices by interlocutors.However,conflict talks will occur if one party can not make an appropriate choice.Secondly,variability,negotiability,and adaptability are three properties of language,which are correlated instead of being separated.Thirdly,there are four angles of investigation from the perspective of adaptation theory.They are contextual correlates of adaptability,structural objects of adaptability,dynamics of adaptability and salience of the adaptation processes.As the body part of the thesis,Chapter IV is divided into three parts to discuss the causes of conflict talks,their linguistic features,and adaptive strategies respectively.Firstly,in the initiation phase,it is because one party is not able to conform to the other party’s physical world,social world,and mental world that conflict talks are initiated.Secondly,distinctive language features and the preference for special discourse types are presented in the opposition move of conflict talks.Thirdly,interlocutors tend to choose different adaptive strategies to terminate conflict talks.Chapter Ⅴ concludes the major findings and limitations of the thesis.It has been found that the three worlds work in combination.Besides,communicators are more inclined to adopt negators as the most powerful linguistic forms,and rhetorical as well as interrogative questions as the most commonly used means of refutation.Finally,at the end of the conflict,communicators are more likely to resort to outside force such as third-party intervention or choose silence and leaving rather than submission and compromise strategies to terminate the conflict talks.In addition,this study has many limitations for some reasons,so this chapter gives several suggestions for further study based on the listed limitations.