| Conflict talk is a universal and complex linguistic phenomenon that frequently occurs in people’s daily interactive communication.It mainly refers to the fact that two parties hold different opinions on a person or something.Because of its irregularity feature,scholars seldom conduct researches on it.People started to concentrate on it as a branch of discourse analysis until the 1970 s.Subsequently,the study of conflict talk has attracted interest in various disciplines,such as sociology,anthropology,and linguistics,which have discussed conflict discourse from different perspectives.Compared with foreign countries,domestic studies on conflict discourse started late.Moreover,in recent years,scholars mainly concentrate on the use of face theory,relevance theory,conversational analysis theory and adaptation theory to study the construction patterns,causes,solutions and pragmatic functions of conflict discourse.These communicative theories focus on the language comprehension and speech strategies in the conversation,while the dynamic characteristics of verbal communication are less studied.Memetic theory is a new theory that explains the laws of cultural evolution based on the new Darwinian theory of evolution.According to the memetic theory,conflict talk is the dynamic development process of the two parties and it is the mutual selection of memes in different meme domains.The process of selection,competition and reorganization fully demonstrates the dynamic selectivity and competitiveness of memes in the development of conflict discourse,and highlights the dynamic characteristics of conflict discourse.As the core concept of memetic theory,meme is similar to a gene.Both of them survive by replication,and spread from one host to another by means of imitation.This article studies the conflict discourse in Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of memetic theory.Through the analysis of text,this paper aims to explore the following problems.First,what memes cause conflict talk? Secondly,how to work out a termination pattern of conflict talk according to memetic theory? After research,this paper gets the following conclusions.Firstly,through the discussion of the new text and the classification of the content of conflict talk by Partington(2002),this paper gets three sorts of conflict memes that result in conflict talks,namely,conceptual conflict meme,interpersonal conflict meme and discourse conflict meme in conflict talk.And furthermore,the author expounds the role of the three conflict memes in conflict discourse.Secondly,meme competition can provide a theoretical basis for the termination patterns of conflict discourse.That is,one party is winning/ losing or the two parties fall into a stalemate situation.When one of the conflict parties can successfully absorb the other’s memes,then it will win the competition,and on the contrary it will fail.When the memes of the two conflict parties do not merge with each other,the meme competition will be deadlocked. |
