Adaption-Theoretic Approach To The Conflict Talks In American Gangster TV Series The Blacklist

Conflict talk is a universal and complicated linguistic phenomenon in human communication.Most of the conflict talks result from the speaker and hearer's disagreement and dispute in their views,stances,interests,personalities and the like.Researchers' attention to conflict talks can be traced back to 1970 s and 1980 s when Brenneis & Lein(1977)and Boggs(1977)focused their studies on children's debates and disputes.Later on,researchers further broadened the horizon of conflict talk studies through their efforts from different research perspectives.However,few of them have studied police-gangster conflict talks,especially from pragmatic point of view,let alone from the adaptation-theoretic perspective.Out of above consideration,the present research,based on Verschueren's Adaptation Theory,is intended to analyze police-gangster conflict talks,with the corpus selected from the first and second seasons of the famous American gangster TV series The Blacklist,and devoted to the exploration of the following four questions:(1)How are the three properties of variability,negotiability,and adaptability revealed in the police-gangster conflict talks in The Blacklist?(2)What are the policemen and gangsters' linguistic choices at phonological,lexical,syntactic,semantic levels respectively,for the construction of their conflict talks in The Blacklist?(3)How do the policemen and gangsters respectively make a negotiation about their pragmatic choices of speech acts in their conflict talks in The Blacklist?(4)Are the police-gangster conflict talks in The Blacklist contextually adapted or inadapted? In what ways?After a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the collected corpus within the framework of Adaptation Theory,the present research has arrived at the following findings:First,the three properties of linguistic variability,pragmatic negotiability and contextual inadaptability are embodied in the police-gangster conflict talks in The Blacklist.Second,in The Blacklist,when involved in conflict talks,the policemen and gangsters' linguistic choices are variable as follows: phonologically,they choose different intonations,tempos and stresses;lexically,they choose different terms of address,vulgar terms,derogatory terms and slangs;syntactically,they choose different complexities,focuses and moods of sentences;semantically,the propositional content of their conflict talks features uncooperativeness,hostility,aggressiveness and destructiveness.Third,the conflict talks in The Blacklist are also realized by the policemen's negotiable pragmatic choices of speech acts such as ordering,threatening,berating,disclosing and interrogating and the gangsters' pragmatic choices of speech acts such as protesting,refuting,quibbling,intimidating and sneering.Fourth,the conflict talks in The Blacklist result from the policemen and gangsters' deliberate inadaptation to the communicative context which is composed of three “worlds”,say,mental world(i.e.the communication partners' psychological expectations and emotional needs),social world(i.e.social norms,legal norms and communicative norms)and physical world(i.e.the addressee,temporal dimension,spatial dimension)This thesis is concluded by pointing out that Adaptation Theory is an effective tool for the analysis of specific linguistic and communicative phenomena such as the conflict talks in The Blacklist.