A Socioliguistic Perspective On Family Conflict Talk

Conflict is a common occurrence in our society.It occurs when interlocutors are unwilling to cooperate with each other in verbal communication because of the discrepancy in their personalities,value orientations or attitudes toward someone or something.The author takes the family conflict talk(FTC)in the American TV series"Good Luck Charlie"as data.From the perspective of sociolinguistics,the author analyzes the FCT of an American middle-class family.Through quantitative study,the author is able to find out that parents and children conflict talk accounts for the biggest percentage in family conflict talk and there is a big discrepancy in terms of linguistic performance in the three types of family conflict talk.Qualitative analysis of the data provides insights into the possible causes of family conflict talk.Social factors under discussion are power,face,gender and occupation while linguistic factors are intonation,lexicon and move pattern.Gender,power and identity construction are three social variants that permeate into every FCT.