A Pragmatic Study Of Conflicting Responses To Rhetorical Questions In Modern Family

Conflict talk is not only an inevitable linguistic phenomenon in interpersonal interaction,but is one of the hottest topics in the field of pragmatics.Conflict is defined as a speech activity in which both sides try to maintain their positions through opposition(Honda,2002).Although researches on the causes,process and response of conflict talk have been growing in recent years,conflicting response caused by such specific indirect speech acts as rhetorical questions has been neglected.This study analyzed conflicting responses to rhetorical questions between family members based on rapport management theory(Spencer Oatey,2008),aiming to explore the negative effects of conflicting responses to rhetorical questions on rapport management and provide a reference for establishing harmonious interpersonal relationship.This study applied text analysis to analyze carefully the first six seasons of Modern Family which are composed of 144 episodes,from which 63 fragments containing conflicting responses to rhetorical questions were selected.Through analysis and discussion,the thesis drew the following conclusions.Firstly,there are 10 types of conflicting responses caused by rhetorical questions,including refutation,denial,complaint,order,abuse,threat,warning,irony,rebuke,offensive body movement.These conflicting response strategies mainly occur in 8pairs of family members.Among these conflicting response strategies,denial occurs most frequently and the least frequent conflicting response strategies are abuse and offensive body movement.In contrast,these conflicting response strategies are mostly adopted by two pairs of family members,couples and parent-child,in which couples use most frequently.Secondly,conflicting responses to rhetorical questions have negative impacts on interpersonal relationship between family members,threatening listener’s face and sociality rights.Among them,threatening quality face occurs most frequently.Family members are more inclined to refute others’ advice or opinions or deny other’s competence to threaten other’s quality face and express their opinions.Thirdly,the possible factors influencing the choice of conflicting responses to rhetorical questions between family members include speaker’s rapport-neglectorientation and rapport-challenge orientation,power and distance between family members,cost-benefit consideration of message content and social roles between communicators.This thesis conducted a pragmatic analysis of the conflicting responses to rhetorical questions between family members.It is hoped that readers would understand more comprehensively the conflicting responses between family members.This study to a certain extent enriches the study of this linguistic phenomenon.At the same time,the negative effects of conflicting responses on interpersonal relationships also suggest that people should adopt appropriate ways of speaking and strive to establish friendly family relationships and harmonious interpersonal relationships.