A Study Of The Conflicting Responses In Parent-child Non-aggressive Contexts

Conflicting response is an essential part of conflict talk and a common pragmatic phenomenon in verbal communication.In recent years,lots of researches on conflicting response have obtained fruitful findings at home and abroad,but most of them investigate it in aggressive contexts and few put it under non-aggressive ones.Moreover,relative studies prefer to probe into conflicting response from traditionally pragmatic perspectives like face,politeness or impoliteness theories,but few address it from the angle of relation.Thereby,this thesis makes a tentative study to explain the conflicting responses in non-aggressive contexts from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics.Conflicting responses in non-aggressive contexts frequently happen in everyday communication,especially in family situations.Therefore,focusing on the traditionally parent-child relation in China,this study takes the conflicting response in non-aggressive contexts as the research object and tries to analyze its realizations,pragmatic motivations and interpersonal functions based on rapport management theory,which hopes to deepen people's understanding of conflicting response.All the data in this thesis are collected from the documentary TV programme—X-Change.And the methodology adopted here is qualitative analysis.Firstly,this study explores the realizations of the conflicting responses employed by parents and children and discovers seven types of realizations: negative evaluation,negation,swear words,rhetorical question,sarcasm,conditional threat and deliberate misinterpretation.Moreover,it finds that interlocutors usually use more than one expression to initiate conflicting response,by which they manage the face and sociality right of both sides.In addition,based on rapport management theory,this thesis probes into the reason why parents or children initiate conflicting responses in non-aggressive contexts.Through an interpretation of the data,it finds that the interpersonal orientations held by interlocutors constitute the major motivational forces for conflicting response,mainly including rapport-challenge orientation,rapport-neglect orientation,rapport-maintenance orientation and rapport-enhancement orientation.Stimulated by a certain orientation,interlocutors would dynamically adopt various forms of conflicting response to manage the face and sociality right of both sides,finally exerting positive or negative effects on interpersonal relations.Last,the study discusses the interpersonal functions of conflicting response and finds that the conflicting responses given by parents and children mainly accomplish seven interpersonal functions,like venting negative emotion,competing for power,maintaining self-image,attracting attention,escaping blame,showing concern and dissuading.Starting from interpersonal pragmatics,this study analyzes the realizations,pragmatic motivations and interpersonal functions of the conflicting responses between parents and children based on rapport management theory,which is of benefit to deepen the understanding of parent-child conflicting responses and hopes to offer implications for the interpersonal communication between parents and children.