Conflict Talk Between Classmates From A Rapport Management Perspective

Conflict talk,an omnipresent linguistic phenomenon,exists in the verbal communication of our daily life.Because of its university and complexity,many scholars have noticed this linguistic phenomenon and studied it from different perspectives,especially pragmatics.On the theoretical basis of pragmatics,some scholars clarified conflict talk’s structural features;some studied its communication strategies.However,while many domestic studies on conflict talk are based on Linguistic Adaptation Theory,few studies are in light of Rapport Management Theory,especially the new version of rapport management proposed by Spencer-Oatey in 2008.Besides,most scholars divided the process of a conflict talk into three parts: the initiating turn-taking,oppositional turn-taking and terminating turn-taking of conflict talk,and mainly focused on the single adjacency pair in the communication.The dynamic analysis of conflict talk is overlooked.In previous studies,few scholars investigated conflict talk between classmates.The thesis takes conflict talks between classmates in the TV drama Growing Pain as the data source and Rapport Management Theory as theoretical framework to answer the following questions:(1)What are the pragmatic motivations of conflict utterances between classmates?(2)What is the dynamic process of rapport management in conflict talk between classmates?(3)Why does conflict talk have different interpersonal effects on both sides?In this thesis,conflict talk is defined as an intact process that cannot be divided into independent moves,which consists of conflict utterances.In other words,only if the speaker and the hearer both have conflict utterances,the talk between them can be called a conflict talk.Three major findings of the study are as follows:Firstly,the thesis divides conflict utterances between classmates into two types: the conflict utterances triggering conflict talk and the conflict utterances not triggering conflict talk.The conflict utterances triggering conflict talk between classmates are from both the speaker and the hearer.For speakers,their pragmatic motivations cover four types of rapport orientations: rapport-enhancement orientation,rapport-maintenance orientation,rapportneglect orientation and rapport-challenge orientation.For hearers,they usually take a rapportneglect or a rapport-challenge orientation to give conflict utterances.The conflict utterances not triggering conflict talk are only from the speaker,because these speaker receives mitigating responses from the hearer.In this case,pragmatic motivations of this type of conflict utterances relate to the rapport-neglect orientation and the rapport-challenge orientation of speakers.Secondly,this thesis puts forward a generalized model of dynamic process of conflict talk between classmates.At the beginning,the interlocutor A holds a rapport-maintenance orientation,rapport-neglect orientation or rapport-challenge orientation.This is because that A’s conflict utterances can trigger the conflict talk between classmates successfully only if A’s orientation is one of these three orientations.Then A will manage rapport with the interlocutor B based on three management dimensions of face,sociality rights and obligations and interactional goals.The outcome of A’s management is reflected in the selection of strategies in five domains,especially the illocutionary domain.After hearing what A says,B will evaluate the extent of the(im)politeness of A’s utterances,which could influence B’s rapport orientation.Then,B will experience the same rapport management procedures as A.Significantly,only if B holds a rapport-neglect orientation or rapport-challenge orientation and respond to A’s words in a conflicting way,the conflict talk between A and B can exist and continue.In addition,the roles played by A and B,the speaker and the hearer,can be interchanged in a conflict talk,and this process will not stop until the conflict talk is over for various reasons.Thirdly,this thesis argues that evaluation of A and B on each other is non-summative,which means their evaluation depends on the immediate context to a large extent.Hence,when the conflict talk is over,their final evaluation on each other can be used to judge to what extent they feel the immediate relationship has been challenged.Through analyzing the two examples by a detailed turn-by-turn basis in Growing Pain,this study points out that most of the time,both sides have the same interpretation of the outcome of rapport management in a conflict talk,while sometimes,both sides perceive the quality change of the relationship to a variable degree.As a result,the conflict talk between them has different interpersonal effects on them.