A Study Of Conflict Discourse Of Identity From The Perspective Of Relevance-Adaptation Mode

Conflicts might arise out of communicators’ deviation from individual ideas,standpoints and viewpoints during communicating,which certainly give rise to poor communication or interrupted interaction.As one of the manifestations of conflicts,conflict discourse is a common linguistic phenomenon.The linguistic phenomenon exists in all aspects of social life,which impedes normal communication and even results in massive contradictions,thus considerable attention has been paid in academic studies.Scholars at home and abroad have investigated conflict discourse’s generation,causes,ending modes and corresponding strategies from the perspectives of Pragmatics,Semantics,Cognitive Linguistics and Social Psychology.However,fewer researches had been done to date from the perspective of intercultural communication.In the process of intercultural communication,the variance of cultural identity serves as a vital reason for the emergency of cultural conflict discourse.Therefore,the exploration on the underlying factors of conflict discourse of identity and its corresponding tactics would facilitate productive communication and promote interpersonal relationship.This paper adopts the Relevance-Adaptation Mode,employing the qualitative research method,to analyze the conflict discourse of identity in Let the Great World Spin.Relevance-Adaptation Mode holds that the process of communicating is a relevance-oriented process,and verbal communication is a dynamic process in which discourse and cognitive context assumptions conform to each other.Relevance-adaptation is the choice of speech form and language structure in the process of speech generation and understanding.The mode offers a supportive theory to explore the relationship between cultural identity and its contextual factors.This study attempts to answer three questions:(1)What cultural conflict discourse predominately are presented in intercultural communication?(2)What are the causes of cultural conflict discourse?(3)What strategies have been adopted to avoid conflict discourse?After analyzing cases selected from Let the Great World Spin,the paper draws to the conclusion that conflict discourses is closely related with contextual factors’ relevance-adaptation.According to different intercultural contexts,communicators could adopt various strategies to relieve cultural conflict.The most prominent conflicts involved in this novel are associated to race,gender and class,therefore this paper proposes three tactics to cope with cultural conflicts.Specifically,using mitigation to alleviate tension among races,that is,communicators make the best optimal relevance.Confronting with conflicts between genders,being silent is helpful to avoid gender conflict,meanwhile,it represents a communicator’s suitable word choice awareness.Stratum conflict results in failing to conform to the other party’s context and making submission is a concession that one party adapts the other party’s cognitive context unreservedly.The exploration on the causes and efficient strategies of cultural conflict discourse could enhance the language users’ awareness of choosing and using correct discourse strategies,at the same time,improves their competence for the use of language and facilitates to establish,maintain or consolidate harmonious interpersonal relationships.