A Pragmatic Study Of Parent-child Conflict Talk In All Is Well

Conflict talk frequently occurs in our daily communication.As a special kind of verbal interaction,conflict talk refers to many speech acts,including arguing,disputing,quarrelling,etc.A common feature all those scenes have is that both sides adopt opposed words or actions to threaten each other’s face during an interaction,resulting in communication failure and disharmony.After reviewing the literature,it is easy to find that many researchers devote a lot to studying conflict talk from various perspectives.However,there are few studies on parent-child conflict talk based on the impoliteness theory.This study discusses parent-child conflict talk based on Culpeper’s and Bousfield’s impoliteness theory.Applying qualitative and quantitative research methods,the thesis collects parent-child conflict talks from the Chinese TV play All Is Well as its data.The thesis finds out all the impoliteness output strategies and response patterns used by the parents and the daughter Mingyu.Then the study analyzes the different adoptions of impoliteness output strategies and response patterns by the parents and the daughter Mingyu respectively.Finally,it explores the reasons why the parents and the daughter have different choices in strategy and response pattern,and it offers three approaches to help people to build harmonious parent-child relationships.The findings of this study can be summarized as follows.First,the mother frequently uses the strategy of frightening to achieve her intended purposes,making her daughter feel dishonored.Instead of threatening,the father usually employs the strategy of challenging.The daughter Mingyu,on the other hand,often combines criticizing and challenging during conflict talk against her parents.Besides,the mother and Mingyu tend to adopt the offensive-offensive response pattern when they are confronted with offensive words or actions,while the father and Mingyu prefer the offensive-defensive response pattern.Second,a conclusion can be drawn from the study that power relation,gender difference,and cognitive difference are the three main factors resulting in the adoption of different conflict talk strategies.Third,the study moves further to offer three feasible approaches in building a harmonious parent-child relationship.During the conflict,it would be better if a compromise was reached between the viewpoints of two sides.Humorous words could also be applied to shift the topic and arrive at reconciliation.In addition,interference of a third party is an excellent way to terminate a conflict.By adopting the impoliteness strategy in conflict talk studies,this thesis moves a small step forward in theoretical and practical researches in that field,and hopefully it will provide some inspiration for further researches.Conflict talk is closely connected with the context where it took place,therefore it cannot be identified as positive or negative in absolute ways.