Research On Conflict Talk And Pragmatic Identity Construction From The Perspective Of Impoliteness Theory

Conflict talk is a common phenomenon in daily verbal communication.As a kind of certain speech act,it includes many forms,such as quarreling,arguing,disputing,etc.After reviewing the related literature,it is found that scholars have studied conflict talk from multiple perspectives.In recent years,the research on the identity between communicators in conflict talk has gradually aroused great attention among scholars,and the social attribute of the identity is the focus of scholars’attention.With the development of pragmatics,it is found that the selection of pragmatic identity construction and discourse practices in conflict talk play an increasingly important role,which has attracted extensive attention.In addition,the communicative attribute of identity in conflict talk is also the focus of current research.Combined with the impoliteness strategies raised by Culpeper(1996)and Bousfield(2008),Chen’s(2013)pragmatic identity theory,and the classifications of identity proposed by Tracy and Robles(2013),this study tries to investigate the discourse practices and dynamic selection of identity construction between both parties in daily family conflict from the perspective of impoliteness,taking the Chinese TV family drama All Is Well as an example.This paper intends to explore the following three questions:(1)What identities do the speakers construct in All Is Well by conflict talk?(2)How do the speakers construct their identities in conflict talks based on impoliteness theory?(3)What are the factors which influence speakers’ constructing these identities?To deal with these questions,this paper embraces qualitative and quantitative research methods and analyzes the corpus of about 25,000 words from about 165 conflict situations collected in the Chinese TV family drama All Is Well.To ensure the accuracy of the corpus and prevent the errors caused by the corpus transcription software,the corpus collected in this paper is transcribed by person,and each conflict scenario is analyzed and described in detail.After an elaborate analysis,the findings of this research are summed up as follows:in the beginning,it is found that there are eighteen impoliteness strategies adopted in the collected data.The strategy of Challenging was employed the most by the characters.It is shown that the family members would like to challenge others’ faces directly and they used rhetorical questions more in the conflict.The strategy of Criticizing was employed the second highest followed by the strategy of Challenging.However,some strategies such as Snubbing and Using obscure or secretive languages are not adopted by the characters in the data.Secondly,it is discovered that 142 identities were constructed in the conflict talk and more than one pragmatic identity was constructed in the same conflict.And most of the constructed identities were negative in the conflict talk.What’s more,there are three major types of pragmatic identities,containing master identity,interactional identity,and personal identity.The construction of personal identity takes the first and the construction of master identity is in the last place.The speakers in the conflict constructed the master identity through choosing addressing terms and speech act,the interactional identity through choosing lexical choices,addressing terms,and the personal identity by choosing grammatical choices and speech act.Thirdly,it is found that gender,character,emotion,and power are the four main factors affecting constructing different pragmatic identities.The significance of this research in this thesis can be concluded in theory and practice.In theory,through the analysis and research of family conflict talk in terms of impoliteness theory,this thesis analyzes the selections of pragmatic identity construction and discourse operation,which is helpful to the practice and development of pragmatic identity theory.In practice,exploring the influencing factors of choosing to construct pragmatic identity,helps readers better understand the relationship between conflict talk and identity construction,and provide language support for reducing family conflict and building a harmonious society.