Study On Conflict Talk In TV Series From The Perspective Of Linguistic Adaptation Theory

Conflict talk, as a natural but complicated language phenomenon, frequently happens in daily communication. Most of the time, it breaks down the ongoing communication and creates unhappiness or even great loss. In order to avoid conflict talk, researchers and scholars from various fields have done lots of studies on it. These studies mainly concentrate on ethnomethodology, interactional sociolinguistics and linguistics. But few researches study conflict talk from the pragmatic perspective.This thesis attempts to introduce Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory into the study on conflict talk and tries to figure out the reasons why conflict talk occurs from the pragmatic perspective.According to Verschueren, communication is an adaptation process. Only by the language users making continuous language choices to adapt to the context, can the communicative goal be achieved smoothly. There are three aspects the communicators should adapt to in the communicative process:physical world, social world and mental world. As to conflict talk, the reasons why it happens lies in the failure to make adaptation to the three worlds which communication process takes place in.The only way to solve the problems is to figure out the reasons why they happen. Thus the study on the causes of conflict talk is meaningful for our daily communication. But the reasons for conflict talk are complicated. Sometimes it is caused by several reasons, such as emotion, cognition and culture. So it is expected that the present study could present a more comprehensive and systematic analysis to this language phenomenon.