An Adaptation-theoretic Study Of Conflict Talks Between Couples In Desperate Housewives

Conflict talks are confrontations or disputes caused by different views of the speaker andthe hearer. As universal and complex linguistic phenomena, they often occur in everyday life.Many scholars have carried out studies of conflicts from the point of conversational analysis,ethnography of communication, intercultural communication, and interactive sociolinguistics.However, most of these studies focus on general causes and developing process of conflict talks,and few of the studies analyze conflict talks of specific types from perspective of AdaptationTheory. Taking Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory as theoretical foundation, and usingconversations between couples in American TV series Desperate Housewives as research data,this thesis analyzes and explores the causes of conflict talks, and proposes some terminationstrategies.According to the Adaptation Theory, the causes of conflicts between couples will beexamined from three dimensions: mental, social and physical world. Conflict talks betweencouples are face-threatening acts, in which husbands and wives maintain their position byopposing actions. Adaptive strategies that may contribute to the ending of conflicts should beadaptive to minimize the degree of face threat in the termination of conflict talks.Conflict talks are inevitable in our everyday life, especially between couples. In the view ofadaptation, such utterances are usually rooted in the couples’ different consciousness and mentalstates in the above mentioned three worlds. In other words, the language choices in theconversation consciously or unconsciously adapt to speaker’s communicative context, andviolate that of the hearer’s. Some termination strategies are proposed in the thesis such as the useof humor and hedges.