A Pragmatic Study On Chinese Implicit Conflict Talk At Work

Based on conversation analysis and socio-cognitive approach to pragmatics,this thesis probes into the unfolding patterns of Chinese ICTs at work and examines the reasons for the occurrence of it.Conflict talk is a pervasive and complicated language phenomenon which frequently occurs in daily communication.The researchers home and abroad have conducted numerous studies on conflict talks regarding their structures,strategies,and the culture and gender difference.However,most conflict talks studied are expressed in a direct and explicit manner,for which they are named as explicit conflict talk(ECT),while those that happen in an indirect and implicit manner,i.e.implicit conflict talk(ICT),have drawn little attention.There are few studies on the Chinese ICTs happening in the special and subtle workplace culture.Even the current studies on ICTs are restricted by the consideration from the single perspective of speaker or hearer,and the interactions between the speaker and hearer are rarely seen as an organic unity.Thus,the motivation of this thesis is to conduct an investigation on the Chinese ICTs at work from the perspectives of both the speaker and hearer.In this thesis,the unfolding patterns and conversation features of ICT at work were investigated by using conversation analysis(CA)and the reasons for the occurrence of ICTs at work were analyzed by considering the speaker and hearer as a unity in accordance with socio-cognitive approach(SCA)theory,in which the occurrence of ICTs has close correlation with both the speaker and hearer.Power relation,which is frequently neglected in the past research,is additionally introduced and adopted for the purpose of more concretely revealing the features of Chinese ICTs at work.Eighty pieces of ICT were collected from the following two realistic TV series: Du Lala Sheng Zhi Ji,Fu Chen.Then the collected data were transcribed according to Gail Jefferson's transcription conventions.The transcribed data were then analyzed so as to investigate the unfolding patterns and conversation features of ICT.By analyzing the collected ICT,the following conclusions are drawn: 1)The unfolding patterns of initiating Chinese ICTs at work include claim vs.counter claim,directive vs.refusal,and provoking question vs.opposed answer.The participants in the ICT are inclined to choose indirect expressions to avoid further development of ICT into ECT;2)In the development stage of ICT,opposing questions and negation are two main unfolding patterns;3)Among the nine unfolding patterns in the termination stage,victory of one party,topic-shift,and withdrawal are three most frequently used patterns.4)The power relation plays a crucial role in three stages of ICT.In these three stages,the strong power party usually has more turn-takings and longer turn-taking length than the weak power party.Moreover,most of the ICTs at work are initiated by the strong power party and terminate with the failure of the weak power party.5)As for the initiation stage,the reason for the extensive use of provoking questions and interrogative sentences mainly lies in the egocentrism of communication.In the development stage,the contradiction between intention and attention promotes the development of ICT.In the termination stage,the fulfillment of one's communicative intention brings ending to the ICT,while the weak power party usually is the loser party.Unbalanced distribution of turn-takings in these three stages is mainly influenced by the power relations.6)This thesis also finds that the root that leads to the occurrence of Chinese ICTs at work lies in the egocentrism of communication,which is mainly reflected in the contradiction between prior context and actual situational context and the contradiction of intention and attention.