A Pragmatic Study Of Conflict Talk At Workplace Fromthe Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As a social phenomenon,conflict talk happens a lot in various contexts,which presents great challenge to effective communication.It has been commonly acknowledged that conflict talk is a kind of face-threatening speech act which could cause detrimental effects on human interaction.Given its prevalence and complexity,it’s of significant meaning to probe into different mechanisms behind conflict talk.So far,conflict has become an unavoidable part of organizational life,which as a result put much pressure on employees at work.Under such circumstance,the present study focuses on conflict talk at workplace,in the hope of providing some insights for people to construct harmonious interpersonal relationships at work.Based on the pragmatic perspective,this study addresses three research questions:(1)what are the pragmatic functions embodied in the use of conflict talk at workplace?(2)how do interlocutors initiate conflict talk at workplace?(3)how do interlocutors choose different conflicting response strategy to terminate conflict talk at workplace? To fully investigate these questions,both quantitative and qualitative approach are adopted in this study.All the data is chosen from an American TV series,The Newsroom,which tells a story on how people work in a TV station.After identification and transcription,112 episodes of conflict talk at workplace are collected for analysis,among which half of them happens between interlocutors of similar power rank and the rest half happens between superiors and subordinates.In the study,it has been found that there are mainly four pragmatic functions behind the use of conflict talk at workplace,which are self-interest protection,venting negative emotions,reaching working consensus as well as attacking people.As for the initiation of conflict talk,the research shows that interlocutors’ adaptation failures to the contextual factors of physical world,social world and mental world can further lead to the conflict talk at workplace.It’s noted that the majority of conflict talks are triggered by interlocutor’s failure to the mental world,taking up 52.68% of the dataset.The adaptation failure to the social world comes after with 43.75% of the total number.By contrast,only3.57% of conflict talks are caused by the adaptation failure to the physical world.After the conflict talk occurs,the interlocutors will adopt either mitigated response strategy or aggregated response strategy to end their conflict.These two different response strategies can be achieved in different ways.Usually,the mitigated response strategy includes submission,compromise,humor and topic-shifting.As for the aggregated response strategy,it includes direct disagreement and intensification.And in both context(conflict talk with colleagues and conflict talk with superiors),the mitigated response strategy is used more often than the aggregated response strategy.To sum up,this study centers on the conflict talk at workplace,which helps to improve people’s pragmatic awareness of conflict talk as well as their interpersonal skills.It’s expected that such study can contribute to a better understanding of conflict talk and shed some lights on the future study.