Research On Couple Conflict Conversatio

Verval conflicts,arguments and quarrels within marital families and couple relationships have always been a common social behaviour and linguistic phenomenon in family interactions.Marital family is the basic unit of the social structure.Conflict talks in marital relationships and the way couples communicate are also related to other linguistic and social issues such as domestic verbal violence,children’s education,adolescent health and fertility rates,and to the stability and harmony of all aspects of society.Language issues within marital families,especially language issues between husband and wife,need urgent attention and focus,both in terms of people’s well-being and longterm social stability.Sociolinguistics in China focus more on macro-level studies than that of medium and micro levels or at the interactive level.In recent years,the study of family language has become a new hotspot in sociolinguistics.At present,family language research in China are mainly coming from the field of language policy and planning,while studies from other perspectives such as language violence,language education and legal language are also beginning to emerge.It is an inevitable trend for the development of family language research to present more diversed and nuanced research perspectives.The issue of conflict talk in marital relationships has aroused great social concern,and the study of it is of pratical social need as well as enrichment and development of our sociolinguistic research,especially family language research,which represents a new dimension on family language research,that is,family language study from interactional sociolinguistic perspective.Based on corpus from interviews,self-reflexive cases,life observations and television productions as well as couples’ reality shows,this study examines the conflict talk of couples in the context of contemporary Chinese society.The study identifies a range of ways in which conflict is constructed at the linguistic and paralinguistic levels during their conversations.Through the theory of stance and frame analysis,the ways in which these linguistic or paralinguistic features multimodally construct conflict or contribute to the development of conflictual conversations are analysed.It is also discovered that couples cope with conflict in three different methods,confrontational coping methods,avoidant coping methods,and de-escalatory coping methods.As to the sequence structure of conflict talk,couples’ conflict talk can be divided into an initiation sequence,a confrontational sequence,a stalemate sequence and an ending sequence.In actual interactions,as the couple interlocuters cope and respond differently,it is likely that one or more of these sequences may be skipped and move directly to the next stage,or to be repeated.Based on the data results of the questionnaire survey and research discussions,this paper presents a comprehensive picture of the conflict talks of couple interactions in contemporary marital families in China and dicover some main features of conflict conversations between couples in Chinese families.As regards conflict initiation,the conflict conversations of couples are interpreted from communicative,subcultural and power theoretical perspectives.Couple conflict may be a communicative failure or the result of different subcultural backgrounds of both parties,while the process of couple interaction is also the result of the two-way action of the power and connection dimensions.The paper also explores conflict attitudes and the impact of conflict on marital happiness,and offers some suggestions for healthy communication between couples.