Conversational Analysis Of Conflict Talk Between Lovers Based On American Soap Opera Gossip Girl

Conflict talk is a common linguistic phenomenon in everyday life. It is a type of interaction in which hostile acts are exchanged between two or more parties. The term of conflict talk is often used in the broad sense, and it often leads to communication failure and produces barriers to successful communication, and it includes many linguistic behaviors and events, such as arguing, disputing, quarreling, opposing and squabbling. Researchers from home and abroad in these fields have worked from different perspectives, such as pragmatic perspective, sociolinguistic perspective and ethnmethodological perspective. This thesis makes an attempt to analyze conflict talk systematically from pragmatic perspective.The theoretical framework of this paper is based on Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's Relevance Theory and the theory of Conversational Analysis by Harvey Sacks and his associates. This present study analyzes the conflict talk happened between lovers in American soap opera Gossip Girl. This paper uses data driven analysis. The present study is based on the data collected following the four phrases of spoken discourse analysis: first, getting the conversations from compact disc; second, writing the data from the subtitles; third, analyzing the collected data, and lastly, reporting the findings.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one gives a general introduction including the research background, purpose and significance and the organization of the study. In Chapter two and Chapter three, the relevant literature review and the theoretical framework are done, and it is given the data collection and research methodology. Chapter four is the main part of the paper, which analyzes features with the help of relevance theory and analyzes the reasons with the help of conversational analysis. Chapter five summarizes the major findings and the limitations of the study and recommendation for future research.