Cross-generation Conflict Talk From The Perspective Of Discourse Analysis-Contrastive Study Of I Love My Family And Growing Pains

In the discourse analysis research, verbal means of carrying out conflict have not received much attention. It was not until the early 1990s that studies in the field of linguistic research began to examine conflict communication. Owing to increasing development of discourse analysis, western linguists have carried out numerous studies of conflict talks, and a great number of findings have been achieved up till now. However, relatively little empirical work has been conducted to analyze the specific construction of conflict talks on the basis of Chinese conversation data.By comparing the parent-daughter conflict episodes in two sitcoms, the present thesis makes an attempt to explore the possible similarities and differences between Chinese and American family conversations in the two plays. These conversation data, including two groups of 34 conflict talks, are selected from a Chinese family and an American family of the two sitcoms: I Love My Family and Growing Pains. The following questions are addressed: 1) How do parent-daughter disputes arise in two families respectively and what mechanisms drive them forward in the play? 2) How do parent-daughter disputes escalate and what elements aggravate them? 3) How are parent-daughter disputes terminated and are they usually resolved? 4) Are there any significant similarities or differences in conflict conversations between the Chinese and American family in the two plays?Through the comparative analysis, three findings are obtained: 1) In the three formats of initiating phase, both Chinese and American disputants in the two plays are inclined to choose formats of claim vs. counter claim and directive vs. refusal. Disputants of American family are inclined to choose more indirect expressing way in order to avoid dispute development. 2) In the phase of maintaining, argumentative and non-obedience are two major formats; and within the two sub-formats of non-obedience, there is a smaller difference in the frequency ratio of the morphemic structure and semantic structure employed by the Chinese family members in the play to express negative intentions than that in the American family. 3) Within the five formats of the terminating phase, submission, the third party intervention and stand-off are three major ones employed in the two plays. Sometimes American disputants adopt the format of compromise to end a dispute. Although these findings come from the dramatic dialogues occurring in the fictional situation, they might shed light on the research of the model or the schema of naturally-occurring conflict talks because of the similarity between the two kinds of corpus.