A Text-based Study Of Cultural Conflicts In The Joy Luck Club

Based on H.P. Grice's Cooperative Principle and Brown and Levinson's Politeness Principle, the focus of this thesis concerns exploring the cultural conflicts behind language use (such as communicative behavior, the use of silence, lexical items) through concordance search from the perspective of pragmatics.Language can be regarded as the most intrinsical element in the research on culture. The cultural conflicts are mainly embodied in generation discourse and gender discourse. The thesis is divided into six chapters. Chapter One provides a general introduction to my research. It also discusses the practicality and feasibility of using corpus. First the software Concapp is downloaded then the text of the novel is set up. Since the novel contains 16 independent stories narrated by 4 pairs of mothers and daughters, we can put the story of first generation together and that of the second generation together as two different texts, each one being created as a separate corpus for further research.Chapter Two dwells on the relevant materials, concerning the life background of the writer and the reviews on the novel from cultural and stylistic approach.Chapter Three lays the foundation for the study, discussing Cooperative Principle, face-saving theory, politeness strategies and directness and indirectness. Face plays an importance role in communication and it is composed of"involvement"(positive face) and"independence"(negative face). Therefore, communicators must take these factors into consideration to achieve successful communication. Otherwise conflicts will arise.Chapter Four introduces the empirical study. The emphasis is placed on verbal communication and nonverbal communication. The research starts from examining the frequency of words in the corpus, then moves to search for collocations of keywords and to study the deep meaning behind them in order to demonstrate the process of conflicts between mothers and daughters and probes into their communicative style. The finding is that mothers prefer indirectness while daughters prefer directness. When these conflicts become intensified, they plunge into non-verbal communication---silence. Silence not only exists in generation discourse, but also in gender discourse. Statistics about pronouns and color words further demonstrate the conflict between Chinese culture and American mainstream culture.Chapter Five works on the cultural conflicts that are based on the findings revealed in the Chapter Four. Chapter Six is the conclusion part.It gets to the conclusion that in bicultural environment, the daughters on the one hand protest mothers'communicative style and culture values, on the other hand, they are confused by themselves, feel lost about themselves until the similar experience in marriage makes daughters reexamine their cultural value and identity. Through reshaping cultural identities, they find the way to break the silence and solve the conflicts between genders and generations.The significance of this thesis mainly lies in its theoretical and empirical investigation. Theoretically, it explores cultural conflicts by analyzing directness and indirectness of language. Empirically, it breaks through the flood of qualitative analysis in the current research on literature. But both qualitative and quantitative analyses are indispensable and the former should take the dominant position.