Pragmatic Approach To Conflict Talk Between Couples In Desperate Housewives

The terms used for conflict talk can denote narrow sense——a type of speech act, for instance: disagreeing, opposing, and arguing; or broad sense——a type of interaction: the adversative episode, oppositional argument, quarrel, and disputes. The terms have one core common feature, that is, one participant is disagreeing with another participant when they have different interests or opinions. Researches on conflict talk have been extensively done in numerous fields, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics and so on, but pragmatic researches on the conflict talk are rather limited and there are even fewer pragmatic researches on the conflict talk between couples in literature. Since there isn't sufficient research on the speech act of conflict talk between couples, this paper intends to contribute to fill this gap with a careful study on the conflict talk between couples based on quantitative and qualitative analysis mainly focusing on the pragmatic strategies involved. The study is carried out in the following two parts.The previous two chapters construct a theoretical framework for analyzing conflict talk between couples. After briefing the definition of the conflict talk, Chapter one presents a review of previous studies on conflict talk and conflict talk between couples. Chapter two lays down the theoretical framework of the study, on the basis of speech act theory, conversation analysis and politeness theory.The second part consists of Chapter three, Chapter four and Chapter five, which are devoted to the analysis of the conflict talk between couples. Chapter Three introduces the research methodology and data collection. The television series, Desperate Housewives are chosen to build up a corpus with 152 conflict episodes between couples. Chapter four carries out the quantitative and qualitative data analysis. Pragmatic strategies used by the couples are identified with their frequency computed. Chapter five discusses the results of the data analysis. In the conflict talk between couples, the husband and wife employ similar strategies of initiating conflict talks and terminating them as well. But they differ in the frequency of using certain kinds of the strategies. The strategy of counterclaim which easily escalates confrontations is the most frequently used by the husbands and wives. The wives use more strategies of Non-FTA to terminate their arguments. These similarities and differences are further illustrated from the perspective of gender.Being the first pragmatic study of the conflict talk between couples on quantitative and qualitative analysis, the present study supplements the existing studies to some extent, but still calls for further research.