Critical Discourse Analysis Of Conflict Talks In American Soap Opera Desperate Housewives

Conflict talk is a complicated and universal language phenomenon, whichfrequently appears in people's daily communication. Research on conflict talk hasbeen extensive in numerous fields, e.g., philosophy, rhetoric, anthropology, sociology,psychology, and linguistics. Therefore, conflict talk can be regarded as a researchsubject worth exploring.This thesis adopted dialogues of a soap opera as data and mainly tookadvantage of qualitative analysis on it. The specific data came from a popular soapopera Desperate Housewives which has been on air on the station ABC in Americasince 2004, and the writer chose the first ten episodes of season one from it asresearch objects.According to CDA, any language can not be objective and behind it must hidesome ideologies of language users. CDA has insisted in regarding discourses as anorganic part of social practice, emphasizing on the study of the society better throughdiscourse analysis. CDA investigates ideology and the relationship between language,power, and ideology by analyzing linguistic features and social historical backgroundin which they are generated. Scholars have applied CDA in mass written discoursesand historical popular written discourses such as news reports, law documents andpolitical addresses. In comparison, the study on its application in daily spokendiscourses, for example, soap operas or films, has been very few. This article aims atushering CDA into spoken discourse of the arena of soap opera DesperateHousewives (audience rating 1st, 2004, station ABC, USA) which involves numerousconflict talks happening between people, especially the conflict talks between womenand their husbands, their children, their friends and strangers. Through analysis ofthese conflict talks, it is clear to find some ideologies of American middle classwomen to show the non-objectivity of language.As we all know, conversational analysis is a common and effective method toanalyze spoken and written discourse. This thesis tries to use cooperation principles,politeness principles and face theory to analyze the start, escalation, and end ofconflict talks in order to suggest how some principles affect the stages of conflict talksand to help to reveal ideologies behind those conflict talks.Conflict talk research is a very challenging field. Moreover, to take criticaldiscourse analysis as theory and to take conversational analysis as a method are a new try.