An Analysis Of Conflict Discourse Of Chinese Mother - In - Law

In our daily communication, people’s different characters, values and different socio-cultural backgrounds often cause people’s different attitudes towards the same thing, which can lead to verbal debates, contradictions and even heated arguments. We can call these arguments conflict talk. In recent years, the television series about modern Chinese mother-in-law and daughter-in-law sweeps across the screen which becomes the new corpus for the study of conflict talk. The paper is based on modern Chinese popular television series about mother-in-law and daughter-in-law as the data sources. The paper adopts the qualitative approach studying the initiating stage, maintaining or escalating stage and terminating stage of the conflict talk between Chinese mother-in-law and daughter-in-law on the theoretical framework of conversation analysis and politeness theory to explore the initiating format, maintaining or escalating format, terminating format of the conflict talk and present face threatening acts implied in these formats. At last, the paper obtains the percentage of each format in different stages by quantitative analysis. The paper aims to help Chinese mother-in-law and daughter-in-law avoid the occurrence of conflict talk in their daily communication and choose appropriate politeness strategies.