A Pragmatic Study On A Third Party 's Strategies Of Terminating Conflict Talk

Conflict talk, as a common practice in human interaction, has been attracting researchers'attention all the time. Studies on conflict talk varied, focusing on its different aspects, ranging from the perspective of speech act to that of human interaction, from the structure of the conflict event to the features of the discourse and so on. In recent years, more attention has been attracted to the study of the two disputants'strategies of terminating conflict talk. Whereas, apart from the two disputants involved in conflict talk, a third party often presents in the scene and sometimes plays a key role in ending conflict talk. But, researches dealing with conflict resolution strategies of a third party are hardly done, since, up till now, only a few papers focusing on a third party's involvement in conflict talk can be found, most of which are about conflict discourses of institutionalized settings, such as court debates. However, in ordinary occasions, what strategies a third party employs to terminate conflict talk has not received due attention.So, the author of this paper attempts to make an empirical study on a third party's linguistic strategies of terminating conflict talk from the pragmatic perspective. Obviously, there are too many factors, which influence the choice of strategies to end conflict talk by a third party, to be discussed in one paper. Thus, based on Brown and Levinson's"face"theory, this paper holds that Social Power, among all the factors, is the decisive one. After an analysis of the data collected from the American television series, Lizzie McGuire, a third party's strategies are summed up, and the explanation made with the help of the"face"theory.This thesis mainly concerns the following two questions:1. In ordinary conversations, what strategies does a third party employ to terminate conflict talk?2. How does Social Power affect a third party's choice of those strategies?The American television series, Lizzie McGuire, are chosen to be the data resources. The 44 conflict episodes, with a third party to terminate the conflict talk, are selected and recorded after being watched repeatedly by the author. The data are examined from the two dimensions: control of Face-Threatening Acts (FTA for short) to the disputants and control of outcomes. Thus the strategies of terminating conflict talk by a third party are summarized as follows: Order Strategy, Interruption Strategy, Suggestion Strategy, Humor Strategy, Equivocation Strategy, Collaboration Strategy, Question Strategy and Strategy Combination.The study proves that Social Power is the decisive factor in a third party's choice of strategies to terminate conflict talk. Social Power can be divided into Initial Social Power and Temporarily-changed Social Power. The former is static, deciding a third party's choice of strategies. The latter is temporary and revocable, which works on a third party to change or substitute strategies in a certain context. The data statistics show that when a third party's Social Power ranks above the disputants', the frequency of Order Strategy used by the third party is the highest; When a third party's Social Power equals the disputants', Suggestion Strategy and Collaboration Strategy adopted by a third party rise to the top; When a third party's Social Power is lower than one side or both sides of the disputants', Interruption Strategy, Humor Strategy, Equivocation Strategy and Question Strategy are often employed. When certain contextual elements temporarily alter a third party's Social Power, he/she may break the above rules of Social Power and strategy choosing, and goes from one strategy to another, or directly jumps to the other strategy.Being the pragmatic study of the conflict resolution strategies of a third party, the present study supplements the existing studies to some extent. Due to the limitation of the author's academic research experience and amount of data obtained, it still calls for further research.