A Power Relation Study On Typical Verbal Conflicts In Academy Award For Best Picture Winners

In daily life, verbal conflict is a natural language phenomenon. It is anopposing speech act which occurs between two sides or among several sides. Verbalconflict frequently occurs in people’s communication. Broadly speaking, verbalconflict includes types of interaction such as argument, quarrel, and disputes.Narrowly speaking, verbal conflict refers to a type of speech act, such as disagreeing,opposing, and arguing. Whether it is defined from a broad sense or a narrow sense,verbal conflict shows that one participant is in disagreement with another when theyhave different interests or opinions, which often leads to communication breakdownsand creates barriers to successful communication.In recent years, many scholars have done further research on verbal conflict,which attracts the attention of such fields as sociology, anthropology, linguistics,psychology. Scholars and professionals in many countries have been exploring verbalconflict from different fields and perspectives. However, because the forms of verbalconflict are different and it is hard to gather the data easily, verbal conflict does notreceive much attention.This thesis manages to analyze verbal conflict systematically mainly from theperspectives of power relation. In order to enunciate the author’s view, this thesis alsoemploys face theory and turn-taking as the auxiliary theories. The present studybelongs to qualitative study based on the data collected from the typical verbalconflicts in some representative films winning. This thesis analyzes the structure ofthe conflict talks, in which three phases are analyzed respectively: the initiating phase,the maintaining or escalating phase, and the terminating phase. Besides, this thesissummarizes the characteristics of verbal conflict and puts forward the strategies ofdealing with verbal conflict.According to the analysis of the corpus of the typical verbal conflicts, thefollowing results are obtained. As for the process of a verbal conflict,(1) there arefour formats of initiating conflict talks in the first phase: ignorance, demand vs. refusal, accusation vs. justification and uncooperative action.(2) In the phase ofescalating verbal conflict, contradiction and correction and disobedience are twomajor formats.(3) Among the formats within the terminating phase, compromise,third party intervention, and withdrawal are three major formats employed. Besides,the characteristics of verbal conflict are the low power’s counteroffensive, stalematebetween the speakers with same power and conversion of power relations. Forimproving the efficiency and harmony of conversations, the author puts forward twostrategies: reducing power position and raising discourse power. Although thesefindings come from the dramatic dialogues occurring in the fictional situation, theymight have influences on the research of naturally occurring conflict talks because ofthe similarity between the language in the movies and the language in the real life.It is expected that this thesis could present a more comprehensive andsystematic illustration of verbal conflict. Moreover, the thesis probes into the socialsignificance of the study on conflict talk by analyzing formats of initiation, escalationand termination of verbal conflict and summarizing the characteristics of verbalconflict for the purpose of achieving reunification and harmony in communication.