Pragmatic Analysis Of Conflict Talks Between Lovers In Jane Eyre

The research into conflict and its discourse has resulted in a myriad of conceptualization, terms, and definitions. Argument is one of the most used terms. Argument may be used in the formal tradition of argumentation. It considers the rhetorical construction of argument, and is a verbal, social and rational activity used to convince a reasonable critic of the acceptability of a standpoint by putting forward a constellation of proposition justifying or refuting the proposition stated in the standpoint. Argument can be regarded as a type of speech act.Conflict can be used on two different levels. First, in a narrow sense, conflict is defined as a speech activity in which two parties attempt to maintain their own positions by means of opposition. Secondly, or more broadly, conflict talk can be viewed as a process of opposition which includes not only the manifestation of opposition, but the whole process of inducement, initiation, development, and management of opposition. Therefore, conflict talk can include various speech acts and speech events, such as arguing, disputing, quarreling, opposing and squabbling.Conflict talk belongs to a complex speech act. Indirect speech act is another important part of Speech Act Theory. Indirect speech is used when one says something but actually means something else. That is the illocutionary. As with conflict talk, illocutionary might be realized through different acts such as counterclaiming, questioning and contradicting.Conflict talk between lovers is characterized by face threatening acts (FTA). During the performance of FTA, speaker might judge three social variables, including social distance, relative power and ranking of impositions.Researches on conflict talk have been done in numerous fields, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and so on. However, pragmatic researches on the conflict talk are very limited and researches on conflict talk between lovers are more limited. Considering there is room left, this paper intends to make a little contribution to fill this gap with a careful study on the conflict talk between lovers in the novel Jane Eyre.Based on Speech Act and Politeness Theory, with Conversation Analysis as a methodology, this thesis analyzed the conflict talk between the hero and heroine. According to the analysis, it is concluded that counterclaim, contradiction, contradiction-counterclaim, opposing questions and focus-shifting are the major strategies used by the two lovers to deal with conflict talks. Of all the strategies, the most frequently used is counterclaim, contradiction-counterclaim ranks the second, contradiction the third, opposing question the fourth and the focus-shifting is the least used. This thesis finds four factors that influence the hero and heroine’s choice of strategy, namely politeness, differences in social position, gender differences in expressing approval and upsurge of female consciousness.