Pragmatic Analysis Of Comflict Talk In Workplace Based On The Reality Show The Apprentice

Conflict is an interactive behavior that exists everywhere in social activities ofhuman at all levels. Conflict talk is a reflection of conflict in conversation. It is a kind ofspeech act of non-cooperation which arises because of different characters, values,views and attitudes. In the narrow sense, it refers to a type of speech act, e.g.disagreement and opposing. In the broad sense, it means a type of speech event, e.g.oppositional argument, quarrel and disputing. No matter which term is adopted, onecommon feature remains unchanged, that is, one participant disagrees with anotherparticipant due to different opinions and standpoints, constituting an obstacle ofsuccessful communication.In the1980s, this interesting language phenomenon began to draw the attention ofresearchers in various fields, such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguisticsand so on. And conflict talk has been studied from different aspects. Because conflicttalk is regarded as a type of disorderly discourse and the data is not easy to gather,conflict talk hasn t received enough attention in the field of linguistics. Compared withthe study of conflict talk abroad, the study on conflict talk at home is still in thebeginning stage. Study on conflict talk in workplace is even rarer.This thesis attempts to conduct a pragmatic study of conflict talk in workplacebased on the corpus with68conflict episodes excerpted from the American Reality TVseries The Apprentice. Qualitative and quantitative methodology is adopted in thepresent study. Through the analysis of conflict talks in The Apprentice, three phases ofconflict talk in English environment are analyzed systematically: the starting modes, thedeveloping modes and the terminating modes. The author intends to find some regularrules of conflict talk in workplace and present a detailed discussion of them on the basisof cooperative principle, politeness principle, face theory and speech act theory.The analysis of conflict talk in The Apprentice leads to the following findings: first,there are mainly three formats of starting conflict: claim-counter claim, order-refusaland provoking question-opposing answer. Disputants tend to adopt relatively indirectexpressions to avoid further argument. Second, conflict talk develops in six formats, ofwhich interruption, negation, posing questions and defense are frequently employed.Third, there are six formats of terminating phase: concession, compromise, withdrawal, third party intervention, topic shifting and humor. As the language adopted in realityshow is extremely similar to that in real life, the findings of this study shed light on theoccurrence and construction of conflict talk in workplace in real life.