Pragmatic Approach To Conflict Talk Between Parents And Teenagers In The American Television Series

Conflict talk is very common and complex in social life. From the narrow sense, it refersto a kind of speech act, such as disagreeing, opposing and arguing. From the broad sense, itrefers to a kind of hostile communicative activity that caused owing to the differences in view,interest, desire between two or more parties, such as oppositional arguments, quarrel anddisputing. Generally speaking, conflict talk is a sort of dispute or oppositional state due to adifference of opinions between the speaker and hearer which is a dynamic process (Leung2002;Zhu2008). Conflict talk has two sides. It is generally believed negative due to the failure ofcommunication. However, if properly handled, it also has a positive communicative effect.Since1980s, conflict talk started to come into view of linguists. While compared to thecountries abroad, the attention to the study of it at home was relatively late since thetwenty-first century. Therefore, the research on conflict talk is far inferior to the foreigncountries both in breadth and depth. At present, many scholars have analyzed and studiedconflict talk from different perspectives, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc..However, few researches have been done on conflict talk between parents and teenagers fromthe aspect of pragmatics.In recent year, the American television series about growth of teenagers sweeps across thetelevision screen and emerges in an endless stream, which becomes the new corpus for thestudy of conflict talk. The thesis is based on the American television series about the growth ofthe teenagers as the data sources. Based on the previous study on Conversation Analysis andPoliteness Theory, this thesis attempts to explain and elaborate the construction andmechanism of conflict talk. Then the author researches conflict talk qualitatively andquantitatively in each stage and defines the patterns of it with initiating format, maintaining orescalating format, terminating format and presents face threatening acts implied in the formats.With the quantitative analysis, the study finally reaches the percentage of each format indifferent stages.The conflict between parents and teenagers is a common social phenomenon. Through thestudy of conflict talk between American parents and teenagers, we will better understand theconflict language phenomenon and promote family harmony as well. Through analyzing andsummarizing the initiating format, maintaining or escalating format and terminating format of conflict talk, the author aims to make people further understand conflict talk between Americanparents and teenagers and realize the importance and necessity of avoiding conflict.Furthermore, by understanding the Politeness Theory, American parents and teenagers coulduse appropriate politeness strategies in dealing with their relationship, so as to reduce thenegative and destructive effects.