A Pragmatic Study On The Conflict Talk Between Parents And Children From The Perspective Of Speech Accommodation Theory

Conflict talk is a complicated and common linguistic phenomenon in daily verbalcommunication. It refers to disputable utterances produced in the course of the verbalcommunication involving fields such as social psychology as well as linguistics and so on.Conflict talk exists everywhere in our daily life and almost occurs among any communicators.Among all kinds of conflict talk, conflict talk between parents and children is a representativeone. If this kind of conflict talk can not be handled properly, it will to a large extent affect oreven hinder the communication between the two generations, which will be unfavorable to theconstruction of harmonious home environment. Therefore, the analysis of the conflict talkbetween parents and children can be helpful not only for the avoidance, mitigation andelimination of the conflict talk but also for the promotion of mutual communication andunderstanding between the two sides so as to create a decent home environment and have apositive influence on the development of the society.This thesis aims to analyze the conflict talk between parents and children in the light ofSpeech Accommodation Theory. This theory was put forward by Giles, Powesland, Couplandand many other scholars in1970s with the aim to discuss the social and psychological or otherrestricting factors involved in the verbal communication and the influence they have onpeople’s choice of linguistic signs, language forms, communicative strategies, linguistic style,as well as the interactive effect of the context course. The core idea of SpeechAccommodation Theory is that in different communicative situations the speaker will adjusthis or her own utterances according to different communicative motives as well as purposes,that is, converge with or diverge from the listener’s verbal style. Based on the above, thisthesis also combines Speech Accommodation Theory with the relative ideas of the RapportOrientation to discuss the conflict talk between parents and children further.This study takes the American TV play The Pretty Little Liars as the language data foranalysis from which50episodes were collected and58extracts of conflict talk betweenparents and children were selected as a sub-corpus. This research makes use of qualitativeresearch method to analyze the language data. The research shows that conflict talk betweenparents and children is mainly caused by the disparity in the identity and the purpose or thestanding point of the communication between the two sides. The main pattern of the conflicttalk between the two sides is that one party of the conversation tries to diverge while the otherparty tries to converge or both of them try to diverge greatly from each other’s utterances, allof which lead to the occurrence of the conflict talk. Therefore, there must be some kind oflanguage manifestations when they diverge from or converge with each other which intensify the conflict or mitigate the conflict. In brief, the conflict talk between parents and children isessentially due to the divergence between the two because of their group discrepancy whichaccompanies corresponding language manifestations.The purpose of the study is to deepen strengthen the explanatory power ofsocio-pragmatic theories on conflict talk through the analysis of the conflict talk betweenparents and children. This research is also very helpful in instructing the interlocutors tochoose the appropriate communicative strategies to obtain the perfect interactive effect in thecourse of the initiation, development and termination of the conflict talk. This thesis still triesto apply the research results to the parents’ education of their children as well as enhancementof the harmonious relationship between the two sides, and is looking forward to making acontribution to the study of the conflict talk between parents and children as well as theconstruction of harmonious family or even society.