The Conversation Analysis Of Conflict Talks In2012’s TV Debates Between Obama And Romney

Conflict is a common social phenomenon and conflict talk exists everywhere in our dailycommunication. Due to different educational background and life experience, the speakingparties do have differences in world values, outlooks on life and values, then one speakingparty refutes another speaking party and they may dispute, quarrel, argue, then conflict talkoccurs. So far, many researchers have done a lot of work on conflict talk from differentaspects and angles. However, few studies put its focus on the political conflict talk based onthe theory of conversation analysis.This thesis attempts to analyze the examples of conflict talk which are collected from thethree TV debates between Obama and Romney in America’s57thpresident election in2012under the method of qualitative analysis. The research mainly includes four procedures: firstly,to establish the research objects and collect research video recordings; secondly, to transferthe video recordings into words; thirdly, to set up the research rules and then to do datatranscription and data analysis; fourthly, to summarize the research findings.Having done a detailed transcription and analysis of the collected examples of conflicttalk, the author presents in the present study how conflict conversations between Obama andRomney in the three debates are initiated, maintained and terminated. In the initiation stage,they mainly employ disagreement and opposing question to initiate conflict debates; in themaintaining stage, argumentation, repetition, interruption&overlap and negation are theformats to promote the development of conflict talks; in the termination stage, due to timelimitation and debate tasks, topic-shifting and the intervention of a third party serve as the twoforms of termination.This thesis is divided into six chapters. Chapter one presents a brief introduction of theresearch background, objectives, significance and outline of the thesis. Chapter twosummarizes the literature review of previous studies of conflict talk both at home and abroadand points out the originality of the present thesis. Chapter three illustrates the theory ofconversation analysis which serves as the theoretical framework of the thesis; Chapter fourserves as the main part of the whole thesis, in which the author introduces the researchmethodology, data collection and the detailed analysis of conflict talk examples which are collected from the three TV debates between Obama and Romney. Chapter five concludes theimplications of the present study for future research and oral English teaching. Chapter six isthe last section which concludes the major findings and limitations of this study and putsforward suggestions for future study.This is the first time the author has done research on conflict talks which occur in thethree TV debates between Obama and Romney. While there are indeed some findings andcontributions to the related fields, due to the limited experience and young age of the author,there are still defects. The research needs to be perfected by future researchers and scholars.