An Analysis Of Conflict Talk From The Perspective Of Speech Act Theory

Conflict talk is a common linguistic phenomenon in interpersonal communications, which takes continuous and controversial language turns as specific form. In the framework of Speech Act Theory, this thesis tries to conduct qualitative analysis and statistical weight of conflict talks in the hit TV series Empresses in the palace. The present study makes an attempt to analyze the causes and patterns of conflict talks, and hence to explore the pragmatic strategies of dissolving them. According to the present study, we know that due to the differences of sense of values, positions, beliefs and desires, conflict talks inevitably occur between different parties, and the fundamental reasons include:improper theme, improper condition, improper performance and improper effect. But no matter what kind of conflict it is, after the clash, more or less, communicators usually use different methods or external interference to soften or digest the conflict, such as topic transferring, compromising, maintaining, third party intervention, environmental termination, and one party withdrawal, etc..The study is carried out in seven chapters. It starts from the introductory part, which introduces the orientation, rationale, theoretical framework, objectives, data collection, and research methodology of this thesis.Chapter Two presents a review of previous studies and findings on conflict talks at home and abroad. Many scholars conducted studies on conflict talks from different perspectives and achieved certain findings, but a recognized and comprehensive definition has not yet been formed till now. Not only that, the current researches on conflict talks were only isolated on the language forms and the inducing factors, lacked a complete analyzing framework to integrate all these contents, and did not pay enough attention to the dynamic speech characteristics.Based on the Speech Act Theory, Chapter Three constructs the theoretical framework of the study. Austin’first shot at the theory is the claim that there are two types of sentences:performatives and constatives. According to his point of view, the utterance of sentences is, or is a part of doing of an action, so they are called performatives. In most cases, a speaker might be performing three acts simultaneously when speaking: locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act. Based on Austin’s findings, Searle made a re-classification of illocutionary acts, and put forward the famous indirect speech act theory, which indicated that the implementation of an illocutionary force is indirectly achieved by the implementation of another speech act. So far, the Speech Act Theory has developed into a mature theory system. It not only paid attention to the close relationship between meaning and speech act, but also emphasized the relationship between meaning and context. The term conflict talk in this thesis mainly refers to the verbal interaction process, in which both sides oppose to each other for the purpose of maintaining their own point of views or interests in interpersonal communications. Therefore, the systematic analysis of its causes, manifestations and pragmatic strategies in the framework of Speech Act Theory can enable us to alleviate and eliminate conflict talks effectively in our daily communications.Chapter Four to Chapter six is the main part of this thesis. In Chapter Four, based on the theory of performatives and constatives, the thesis defines and classifies the quality of the selected corpus, and hence points out that due to the differences of sense of values, positions, beliefs, desires and living experiences etc., people inevitably initiate controversial speech acts towards others. Besides, this thesis also classifies conflict talks from the perspectives of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary.Then Chapter Five analyzes the causes of conflict talks, and we believe that speech act of conflict will occur when both sides can not satisfy certain "appropriate conditions". Conflict talk is a dynamic speech process, this chapter also analyzes its initiation and responses from the direct and indirect aspects respectively.With the help of Hart’s theory of Internal opinion and External opinion, Chapter Six points out that the fundamental positions of both sides are the key factors that determine the consistency of their internal opinions. And language or non-language pragmatic strategies that put forward in this thesis may help one party to alleviate conflict talk.Then in Chapter Seven, this thesis sums up its findings:(1) In the process of interpersonal communications, the causes of conflict talk are various:criticism, complaining and accountability are main factors that cause conflicts easily, while negative statement can hardly cause conflict;(2)During verbal conflicts, people prefer to choose indirect responses, among which the disagreeing and rhetorical questions hit the highest frequency;(3)Among direct responses, explanatory responses hit the highest frequency, while irrelevant ones appear with the lowest percentage;(4)On the issue of alleviating conflict talks, those strategies in language forms are preferred than those in non-language forms. And among those strategies in language forms, maintaining is preferred than topic transferring and compromising.Due to various reasons, some problems are still left for further discussion. For example, for people of different backgrounds, is there any preference on selecting pragmatic strategies? In addition, the corpus comes from the TV works. Although it is typical, the corpus itself is processed and refined, and is still different from those conflict talks in real life. In spite of this, we still hope that the study may further enrich and improve the research on conflict talk, and provide inspiration for people to alleviate and eliminate conflict talk.