The Study On Conflict Talk In Emotional TV Talk Shows

Conflict talk, which is a type of offensive and argumentative communicative act on thetwo members or much more, widely exists in daily interpersonal communication. Conflict talk,as an important research topic in the field of pragmatic research, has been studied by moreand more domestic and foreign researchers from the different perspectives since1970s, suchas conversation analysis, pragmatics, social linguistics, cognitive linguistics and so on. Butthere are few researches on conflict talk from the data of emotional TV talk shows.This thesis mainly has the study on conflict talk from the perspective of speech acttheory and the face-threatening theory, and has discussed the following questions:1) What arethe patterns of conflict talk in emotional TV talk show from the perspective of speech acttheory?2) What are the effects of conflict talk in the specific context?3) What are themitigating strategies of conflict talk on the participants and on the host of Happy Cubes?The data of this study mainly derived from the Emotional TV talk shows Happy Cubes,which broadcast in Dragon TV from Monday to Friday every week. The data will betranscribed and generalized properly, and the qualitative and quantitative research methodswill be used in the study to describe and analyze the conflict talks. This thesis proposes thefour typical patterns according to the data, such as expressives, representatives, directives andcommissives; and the main forms of response to conflict are: opposing directly, questioning,interrupting, shifting-topic, explaining, approving, keeping in silence, etc. Then it analyzes thenegative effects on threatening the speakers or hearers’ positive or negative face. Meanwhile,conflict talk can also make positive perlocutionary effects, such as：mitigating conflict,releasing the emotions and improving the interpersonal relationships. Finally, some conflictmitigating strategies on interlocutors will be proposed, such as: using humors, hedges andtransitions, keeping in silent state and topic-shifting terms; some conflict mitigating strategieson the host are: topic-interrupting with empathy and topic-interrupting with criticism.Analyzing and discussing conflict talks in emotional TV talk shows Happy Cubes fromdifferent interpersonal relationships，this study will be in favor of promoting the mutualunderstanding of family members or different personal relations, and it can reduce and avoid conflicts in everyday life. Moreover, it is benefit of constructing harmonious and happyfamilies, even a harmonious society.