A Contrastive Study Of Conflict Talk Between Lovers In China And America From The Perspective Of Impoliteness

Conflict talk is ubiquitous or even unavoidable in daily communication. It refers tothe verbal conflict between two or more parties. Generally, it is realized by conflictivespeech acts such as opposing, quarreling, arguing, etc between two parties and thus inmost cases, conflict talk is considered to have negative effect on interpersonalrelationship and inevitably, it is linked with impoliteness.According to Culpeper (1996), impoliteness is a communicative strategy which isface-threatening in nature and may result in conflict. Since they are adopted by thespeaker as face-threatening act intentionally or deliberately, and even in some casesmaliciously, its communicative purpose or effect is negative in nature. The study ofconflict talk dated back to1970s. Recent years, as more and more people are aware ofconflict talk as a linguistic phenomenon, it has attracted more and more attention fromlinguists.1980s saw a boom of study on conflict talk, numerous conflict talks are studiedfrom a wide range of fields. Until now, researchers at home and abroad have conducted anumber of studies on conflict talk from various perspectives, most of which are from theperspective of psychology, sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Although there are manyresearches carried out on conflict talk, few are within the framework of ImpolitenessPrinciple and still fewer are adopting the contrastive method between two cultures. Thisis what motivates the author to study the conflict talk from a new perspective by combingthe Impoliteness Principle Theory and contrastive study together, which attempts toenrich the present investigations and findings and hope to give some illuminations onfuture studies.The present study adopts both qualitative and quantitative approach. The data of thisresearch is from the Chinese TV Series With the view of meteor shower (season1) andthe American TV series Gossip Girl (season3). By looking at these data, different andsimilar impolite strategies will be adopted and different response patterns between thelovers in China and America will be analyzed. At the same time, some commonpragmatic features on impolite utterances in different cultural backgrounds will be found out. The analysis of impolite output strategies and impolite pragmatic features intends togive lovers some implications on avoiding or terminating conflict talk consciously. Inaddition, the contrastive study of conflict talk in China and America will make somecontribution to the studies of cultural differences between these two countries.