A Survey On Conflict Talks Among College Female Students In Interpersonal Communication

Conflict talk is a ubiquitous and complicated social linguistic phenomenon. However, because of its disorderly linguistic structure and difficulty in collecting authentic data, studies on conflict talks don’t draw enough attention from linguists at the beginning. Not until1990s, with the development of Conversation Analysis, scholars started to pay attention to conflict talks and did some researches on this phenomenon from various aspects. They have made great contributions to this researching area in recent years. Choosing female college students in Guangxi Normal University as the research subjects, the researcher makes an questionnaire investigation into the current situation and general features of female college students’ conflict talks in daily life. Besides, this study collects authentic conflict talks data by recording the whole process of individual interviews and transcribing the audio data into written forms. Then, based on the conflict talk data collected and the framework of Speech Act Theory and Politeness Theory, this study attempts to make a qualitative analysis of the pragmatic features of female college students’ conflict talks in the stages of initiating and escalating and the ways female college students choose to terminate a conflict talk.Data from the questionnaire survey show that conflict talk is a very common phenomenon in female college students’ campus life and dormitories are the main places where conflict talks take place frequently. Conflict talks often occur in the interpersonal communication between two female students whose relationship seems to be intimate and tend to have constructive function in improving their interpersonal relationship or occur between two parties whose interpersonal relationship seems to be so-so and tend to have destructive influence in deteriorating their interpersonal relationship. Most female college students lack of communicative skills to manage conflict talk events appropriately. Cold war and ending a relationship are the major results that conflict talks bring which affects college female students’ interpersonal communication seriously. As for school education on female college students’ psychological health and communication skills, there still exist many problems and schools should take some effective measures to help female college students build up a harmonious interpersonal relationship so as to construct a harmonious campus. Based on a qualitative analysis of the conflict talk examples data, the researcher finds out that criticism, assertion, complaint, request and insult are five main speech acts which threaten female college students’ face and initiate conflict talks easily; explanation, questioning, negation and repetition are the four main speech acts to escalate conflict talks; withdrawal, concession, the third party invention and the change of the topic are the four main methods that female college students use to end a conflict talk. The features of female college students’ conflict talks have a close relationship with both the physical and mental characteristics of female college students. Thus, based on these characteristics and the framework of Politeness Strategies Theory and Interpersonal Communication Theory, the study puts forward some strategies to manage female college students’ conflict talks effectively in order to achieve the construction of a harmonious interpersonal relationship as well as a harmonious campus.