The Conversation Analysis Of Conflict Talk In Class From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Conflict refers to a kind of contradicting or disputing state caused by the argument about different opinions, interests, principles, and purposes between groups and individuals. Its typical feature is incompatibility and contrariety. From the way of happening, conflict can be divided into verbal conflicts and non-verbal conflicts. Since the study in this thesis is about the conflict talks happening in class, it belongs to study of verbal conflicts.The conflict talk involves types of disputing speeches between participants in the process of communications. This widely and complicated existing speech act not only happens naturally and inevitably, but also can not be ignored. Therefore, as early as in1980s, many scholars start to study this language phenomenon. With the development of the study on conversation analysis in these years, scholars abroad and at home have analyzed various conflict talks from different angles together with the pragmatics, and obtained lots of significant research achievements. Among them, the most common way is to combine the conflict talks with the face threatening acts, as well as the impoliteness principles. It is agreed that impoliteness is a kind of communicative strategy leading to the formation of conflicts by affecting the hearer’s face. Therefore, the conflict talks are classified as the intensifying languages threatening the faces. In addition, some scholars in recent years try to apply the Adaptation Theory and Relevance Theory to study the inner causes of conflict talks, and find out that the main characteristics is the lack of adaptability and relevance in the communications.Based on the way of Conversation Analysis, this thesis adopts the Relevance Theory as the theoretical framework, and empirical research as the methodology for the study. After classifying and categorizing the corpus, the writer first focuses on demonstrating and analyzing the structural modes of conflict talks in class according to the its characteristics, mainly by describing how conflict talk in class is initiated, escalated, and terminated in great details with the concept of sequential organization which is proposed by Zhao Yingling. In addition, according to the feature of power existing in the formation of class conversations, the writer also addresses the pragmatic modes producing in this specific language environment from the perspective of the response strategies under the influence of power. At last, this thesis explains and proves the nature of a lack of relevance in the formation of conflict talks by using the pragmatic theory-Relevance Theory. After focusing on these concerns, the present study makes its practical functions in reducing, even avoiding the happening of conflict talks in class, guiding teachers’teaching languages, and promoting the teaching quality, ect. At the same time, it can also enrich the research achievements about conversation analysis of conflict talk in the specific context. Although, in the general cases, the negative effect of conflict talk performs much more often than the positive one in daily communications, the positive effects of conflict talk should not be ignored. In this paper, because of the limited materials, most of the examples chosen by the writers only reflect the negative effects of conflict talks in class, and no more positive one is mentioned. In addition, although the participants in class communication are mainly composed of teachers and students, the different ages, genders, grades of students, as well as the different genders, teaching subjects, and different context environments are all needed to be considered into influential factors in class conflict talks, which deserves us the further and detailed classifications and studies.