A Study On The Contextual Adaptation Of Parent-child Conflict Talk

It is usually said that conflicts exist everywhere at any time. One of the contradictory expressions during the process of interpersonal communication lies in the usage of conflict talk. As a common language phenomenon, conflict talk stands for two or more sides of communication that fall into discourse confrontation or contentious state due to disagreements. One branch—Parent-child conflict talk refers in particular to the conflict which occurs between parents and children.The earliest studies on conflict talk can be traced back to the late 1970s. As the study level of conflict talk has been gradually broadened and deepened, many scholars have gained fruitful achievements. There have been different approaches to conflict talk from discourse analysis, communication ethnography and cross-cultural communication to interactional sociolinguistics. Nevertheless, by reviewing the existing literature, the author of this thesis found that most researches concentrated on analyzing the mode, origin and process of conflict talk and there are rare cases of research on a certain kind of conflict talk with the aid of a specific theory.In view of this situation, the thesis makes an attempt to choose Verschueren’s adaptation theory as a theoretical framework and linguistic data of conflict talk in American sitcom Modern Family season 1 to season 5. Qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis are adopted to explore the context adaptation of parent-child conflict talk. Under this framework, conflict talk is defined as the results of dynamic language choice without adapting to contextual factors.Through the detailed analysis, some conclusions can be drawn as following:the explanatory power of linguistic adaptation makes it possible for its widespread application in daily conversation analysis. For the reason that adolescence is the transitory stage from childhood to adulthood, parent-child conflicts occur constantly in this period. In Modern Family, accusations, negations and concessions are one of the most frequently used formats in the initiating stage, escalating stage and terminating stage respectively. In terms of the reason, this is because parents and children fail to adapt to each other’s physical world (time, space and nonverbal factors), social world (culture, nationality and social status) and mental world (cognition and emotion). Hereby, corresponding adaptation strategies are advanced: formulating a set of principles like forbidding abusive language, peaceful negotiations instead of arguments, temporary separation and lifelong learning.In brief, by concretely analyzing parent-child conflict talk with the help of adaptation theory, the thesis not only expands the applied scope of this theory but also effectively resolves or terminates conflict talk and promotes rapport of parents and children as well as the construction of a harmonious society.