A Pragmatic Study On Repair Strategy In Conflict Talk

Research from home and abroad has focused on the reason fo r raising conflict, the structure of conflict talk and the way to term inate conflict. But rare attention has been attached to the study of repair in conflict. Repair is a pragm atic behavior carried by communicative information or specific purpose and it is a linguistic strategy to change the adversary’s relevant knowledge or behavior.Altogether 162 episodes of repair in conflict talk are collected from Desperate Housewives(seasons 5-8), an American TV series, as the corpus. This study aims to find out what kind of strategies the speaker takes when he/she repairs the listener in conflict talk and what are the rapport management functions of taking these strategies.Data analysis shows that there are 13 kinds of strategies adopted by the speaker to make repair in the co llected data, among wh ich strategies of citing facts and specif ic examples belong to the first category, namely direct repair strategy(with 40 episodes, accounting 24.7% of the total corpus), with the character of opposing the adversary by undeniable facts and exam ples. The second category is nam ed as “initiate repair strategy”(with 122 episodes, taking up about 75.3% of the entire corpus), with the character to initiate the listener repair by strategies of explaining, apologizing, promising, offering compensation, pragmatic empathy, making requesting, reminding, swearing, warning, threatening and commanding. By taking the first five strategies, the speaker is to m ake apology and provide compensation for the of fence he/she has caused on listener, so that the listener could forgive him/her. Through the strategies of requesting(with 16 episodes, accounting 9.9% of the total corpus), the speaker expects the listener could agree his /her request. And by swearing(with 4 episodes, accounting2.5% of the total corpus), the speaker is to express him /herself to gain the listener’s credibility. Speaker’s purpose by adopting these strateg ies is to maintain the harmonious rapport with the listener(with 72 episodes, taking up about 44.4% of the entire corpus). Listener is repaired by strategies of reminding, warning, threatening and commanding for his/her previous of fence done to speaker or an im position to change by speaker if there is a disagreem ent. To be different, taking the four strategies(with 50 episodes, covering about 30.9% of the total corpus) threatens the listener’s face and challenges the rapport between them.Based on concrete data, com bined with quantitative and qualitative research, this research has generalized the kinds of repair strategies in conflict talk by speakers and explored functions of these strategies in m aintaining rapport with the h elp of Rapport Management Theory. To some extent, this st udy enriches the research of conflict talk, especially the study on repair.