A Pragmatic Analysis Of Conflict Talks In If Life Cheats You

Conflict talk is a complicated linguistic phenomenon, in which the speaker tries to persuade the hearer to agree with what the he/she insists through quarrels, arguments and disputes. Conflict talk includes playful conflict and serious conflict, and the later one is the focus of this study.This thesis adopts the pragmatic theories to explore conflict talks in If Life Cheats You. The theoretical foundation of this paper is conversational analysis theory by Sacks and politeness theory by Brown and Levinson. The thesis analyzes 64 conflict talks with both a quantitative method and a qualitative method. The thesis aims to figure out the structure of Chinese conflict talks and the politeness strategies adopted to avoid or mitigate conflict effectively.According to the characteristics and structure of conflict talks, these conflict talks are divided into three stages, namely the initiating stage, the maintaining stage and the terminating stage. In the initiating stage, this thesis mainly adopts turn-taking system, and preference organization to discuss how conflict talks initiate and according to different causes of conflict talks, this paper summarizes five patterns of conflict talks which are request, suggestion, irony, accusation, and silence. The study reveals that among these formats, request and accusation are the main causes of conflict. According to the language feature in maintaining stage, conflict talks can be divided into four patterns which are negation, opposing question, repetition, interruption and overlapping. This thesis figures out that negation is the most direct and simple way to claim one’s position or oppose others, so it is frequently used. Conflict talks end through five patterns, which are unexpected environment, the interference of a third party, compromise, concession and withdrawal of one party. It discovers the following findings. Unexpected environment and the interference of a third party are not strategies because they are not used on the basis of the interlocutors’own choices. The left three patterns indicate interlocutors’ strong desire to end conflict talks. Only compromise is an effective way to solve conflict because withdrawal of one party and concession are only used to end conflict talks.According to the discussion, interlocutors try to avoid face-threatening acts in a conversation, and most of them employ politeness strategies to reduce the negative effect which are brought out by face-threatening acts. In this teleplay, when speakers hold different opinions or they have to do face-threatening acts, they can employ different politeness strategies. The positive strategies are avoiding disagreement, seeking agreement, giving or asking for reasons, etc; the negative strategies are questions, giving deference, apologizing, etc. Conflict brings great negative influence on interpersonal relationship, but sometimes interlocutors try to cause conflict talks intentionally so as to achieve their own purposes in certain circumstances. That is to say, speakers may violate politeness principles intentionally to cause conflict, and irony is a typical way. Besides, when conflict talks becomes more heated, interlocutors will not use strategies to lessen the weightiness of face-threatening acts and they hurt other’s face directly and severely. In some circumstances, politeness strategies are only used for emphatic expressions, such as claiming positions with questions. In another words, the violation of politeness strategies only lead to more heated conflict.To sum up, this pragmatic study of conflict talks in If Life Cheats You aims to provide readers with a better comprehension of the structure of Chinese conflict talks and to figure out strategies which can be used to avoid or mitigate conflict.