The Relevance Study Of Conflict Talk Between Lovers In Chinese TV Play Stand By Me

Conflict talk is considered to be a common linguistic phenomenon in daily communication. It is a kind of interaction in which many speech acts and speech events are included. All of them have a common feature which is to make barriers to the communication that should be successful. Conflict talks may lead to communication failure. Generally speaking, we always use the term conflict talk in its broad sense. Many researchers have devoted themselves to the study of conflict talk from many different perspectives. However, based on the existing literature, it can be easily found that the studies of conflict talk between Chinese lovers are quite limited. Therefore, this thesis makes a pragmatic study of the conflict talk between Chinese lovers.Based on the theory of Conversation Analysis and Relevance Theory, the thesis analyzes the data about the conflict talk between lovers collected from Chinese television series Stand by Me. The research uses the data driven method to analyze the data which are collected by following steps:first, the researcher should watch the TV series again and again to get the conversations needed; second, when watching, the researcher need make a note about the conflict talk from the subtitles; third, the researcher also need analyze the data collected from the TV play, and then report the main findings.Findings of the thesis can be reported as follows. First, the features of conflict talk between lovers in Chinese TV play Stand by Me are found with the help of Conversation Analysis. It is conducted by analyzing every stage of a conflict talk in detail:initiating stage, maintaining stage, and terminating stage. Second, based on Relevance Theory, how the conflict talk occurs is explored and some reasons are found:the speakers fail to show an ostensive-inferential communication, fail to be mutual manifestness of cognitive environment, and fail to follow the principle of optimal relevance. Besides, the research also finds out that among the various conflict talk, the aggressive ones are more preferred than the non-aggressive ones.By analyzing the findings of the study, the research finds out some theoretical and practical implications for the future researches. To some extends, this thesis also fills the gap existing in the Chinese conflict talk study. In this thesis, its findings have showed us that conflict talk itself is neither positive nor negative. It all depends on how the communicators manage it. Therefore, it is a very important skill for people to manage conflict actively and effectively.