An Analysis Of English Conflict Talk Based On Face Theory

In recent years,there goes a trend that American TV series have been enjoying an increasingly enthusiastic audience group.The series have been loved and chased by the viewers who want to learn English or understand culture,etc.Among these TV series,the situation comedy,Two Broke Girls,produced by Columbia Broadcasting System(CBS),has been hugely popular ever since its first season came out in 2011 and it has selected to be the38 th Most Popular New TV Comedy by American people.With one season issued each year,it has been updated to Season V(unfinished yet).The stories are set in a low-end cafeteria in Brooklyn of New York City,and the comedy shows small potatoes' daily life in the city in a practically humorous way.The stories interpret the two waitresses' daily life there.Conflict talk is frequently employed in the play.For providing a better view and helping the audience understand the situation comedy,in this study,the author discusses the comedy from the perspective of Face Theory.As a kind of general linguistic phenomenon,conflict talk frequently occurs in daily communication.In a narrow sense,it refers to verbal behaviors with argument and debate;in a broader sense,it represents a kind of communicative act with opposite natures caused by differences concerning standpoints,cultures,religious beliefs and so on.Many specialists and scholars carry out their researches on conflict talk in different aspects and achieve plenteous achievements.However,admittedly,in the existing literature,there is little Face Theory-based study on conflict talk.In daily communication,face is a kind of complicated social and cultural phenomenon as well as a non-negligible factor.Therefore,based on previous studies concerning conflict talk,this thesis takes Face Theory as the theoretical orientation and uses conflict talk in the American TV series,Two Broke Girls?,as linguistic data for the study.This study focuses on discussing and solving the concerning problems about conflict talk,including the causes and forms of conflict talk in the comedy and strategies as well as theapproaches to avoid it.At last,it discusses how to remit or solve the conflict talk in daily life.Both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted by the author for case analysis.As for the quantitative study,a small conflict talk corpus is constructed to conduct manual statistics to manifest the form of conflict talk and the proportion that the conflict talk takes up in the dialogues under Face Theory.By analyzing and studying linguistic data,it was found that conflict talk in the comedy could be roughly divided into two groups which might threaten the face of speaker and listener.In terms of the qualitative study,the causes of conflict talk in this comedy are analyzed in an exploratory way.It was found by the analysis of linguistic data conflicts in conversations was mainly related to the differences of egoism,values and characters.Meanwhile,effective solutions to avoid,remit and solve conflict talk are discussed.This thesis explicitly explains the relation between linguistic form and function based on a combination of conflict talk and Face Theory.Besides,from the perspectives of pragmatics,application values and pragmatic analysis of the features of interpersonal talk conflicts in English context are conducted in this thesis.Similarly,the method can also be applied to the processing and analysis of other languages.Based on those factors,the study offers practical guidance for language teaching activities,aiming to improve students' social awareness and enable them to become social members with insights.These are the supportive elements to show how to make a strong argument with sufficient grounds in case of being offended in cross-cultural communications.