The Pragmatic Analysis Of Conflict Talk In Downton Abbey

Conflict is an interactive act which pervades everywhere in human life.So it is essential to people's daily interaction.If conflict is presented in the form of language,it will turn into the conflict talk.Narrowly speaking,conflict talk is one kind of speech acts including disagreeing,opposing and arguing,etc.Broadly speaking,it can be regarded as one kind of interaction including quarrel and dispute,etc.Whether studied from narrow sense or broad sense,conflict talk actually means a hostile interaction which will interrupt communication and even hinder the successful interaction.Therefore,conflict talk causes widely concern from various fields at home and abroad including sociology,anthropology,psychology,linguistics,etc.However,just a few studies explore it from the perspective of pragmatics.This thesis analyses conflict talk in Downtown Abbey based on Conversation Analysis and Politeness Theory,aiming to summarize the conflict talk in TV series systematically and to find out the appropriate strategies to avoid or resolve conflict talk.Downtown Abbey is a well-known TV series which contains many conflict talks,so this thesis collects conversational examples from the first three seasons to make a further study with the qualitative approach.This thesis consists of introduction,main body which includes four chapters,and conclusion.The first part is introduction which illustrates the background of conflict talk,and also presents the significance and method of studying conflict talks in Downtown Abbey from pragmatics.People originally study conflict talk from the following fields:anthropology,sociology,psychology and so on.In 1980 s,conflict talk as one branch of Conversation Analysis achieves attention of scholars.Downtown Abbey is a typical English TV play full of conflict talks,so it is seen as a classical case to study conflict talk.But up to now,few studies involve the conflict talk in Downtown Abbey from the perspective of pragmatics,which is the innovation of this thesis.Therefore,it will attract more readers to appreciate TV works.The second part is the main body,which is made up of four chapters.Chapter I is the literature review and illustrates conflict talk briefly,summarizes the development of conflict talk and introduces the English TV play Downton Abbey whichis full of many conversational examples of conflict talks and provides abundant material for the study.Conflict talk consists of three stages,i.e.initiating,escalating and terminating stage.Chapter II mainly introduces Conversation Analysis including turn-taking mechanism,adjacency pair and preference organization,and also presents the Politeness Theory including face-threatening acts and politeness strategies.Chapter III analyzes how the Conversation Analysis is realized in Downtown Abbey.This part demonstrates how conflict talk starts in the initiating phase,how it is escalated with the patterns of argumentative,non-obedience,repetition,opposing question,and interruption,and how it ceases with the patterns of submission,compromise,stand-off or third-party intervention.Chapter IV presents the causes under Politeness Theory and the discourse representation of conflict talk under face-threatening acts.As to the causes from two parties,the negative response of the hearer and the abnormal communication of the speaker are involved.Considering the social psychological aspect,main causes are egoism,different values and different personalities between two parties.As the representations,conflict talk usually involves the speech acts which threaten the faces of two parties.The last part is the conclusion which summarizes what have been analyzed in the above chapters and points out the purpose of this thesis.By analyzing conflict talk in Downtown Abbey,what can be proved is that it's feasible to analyze conflict talk from Conversation Analysis and Politeness Theory.Then this part proposes some limitations and suggestions what actually expect that people can adopt the appropriate strategies to resolve conflicts so that they can interact successfully.