A Study Of Conflict Talk Between Teacher And Student From The Perspective Of Impoliteness

As a common phenomenon in daily communication,conflict talk has inevitably attracted much attention from scholars both at home and abroad.Conflictive talk refers to the verbal conflict between participants,that is,in turn-taking conflictive conversations,one interactant objects the other party’s words,behaviors or ideas.Conflictive talks would usually hinder the ongoing conversation and ruin the communicative atmosphere,what’s more,a failure to resolve conflict talk may bring about negative effect on interpersonal relationship.It is for this reason that conflict talk is often associated with impoliteness.By adopting the impoliteness model proposed by Bousfield(2008)as the theoretical framework,the present study tries to analyze the conflict talk between teacher and student in the Chinese context.The data of this research is derived from ten Chinese TV plays.Through analyzing the data collected,the current research will investigate the impolite strategies employed in conflict talks between teachers and students,and also analyze the impoliteness patterns used by teachers and students.Through the analysis the author finds that 9 impoliteness strategies in Bousfield model are realized.In addition,the author identifies 3 new impoliteness strategies in the present study,that is,asserting,complaining and defying.As for the realization pattern of impoliteness strategies and the response patterns,it is found that most of the impoliteness strategies are realized in the form of combination and that OFF-OFF pairing,which means to counter an offending utterance with another confrontational response,is the most common pairing in conflict talks between teachers and students.The present study also finds that conflict talks manifest such functions as revealing power positions of the interactants,letting off angers and intensifying the dramatic effect.