A Study Of The Language Of Presidential Campaign Debate Based On Conflict Discourse

In the process of our daily communication,conflict talk is a common but complicated linguistic phenomenon.In a broad sense,conflict talk can be viewed as a kind of speech event,it refers to two or more parties hold different opinions,feelings and interests,therefore,antagonistic acts are occurred.For example,quarrel,dispute and oppositional argument.In a narrow sense,conflict talk refers to a kind of speech act,such as disagreeing,opposing and arguing.Conflict talk in a broad sense and conflict talk in a narrow sense share a common feature:a state of disagreement or dispute caused by differences of opinion between the speaker and the hearer.This thesis is based on the speech act theory and turn-taking theory,attempts to analyze the typical examples of conflict talk which are collected from the three TV debates between Trump and Hillary in America's 58^th presidential election in 2016.First,this paper intends to analyze the pragmatic strategies of the formats of initiating,maintaining and terminating and the characteristics of debating language in the turn-taking.In addition,under the method of quantitative and qualitative analysis,this paper analyzes which turn-taking strategy can gain or maintain the right of speech better.In this paper,we hope to analyze the whole conflict talk in the debate will help people to have a systematic and thorough comprehension on it,which will help people to improve their skills of debating language and people can achieve their own communicative purposes more effectively in the process of debate.