A Study Of Conflict Talk Between Parents And Children From The Perspective Of Impoliteness

Conflict talk is a common occurrence in social interaction and often associated with impoliteness.In daily communication,it has been a kind of consensus that the speakers apply polite strategies to maintain and enhance the interpersonal relationship between each other,and there are lots of relevant researches.However,there are few researches on the pragmatic study of conflict talk from the perspective of impoliteness.People universally regard the influence of conflict talk as mostly negative.Nevertheless,numerous studies have shown that conflict talk also has positive influence.Conflict talk might originate different features in different interaction,and then have different functions.Thus,it is necessary for us to analyze and explore pragmatic functions of conflict talk fulfilled in parent-child communication from the perspective of impoliteness.Based on Bousfield’s impoliteness model,this study is intended to make a pragmatic analysis of conflict talks between parents and children whichare extracted from the Chinese sitcom Home with Kidsusing both qualitative and quantitative research methods.It analyzes the differences in the use of impoliteness output strategies and response options respectively by parents and children.Then,it explores the reasons why parents and children have different language use and reveals differentpragmatic functions of conflict talk in communication.The study mainly focuses on these three questions as follows:(1)What are impoliteness output strategies and impoliteness response options used by parents and children in conflict talk?(2)What are the differences in strategies and response options respectively used by parents and children in conflict talk?(3)What pragmatic functions of conflict talk can be realized by using these strategies and response options in communication?In interpersonal communication,the identity of the speaker can be manifested by the choice of linguistic forms such as lexical choice,strategy selection and response option and so on.The speaker with different identities will also reflect apparent linguistic features in verbal conflict.In accordance with those three questions above,theauthor investigates how the two interactants parents and children with different identities employ impoliteness output strategies and response options in conflict talk so as to find out the embodiment of their role features in language use.It is found that in terms of impoliteness output strategies,parents prefer to use the offensive strategies of criticizing and threatening while children prefer using the strategies of challenging and abrogation.For response options,both parents and children like to employ the Offensive-Offensive pairing but children prefer to apply more Offensive-Defensive pairing than parents do.The differences are caused by different roles,obligations,responsibility,age and even social experience of parents and children in the family.In general,the power relation and generation gap between parents and children are the main reasons which lead to the different application of impoliteness output strategies and response options.In addition,this study discovers that conflict talk in interaction is alwaysinstrumental and functional.In parent-child communication,conflict talk can function as an instrument of reaching a consensus,venting negative feelings and getting power.Through the pragmatic study of conflict talk between parents and children,this study makes us have some acquaintance with pragmatic functions of conflict talk as well as the conflict between parents and children and helps us to have a better understanding of each other’s positions and viewpoints in daily parent-child interaction.This can be helpful to reduce or avoid family conflict,and thus play a positive role in the establishment of harmonious family and harmonious society.