An Analysis Of Female Conflict Talk From The Perspective Of Impoliteness

Conflict talk is an inevitable linguistic phenomenon in daily communication,usually manifests as a series of speech acts and speech events,such as arguments,refutations,and objections between the communicative subjects.It is generally believed that conflict talk hinders people’s communications and even brings negative effects on the interpersonal relationship between the communicators.Therefore,conflict talk is usually associated with the impoliteness.This thesis adopts Bousfield’s(2008)impoliteness model as its basic theoretical framework and takes the discourse of the conflict talk from the American sitcom Two Broke Girls as the research subject,then employs qualitative and quantitative research methods to analyze the impoliteness utterances.The result shows that most of the impoliteness strategies proposed by Bousfield have been applied in Two Broke Girls.This study finds out14 impoliteness output strategies in total,including 13 On-Record strategies and 1Off-Record strategy.And there are three main types of dynamic impoliteness response patterns: Offensive-Offensive pairing,Offensive-Defensive pairing and Offensive-Compromise pairing.Analyzing from the perspective of the impoliteness,the female characters mostly apply the Criticize,Hinder/Block and Frighten strategies,which are the three kinds of intense impoliteness output strategies.When responding to impoliteness,both of the two characters tend to use the Offensive-Offensive pairing,in which a lot of confrontational words are used in response to the other’s face threat.Besides,this study has also found that the female conflict talks among the characters in this comedy posse the special pragmatic functions for reaching an agreement,venting negative emotion and obtaining the priority of speaking.It is hoped that this study can provide a reference for the readers to have a profound understanding for the phenomenon of impoliteness,broaden the research fields of the impoliteness theory,and meanwhile provide a new perspective for the future conflict discourse analysis.