A Study Of Pragmatic Distance In Chinese Family Conflict Talks

Pragmatic distance is defined by Wang Jianhua(2001,pp.25-31)as the degree of intimacy perceived and confirmed by both participants in a specific communicative event,and it could be described as “intimacy degree of pragmatic distance”.Wang Jianhua develops the concept of pragmatic distance in 2001 in his study on Politeness.The connection between linguistic politeness and pragmatic distance is illuminated as Distance Principle of Politeness(Wang Jianhua,2001).Thereafter pragmatic distance has been widely investigated from many different perspectives,ranging from politeness principle,address terms,personal deixis to the projection of personal deixis.Despite pervasiveness of pragmatic distance at the level of a single word,pragmatic distance posted in utterance,is largely under explored.“Distance” and “establishing distance” is one of the basic conditions for human beings to live together.Wherever a verbal exchange happens,there is a specific definition of pragmatic distance.Conflict talk is a common but complicated linguistic phenomenon in daily life,which adversely affects the construction of a harmonious interpersonal relationship.Based on the family,this study thus seeks to probe into the changing mechanism of pragmatic distance in Chinese family conflict talks.Within analytical frameworks of pragmatic distance theory and linguistic adaptation theory,the study attempts to discuss about the following two key questions:1)What are the discourse strategies used to increase pragmatic distance in the process of a violent conflict and what are the linguistic characteristics of these strategies? 2)What are the adaptive features of the utterances chosen by communicators to narrow pragmatic distance when the conflict is alleviated? To elucidate issues above,the corpus for analyses is based on the conflict talk data drawn from the Chinese family TV series All is Well.The study firstly identifies two major types of the changes of pragmatic distance: increasing and reducing in terms of the different stages of conflict talk.Following this,the linguistic strategies are primarily revealed when pragmatic distance changes.Besides,the internal mechanism used by both communicative parties to regulate pragmatic distance is explored as well.Two major findings are concluded as follows: 1)There are two major types of discourse strategies used by communicators to increase pragmatic distance: explicit discourse strategies and implicit discourse strategies.The former mainly include the following linguistic characteristics: abusive language,direct negation,negative evaluation and threatening.While the latter cover question and rhetorical question,ignoring and snubbing as well as formalized acceptance.Both strategies will aggravate the conflict and adversely affect the establishment of harmonious families.2)Based on linguistic adaptation theory,the utterance selected by communicators in the conflict mitigation stage has the characteristics of dynamic adaptation: adaptation to mental world,social world and physical world.In addition,active adaptation can narrow pragmatic distance and promote a smooth process of communication.This study provides a pragmatic account of distance in family conflict talks,and thereby affords people a new perspective to grasp pragmatic distance as well as some references and inspiration to use distance strategy appropriately in daily communication.Meanwhile,this study also contributes to the research on conflict talks and the study in the field of interpersonal pragmatics.