A Study Of Impoliteness In Family Conflict Talks Based On Rapport Management Theory

Recent years have witnessed increasing attention from scholars to relationship management or rapport management.And it is noteworthy that family rapport acts as an important indicator of marital satisfaction and adolescents’ psychological health.However,family members can’t keep a harmonious state all the time,and in particular,conflict talks(CTs)have been a potential killer of a harmonious climate in families.Therefore,centered on how family CTs unfold and how rapport has been managed in the process,this thesis collected spousal CTs and parent-child CTs in two TV series named A Love for Separation and A Little Reunion.The two TV series,as companion volumes focusing on the issue of adolescents’ education,are a vivid reflection of people’s real life.Conflict talks have been extensively examined in numerous fields,especially in pragmatics.Among the pragmatic studies on CTs,impoliteness theory,especially Bousfield’s(2008)impoliteness model,enjoys great popularity in recent decades.However,these studies mainly focus too much on the speech acts or pragmatic functions of the conflictive utterances,rarely giving a systematic illustration of the factors that influence strategy choice.Spencer-Oatey’s(2008)rapport management theory(RMT)can duly complement this gap.With their shared theoretical grounds,i.e.,face theory and politeness theory,it is possible to combine the two theories for CT study.Therefore,the current research revolves around the pragmatic strategies of family CTs and linguistic backups.For starters,it explores the use of impolite strategies for the onset and development of spousal and parent-child CTs.Then,it discusses the factors that influence strategy use within the analytical framework of this study.NVivo 12 is adopted to mark the linguistic strategies that occurred in the data set.Among the 85 pieces of CT episodes drawn from the aforementioned TV series,54 are spousal CTs,and 31 are parent-child CTs.The data show that both groups tend to adopt on-records strategies in CTs,among which argue,criticize and disgrace,deny are the most common strategies.Differences and commonplace exist in different sides of the interlocuters,and different stages of the CTs.Particularly,in spousal CTs,men employ argue most frequently,while women tend to use criticize and disgrace.In parent-child CTs,children argue more,while parents apply deny and order more often.The two kinds of CTs share the most common mode at the initiation stage,while in the escalation and termination stage,their most frequent modes are different.Based on the research findings,the present study discussed the relationship between impoliteness and rapport management.It found that impolite strategies contribute to a failure in rapport management and finally lead to the outburst of CTs.Besides,the difference in strategy choice is influenced by participants’ rapport orientation,social distance,and power distance.To be specific,rapport challenge orientation and rapport neglect orientation drive speakers to escalate the conflict with on-record impolite strategies.And the larger the power distance and smaller social distance there are,the more strategy choices they have for their rapport management.The present study sets an example of the combination of the impoliteness model and RMT,making some contributions to CT research.What’s more,this study illuminates that the language force would threaten family members’ rapport.Therefore,this study can improve people’s awareness of language use to maintain rapport with families.