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A Comparative Study on the Exchange Structure of Conflict Talks between Couples in Chinese and American Families

Author: XiaPingPing
Tutor: MaWen
School: Shandong University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: Conflict Talk Exchange Structure Move patterns Act patterns
CLC: H13
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 80
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Abstract

Conflict talk (CT) is a common and inevitable linguistic phenomenon in daily life. It is the conflict happening in the interaction of two or more parties. In a conflict talk participants oppose the utterances, actions or selves of one another in successive turns. The term of conflict talk is often used in the broad sense and it includes many linguistic behaviors and events, such as arguing, quarreling and opposing. In the recent years, with the development of conversation analysis, a large amount of studies have been made from different aspects by linguistics from home and abroad, for example the conflict talks in TV interviews, in plays and in Internet chatting room. However, research shows that little work has been done in terms of the comparative study, especially on the conflict talk in China and western countries. In this thesis, the author attempts to make a comparative study of CT between couples in Chinese family and American family by using the exchange structure proposed by Sinclair and Coulthard and to further explore the conversational structure of CT happening in the context of family.This study is an empirical study in which both qualitative method and quantitative method are adopted, and both theoretical exploration and statistical analysis have been made in the study.108 pieces of CT episodes between couples are collected from the Chinese serial Golden Wedding, and 75 pieces from Desperate Housewives. After transcribing, classifying and analyzing the data, the following results are obtained:Firstly, in terms of the move patterns, there exist great similarities on move patterns in CT between couples in China and America. The four types of moves, namely, the initiating move, responding move, challenging move and follow-up move, all contribute to the construction of the conversation structure. However, the occurrence rates of challenging move are much higher than that of responding move in both TV serials. Besides, the follow-up move seldom occurs in CT between couples in both American families and Chinese families. Therefore, the conversational structure of CT is a two-part exchange structure with an optional follow-up move. And the two-part exchange structure is constructed by an initiating move followed by, mostly, a challenging move.Secondly, in terms of the act patterns, mainly two kinds of acts contribute to the construction of conflict talks, namely, the initiating act and challenging act. Among the four kinds of initiating acts, elicitation acts and informative acts play a dominate role, while the directive and requestive acts have a much lower occurrence rate. As for the differences, the occurrence rate of the directive acts is a little higher than that of the requestive act in Golden Wedding. While in Desperate Housewives, the situation is just opposite, with the occurrence rate of requestive act higher than that of the directive act. On the other hand, among the 19 directive acts of conflict talk episodes in Golden Wedding,14 acts are made by the wives, while only 5 directive acts are from husband. Similarly, among the 10 directive acts of conflict talk episodes in Desperate Housewives,7 acts are from the wives, while the rest 3 directive acts are from husbands. These figures hint a fact that in the family context, regardless in China or in America, wives tend to give their husbands less options of complying or disobeying their orders than their husbands do.Thirdly, this thesis classified the challenging acts into two types according to whether the challenging acts follow the previous topic of the initiating act, off-the-topic challenging acts and negative expressions. What’ more, the negative expressions are further classified into four subclasses according to the four different types of initiating acts:negative expressions to informative act is named as opposition, negative expressions to elicitation act as objection, similarly those challenging acts to directives as refusal, and the first kind of challenging acts to requestive act as denial. Thus the construction of the two-part exchange structure of CT in terms of act patterns can be illustrated as the following four categories:(1) Informative---Opposition/Off-the-topic challenging act; (2) Elicitation---Objection/Off-the-topic challenging act; (3)Directive---refusal/Off-the-topic challenging act; (4) Requesive---denial/Off-the-topic challenging act. And the oppositions to the informative acts are classified into reasons for opposition direct opposition and indifference; objections to the elicitations can be classified into complaining and reasons for objections; refusals to the directives are categorized into direct refusals and reasons for refusal; denials to the requests can be further classified into direct denial and reasons for denials. On discussing the conflict talks between couples, this study may help enhance the mutual understandings in families. Therefore it is significant for building up harmonious families and then a more harmonious society which is promoted throughout China recently.

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