An Analysis of the Linguistic Features of Conflict Talks in Polylogues of English Majors

The present study seeks to explore the linguistic features within conflict talks in English majors’ polylogues, namely group discussions, under the theoretical framework proposed by Scott Suzanne, and outline the multiple linguistic features which work together to index conflict talks. It has been found that negations, discourse markers, and modals are the top three most frequently used in the lexical level, and a long turn is always dominant in the conflict talks which apparently is different from the ones in Scott’s study. 1. Preface Goffman, sociologist, holds that the interactive pattern in daily life can reflect social structure, and the interactive pattern can embody the trend or rules in the continuous construction or reconstruction of the social order. Conflict talks are undoubtedly quite common in the interactive verbal communication everywhere and it can reflect the potential patterns of social order and the relationship between the interlocutors, individuals and the institutions, and among institutions. Although quite a few papers, which are about the regularity of conversational interaction, have been published in recent years domestically and abroad, rarely has the attention been given to conflict talks. “Conflict talk” was firstly adopted by Grimshaw in 1990 in his edited book, Conflict Talk: Sociolinguistic Investigations of Arguments in conversation. Since then, researchers have been trying to uncover this field in various apsects: Honda examined the interactional structure of conflict talk in Japanese talk show of public affairs; In 2011, Hanh thi Nguyen published Boundary and alignment in multiparty conflict talk, exploring the multiparty conflict talks in the pharmacy patient consultation by using conversation analysis. In China, scholars have made efforts in the research, like Pragmatic Approach to Conflict Talk between Couples in Desperate Housewives (Zhu Xiaoqin) which is based on the American TV series, and it mainly seeks to ascertain the language strategies used in it, conflict terminating mode and the characteristics of conflict between couples; Zhao Zhongde and Zhang Lin analyzed the reasons of the occurrence of conflict talk under the theoretical framework of Relevance Theory; Du Lingli first investigated the conflict talk in the online chatting room and summarized the initial, maintaining and terminating stages. Zhao Yingling published A Study of Conflict Talk in Chinese, which focused on the construction models and cohesive devices of conflict talks. In 2008, Zhao published her dissertation of doctor degree, Pragma-rhetoric Study of Conflict Talk in Chinese, which is a systematical and profound research of Chinese conflict talk. Zhao Yongqing has made the research about the basic sequence structure and the linguistic features of multi-party conflict talk with a socio-pragmatic orientation, and the dissertation adopts the working corpus from BNC with altogether 47,982 words(token), and the polylogues are mainly from TV talk shows, public government conferences, and hearings. Nonetheless, the research of conflict talks is far from satisfaction. It can be clearly found that rarely research has been done from the Chinese English learners’ perspective, and the studies mainly are based upon the scripts of novel or drama which can be unnatural. Polylogue, proposed by Kerbrat-Orecchioni in 2004 in Journal of Pragmatics, means the verbal communication among at least three participants or three parties. The polylogues among the English majors, the English learners, should be given due attention, since the unedited texts, with the characteristics of situational Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 425 International Conference on Arts, Humanity and Economics, Management (ICAHEM 2019) Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL. This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license -http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. 162 An Analysis of the Linguistic Features of Conflict Talks in Polylogues of English Majors the contextual details, are crucial to valid and meaningful analysis. The present study can be of practical value to English pedagogy, and improve language learners’ learning efficiency, etc. 2. Research Background 2.1. Conflict Talk Conflict talk, a common language phenomenon, can be found in everyday life, courts, business negotiations, hospitals, etc. Van and Grootendorst wrote that conflict talk, which was first used by Grimshaw in 1990, refers to a verbal, social, and rational activity aimed at convincing a reasonable critic of the acceptability of a standpoint by putting forward a constellation of propositions justifying or refuting the proposition expressed in the standpoint. In addition, Eisenberg and Garvey define conflicts as, “...the interaction which grows out of an opposition to a request for action, an assertion, or an action...The negating responses or oppositions include refusals, disagreements, denials, and objections. Thus, an adversative episode is a sequence which begins with an opposition and ends with a resolution or dissipation of conflict.” Muntigl and Turnbull hold that the conflict arises when a current speaker A’s ongoing talk is contested by a speaker B, and speaker A then produces a counter-oppositional turn toward speaker B. Meanwhile, conflict talk only exists when with the second opposing turn, which retrospectively marks the arguable move as the beginning of the conflict talk sequence. The following 3 moves structure is proposed by Muntigl and Turnbull: a. A: statement b. B: counterstatement (i.e. B disagrees with A) c. A: counterstatement to B (i.e. A disagrees with B, and possible insists on Turn 1, statement) The third move plays a crucial role in the happening of a conflict talk, for the fact that if A gives in or apologizes or just remains silent instead of performing a counterstatement to B in the third turn, no conflict will develop and no conflict talk will occur. It also needs mentioning that the 3 move structure proposed by Muntigl and Turnbull embodies only a conversation or dialogue, and the present study is based on the corpus built upon the English majors’ group discussions which include at least 4 participants in the talks. But the 3 move structure can still be applied to the recognition and selection of the discourse of conflict talks since the present study aims to outline the linguistic features of English majors’ conflict talks. 2.2. Scott’s Research Scott Suzanne published her article in 2002, Linguistic feature variation within disagreements: An empirical investigation, in Text, which is a qualitative and quantitative study of the linguistic features of oral disagreements which indexes disagreements. It has identified the co-occurring linguistic makeup of conflict talks and analyzed the feature systematically. The corpus she adopts are from the four transcribed editions of the unscripted 30 minutes long American Cable News Network (CNN) television news show, Crossfire, which is about the public affairs and participated by two hosts and one to three knowledgeable guests discussing one controversial topic of current interest. The corpus is natural because the scripts in the programs are not scripted, which is in line with the corpus adopted by the present study. By referring to related literatures on disagreement, Scott has outlined the linguistic features which might index disagreement. Altogether, she has summarized 12 types, which are listed in Table 1 below. Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 425