An Analysis of Conflict Talk from the Perspective of Cooperative Principle–A Case Study of Young Sheldon开题报告

1. 研究目的与意义

Taken the third season of Young Sheldon, this paper studies conflict talks in interpersonal communication based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle. Grice, H. P., an American linguist, first proposed the Cooperative Principle in 1967, which is an indispensable part of pragmatics. Grice believes that people make more or less efforts for cooperation in order to achieve the purpose of conversation in daily conversation. Sometimes they deliberately violate the Cooperative Principle and produce special Conversational Implicature. Nowadays, there are too many conflict talks caused by the violation of the Cooperative Principle in our family, school and society. If we don’t attach more importance to it, it can lead to a deterioration in interpersonal relationships which is precious to us. As a sitcom centered on the daily life of a whole family, Young Sheldon provides a good corpus for the research of conflict talk. In order to make the research more close to life, the selection of corpus must be representative either. The conflict talks between the main characters are similar to those in our real life. So the dialogue in Young Sheldon deserves scholarly attention. This paper analyzes a few dialogues in Young Sheldon from the perspective of violating the Cooperative Principle to explore the actual conversational meaning and illocutionary meaning behind the dialogues. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the causes of conflict talks and explores the semantic effects that the characters really want to express, so as to enable the audience to better experience and understand the emotion conveyed by the dialogue, so as to achieve the purpose of cultural exchange. From the perspective of Cooperative Principle, this paper can reveal the constructive significance to interpersonal relationship and provide enlightenment for interpersonal harmony and social harmony. What’s more, through this research, we can use such conflict talks that violate the principle of cooperation to solve problems or achieve desired effects and functions in our daily life.

2. 研究内容和预期目标

pragmatics is a field of linguistics. it mainly studies how to understand and use language in context, and how to use language successfully. among it, the conventional principle is a important part of pragmatics. the conversational principle is also called cooperative principle (cp), which was put forward by american language philosopher grice in his speech at harvard university in 1967, also known as grice’s principle. nowadays, withthe development of new media, the corpus of pragmatics has been greatly enriched. young sheldon is a sitcom and a derivative of the big bang theory. it mainly tells a series of stories about sheldon cooper in family and school in eastern texas. compared with the big bang theory, young sheldon’s dialogue is more about family life and school life. children and adults tend to have more conflict talk and dialogue that violates the cooperative principle.cooperative principles is nearly always observed, while the maxims are not, which give rise to “conventional implicature”. in real social communication, there are countless cases of intentional violation of the cooperative principle, which will not affect the communication, but can achieve unexpected communication effect. taken the third season of young sheldon, this paper studies conflict talks in interpersonal communication based on grice’s cooperative principle. the dialogue of characters in films and tv plays also follows certain cooperative principles. this paper selects some dialogues in young sheldon to analyze how and why the characters violate the four principles of cooperative principle, and analyzes the conversational implicature after deliberately violating the cooperative principle. more importantly, the conflict talk between main characters will bring some functions. and these functions will be the focus of this paper.

outline:

1. introduction

3. 国内外研究现状

regarding conflict talk, the earliest research began in the late 1970s. some scholars (brennis and lein 299-309, boggs 325-344) took the lead in researching the argumentative language and structure pattern of children’s dialogue. since then, many researchers from different fields have done a lot of researches on this issue and achieved certain results as follows.

in the west, brennis and lein found three sequential forms of conflict talk: repetition, escalation and inversion (299-309). corsaro and rizzo made a comparative study of the children’s conflict talk in a kindergarten between the united states and italy (21-66). grimshaw made a review of the study of conflict talk. scholars such as vuchinich also analyze conflict talk from different perspectives. at present, different scholars use different terms on conflict talk in academia. grimshaw terms it as conflict talk (282), and this term is used in this thesis. other scholars also have different terms to describe this kind of talk, such as adversative episode (eisenberg and garvey 149) and disorderly discourse (briggs 248). but no matter which term is used, conflict talk is used to describe the situation that one party opposes the other party’s words, deeds, or disagreements on someone or something, which leads to conflicting discourse.

at home, domestic scholars research on conflict talk began in the 21st century. y. l. zhao uses a structural analysis method to analyze the beginning, conflict, and ending steps of conflict discourse in chinese, and explains the sociological basis of conflict talk (37-42).ran defined the conflict talk and sorted out the relevant research literature. from the perspective of function, ran and yang pointed out that intentional offensive utterances can be realized by blaming, ridiculing, threatening, swearing, negative analogy and so on (49-55). zhang summarizes the basic structure of conflict talk based on the corpus of conflict talks in a tv drama, and interprets the meaning relation among the structural components from a rational perspective. x. r. zhang discusses the concept, characteristics and future research direction of conflict talk in order to explore the scope of application of conflict talk under the theoretical framework of pragmatics. for a long time, foreign scholars have made important contributions to the study of conflict talk based on conversational analysis. however, there is no clear outline of how to guide conflict talk research based on conversation analysis. combining with the research methods of conversation analysis, liu presents the research from the perspectives of conversation strategy, conversation structure and conversation style, which can help us to have a more comprehensive understanding and wide application of the research. based on grice''''s cooperative principle, feng tries to analyze and explore the implicit conflict talk with the text of the regular press conference of the ministry of foreign affairs of china as the research material and adopts the method of qualitative research.

4. 计划与进度安排

this paper adopts qualitative research method and analyzes dialogues in young sheldon. it studies how and why the characters violate the four principles of cooperative principle, and analyze the conversational implicature after deliberately violating the cooperative principle.

1. november 25, 2022. the selection of the topic

2. december 30, 2022. opening report

5. 参考文献

[1]. boggs, stephen t. (1978)“the development of verbal disputing in part-hawaiian children.” language in society 7 ,325-344.

[2]. brenneis, d. and lein l. (1978) “children’s disputes in three speech communities.” language in society 7 ,299-309.

[3]. briggs, c. (1996) disorderly discourse: narrative, conflict, and inequality. new york: u of oxford p.