Conflict talk in Noah Baumbach's marriage story : an interdisciplinary study of the challenging negotiations of divorce

Abstract EN

Conflict talk is the talk that accompanies conflicts.

It is the outcome of negotiations of disagreement in confrontational interaction.

This research paper deals with conflict talk in Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story.

It offers an interdisciplinary study of the challenging negotiations of divorce in the data for analysis.

The study is interdisciplinary as it derives from conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and pragmatics.

It suggests for the analysis of data a theoretical framework inspired by Jef Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory.

It proposes that language use is a dynamic process of linguistic choice (1999).

The framework has two facets: structural and strategic.

The research paper claims that a conflict is a communicative context of adaptability where people make language selections that generate this talk.

The paper attempts to figure out the causes of conflict talk and show how people adapt their behavior to conform structurally and strategically to the conflicting context at hand.

The paper concludes that dynamic negotiations between disputing language users during conflict talk can reach positive ends, e.

g.

, resolutions and agreements, if they adapt their language choice towards convergent rather than divergent processes of interaction.

Key Words: Conflict talk; Linguistic Adaptation Theory; structural phases of negotiation in conflict talk; linguistic strategies of conflict talk; Marriage Story.