Implicit Conflict Talk: An Introduction

Abstract

Differing from previous studies which not only focused on explicit conflict talk but also considered it as the central subject for research, this paper classifies conflict talk into two types, “implicit conflict talk” (ICT for short) and “explicit conflict talk” (ECT for short). It first presents a working definition to ICT and draws a dividing line between ICT and ECT from three aspects. It then discusses how ICT relates to other types of conflict talk, such as indirect conflict talk and cool conflict talk. It goes further to discuss the organizations of ICT: its local organization—adjacency pair and its overall organization—pre-sequences and insertion sequence. The whole research is done by illustrating 12 examples from well-known literature, popular movies and television series both in English and Chinese. The aim of the paper is to arouse interest in research on ICT.