An Analysis of Relational Meta-discourse in Conflict Discourses from the Perspective of Interpersonal Pragmatics

Meta-language reflects people’s ability to talk about language itself (Hockett 1960).Based on different dimensions of meta-pragmatic awareness, Chen (2020) reclassifies meta-discourse.Relational meta-discourse refers to the language planning and management at the meta-level by interlocutors in order to maintain interpersonal relationships.Research on relational meta-discourse is rare at present, and the existing research framework fails to fully illustrate the nature of meta-discourse.This paper adopts the "new rapport management model" (Chen 2018) to construct an operational research framework for relational meta-discourse.Through the analysis of natural conflict discourses, this paper explores the linguistic expression, pragmatic motivation, and pragmatic effects of relational meta-discourse.Results show that interlocutors tend to use four types of relational meta-discourse (face, emotion, rights and obligations, communicative objectives) to signal negative information, establish proposition interpretation frameworks, evaluate propositions and self-repair in conflict talks.