A Memetic Study on Conflict Talk模因论视角下的冲突话语分析模因论视角下的冲突话语分析ContentsConflict talkDefinition of Conflict TalkTypes of Conflict ContentMemeticsIntroduction to MemeSeveral terms related to MemeLifecycle of MemesMeme and languageMeme theory and language communicationSome examples of parent-teenager conflict talk in Home with KidsDefinition of Conflict TalkConflict talk is a universal and inevitable occurrence in everyday discourse. As Kuo(1992:4) states, “conflict talk is ubiquitous, normal, and integral to the workings of every society”. The terms related to conflict talk include argument, disputing, opposition, argumentative exchange, oppositional argument, and the like.No matter how different in naming, they share a similar explanation, that is, one participants discourse contradicts anothers which is stimulated by one participants behavior and expression; or the discrepancy in opinions about certain people or staff.The most commonly used term of conflict talk is arguement. Traditional definition of argument, which is based on logical reasoning, is a verbal, social and radical activity aimed at convincing a reasonable statement by putting forward a proposition justifying or refuting the proposition expressed in the standpoint. The argument can be considered as interactive process between two or more participants. Jacobs and Jackson (1981) pointed out these two sorts of arguments happen frequenfly in daily talks. One can make an argument to illustrate his certain position; and secondly, people cam also make an argument with others, that is, the act of interaction. One distinctive feature of argument is exchanging views between participants, namely, a speaker disagrees with anothers claim. The term of conflict talk was firstly employed by Grimshaw (1990) to describe the particular interdisciplinary investigation of arguments in conversation. In a conflict talk covering various aspects of social life, participants oppose the utterances, actions or selves of one another in successive turns. Conflict talk is considered by him as an exchange of more than two oppositional turns. Atsuko Honda (2002:574) put forward the term conflict talk on two different levels. First in a narrow sense, conflict talk is defined as a speech activity in which two parties attempt to maintain their own position by means of the manifestation of negativity against the other activity that consists of the manifestation of opposition (including exchanges of opposition). Second, conflict talk can be broadly viewed as a process of opposition which includes not only the manifestation of opposition, but also the whole process of inducement, initiation, development, management of opposition and the process of argumentation.Types of Conflict ContentAccording to Grimshaw (1990：283), conflict talks can be roughly sorted into four principal categories. That is, people argue about the following:(1) Things or “rights” (toys or territory, authority or precedence, respectively);(2) Beliefs (ideologies, values, opinions);(3) Factual claims (usually historical);(4) Some combination of the above. Qin Junxiang (1997) also summarizes a classification frame for conflicts: conflict triggered by different ideas, desires and characteristics as well. Firstly, the so-called idea, covering a wide range of aspects, includes views upon value, philosophy, love, aspiration, and religious as well. Conflict triggered by different ideas is doomed to result in realistic conflict in the daily life. Next, desire difference contributes a lot to conflict origins. As Qing Junxiang argues that conflict is the very desire, and there will be no opposition without desire. In addition, differences upon characteristic, habit, and fondness could either cause conflict between individuals. Such kind of differences would not necessarily lead to conflict unless interpersonal communications take place A relatively comprehensive classification is made by Partington (2003:159) who divides conflict talk into three types: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. The first concerns factual claim. This includes views upon the world, life, value, philosophy, love, aspiration, religious and so on. Conflict triggered by different ideations is bound to lead to conflict talks in our daily life. The second kind interpersonal revolves around all some sort of accusation and takes the form of attack and defense and possible counter-attack. The main interpersonal conflict lies in peoples different roles in their communication. The third type is just related to the actual words used. The former two are just stay at the potential level of causing conflict talks. In conclusion, according to Partington (2003：1 59), any single conflict talk is likely to range among all throe of these in Hallidayan terms: (1)ideational, over factual claims; (2) interpersonal, over participant roles; and (3) textual, over the actual words used. This classification coincides with Wilsons idea about memes to some extent. According to Wilson (1998), memes exist not only in World 2 (the objective world) and World 3 (the world of subjective ideas, expressed thoughts), but also in World 1 (the world of physical objects). The ideational conflict belongs to World 3, the interpersonal one to World 2 and the textual one to World 1. Introduction to Meme The core term of memetic theory is “memo”, which is coined by Dawkins as an analogy to gene in his bestselling book The Selfish Gene in 1976. In this book(1976： 192)， Dawkins describes “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation”. As examples, he suggests “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, and ways of making pots or of building arches”. According to Blackmore (1999), any definition of meme should fit the concept of meme as a replicator taking part in a new evolutionary process, and any definition of meme should not stay from this concept. She follows Dawkins original idea of meme and the definition given by the Oxford English Dictionary (An dement of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation), and believes that the definition of meme “depends on, and should depend on, the concept of imitation”. Anything “that can be passed on by imitation” can be counted as memes. And she also believes that the idea of meme as a replicator is what has been missing from our theories of human evolution and that memetics will prove immensely useful for explaining our unique attributes (or many other peculiar “surplus” abilities) and the rise of our elaborate cultures and societies.Several Terms Related to MemeuHost and Vector (宿主和载体)A “host” must be able to possess at least the potential capacity to elaborate on meme and to perform those cognitive tasks connected to the meme that we normally refer to as “understanding”. This means that only human beings can be hosts, at least until the development of artificial intelligences goes further.A “vector” is anything that transmits the meme between hosts without the ability to reflect on the meme. Examples are a wall, a voice, an email-program, a picture or a book, etc.uSingular Meme and Memeplex (单个模因和模因集群)According to Dawkins (1976), memes are ideas, habits, skills, stories, or any other kind of behavior or information that is copied from person to person by imitation. They “range from single words and simple actions to the vast memeplexes of science, art, religion, politics and finance” (Blackmore, 2003). Just as a set of genes can work together, memes can also work together and get transferred together to reinforce each other. Such a group of mutually-assisting memes can be called a memeplex, abbreviated from “co-adapted meme complex”. Like memes, memeplexes spread as long as there are certain reasons for them to be copied.uMeme hook (模因吊钩) In language communication, one host usually does not start to spread a particular meme by him or herself. The host has to be motivated. To this extent, memes have a particular trait, or a co-meme, called a “hook”. The hook is a part of a memeplex that urges replication or encourages the hosts to spread the meme. The hook is often most effective when it is not an explicit statement, but a logical consequence of the memes content. For example, when the teacher asks his or her students in class about how to become a good student, the students may have different or similar answers to this question, and then the teacher may give response to their answers. So here the question “how to become a good student” is a kind of meme hook that encourages the teacher and the students to communicate their memes or memeplexes of the standard of being a good student.Lifecycle of Memes According to Heylighen (1998,Cf. Gottsch, 2001), in order to complete the lifecycle, a meme must pass successfully through four subsequent stages: first, assimilation by a host of the meme; second, retention in that hosts memory; third, expression by the host in language, behavior or other forms that can be perceived by other potential hosts; fourth, transmission of thus created message or meme vehicle to one or more other replication loop. For example, if we want to form a meme of the standard of being a good student, first this meme has to be learned or to be expressed by other hosts until it is assimilated and retained in our minds, and then we have to express and transmit this meme when we have to decide how to become a good student, either through language or actions. In certain contexts, this meme will again be assimilated by some other hosts who do not have the meme of being a good student, and they will repeat the process.Meme and LanguageuLanguage transmits memeBlackmore (1999) points out that “the vitality of a whole language or a certain linguistic unit partly relies on the replication ability of the meme it conveys”. He also argues that “the human language faculty primarily provided a selective advantage to memes, not genes”. In other words, one function of 1anguage is to spread memes. Language plays an important role in the process of meme replication and transmission. Conversations, publications and social interactions depending on language are ideal ways to pass memes on from one host to another. Language today is transmitting a vast majority of memes, through direct speech, communication, radio, television and the Internet. Language is a successful replicator in that it is identified with characters of fidelity, fecundity and longevity. Language can not only be a carrier of memes, but also a meme or memeplex itself. Variation forms of language such as the idioms, sayings, proverbs, poems, stories, mottos, title of some popular songs, films and TV plays, etc. can facilitate the spreading of memes with high rate of fidelity, fecundity and longevity, as they have been either historically handed down through generations or synchronously spread among people by media and communication.uMeme influences the vitality of languageIn the process of language evolution, the new words, expressions and variations compete and adapt for dominance or survival. If the meme, whether it is a political, economic, cultural or emotional concept, is strong enough to be replicated in a period, the language is also to be replicated as it is the medium or carrier of the meme. For example, many popular new words are created to express peoples new memes, such as “low-carbon life”, “the rich second generation”, “economic boyfriend”, etc. As a result, the language is evolved when the majority of the social members accept these memes and use these expressions. Blackmore (1999) holds that memes were born when humans began to imitate each other and language itself is created by memes and for memes. According to Vienna (1996), each meme, each linguistic element, be it a phoneme, or a morpheme, a syntactic structure, a word, a semantic feature, a flame or a schema, whatever, owes its existence to a replication process by which it has been established as a copy of its ancestor meme(s). In a word, Language is evolved greatly owing to the existence of meme.Meme theory and language communication According to He Ziran (2007), the language meme reveals the rule of language spreading and propagation from the memetic perspective. Language is a kind of vector through which memes or memeplexes are transmitted. Language communication is a process of meme selection and competition. That is, the memes are firstly selected from the memeplexes as a result of mental thinking. Through language communication, they are expressed and transmitted to the communicated who then will also select his or her relevant memes as a response to compete or adapt with the received memes. He Ziran and He Xuelin (2003) commented that memetics provides a new idea for the study of verbal communication. Luo Dijiang (2007) views the communication process from a memetic perspective. He suggests that communication is a process of the mapping of “meme domain” between different communicators. The “meme domain” here is what we call memeplex(es). The success of the communication greatly depends on the successful mapping between the memes in each partys “meme domain”.Ideational conflict memes Due to their different experiences and understanding of the world , parents and teenagers may form different ideology, or different ideational memes, which often give rise to conflict talks in their daily communication on the perceptive level (such as attitudes towards study, love, habit, interest and so on) and the cognitive level (such as encyclopaedia knowledge).爸爸：想一想啊，还能有谁啊，给你请的家教。小雪：有没有搞错啊。爸爸：没搞错啊。你妈妈都已经在开始给你物色 人选了，有可能一会儿就去跟人面谈。小雪：我抗议，这是对我学习能力的一种不信任。爸爸：别瞎说。妈妈为了?给你出资请家教，连喜 欢的貂皮大衣都不要了。Some examples of parent-teenager conflict talk in Home with Kids In this conversation, the parents intend to find a tutor for their daughter, Xiao Xue, who is already performing well in her study. But the parents still hope her to become better at any cost. To Xiao Xue, what her parents do for her is just a kind of distrust and she is against the idea. In her opinion, she has the capability to deal with her study by herself, but the parents hold that their daughter may do better with the help of a tutor, just as most other parents do for their children. Thus, their different memes lead to a conflict talk.Interpersonal conflict memes The interpersonal aspect mainly lies in unequal roles between Chinese parents and their children. The Chinese traditional value has told us that children should respect and obey their parents. But in modern times, influenced by the western culture, the parental authority is faced with the challenge from their children, especially those teenagers who are in desire of independence and freedom. They have grown into individuals and formed some personal opinions towards the world. So the “parental authority” and the idea of “mutual respect and equality” are the major interpersonal conflict memes between parents and teenagers.小雪：你凭什么干涉我的社交?爸爸：社交?你这么小的年纪，你懂什么叫社交? 我是怕你犯错误。小雪：您懂，您不犯错误。那你还离婚。爸爸：你怎么说话呢？爸爸可真生气了我告诉 你，这孩子。小雪：(哭)你干嘛那么凶啊。你从来都没有关心过 我 In this conflict tail here the father holds the meme that children should respect parents and not get involved in parents affaires. He is angry with the daughters offensive attitude and improper remark on his divorce issue. But the daughter wants to express her dissatisfaction towards her fathers lecture on her regardless of the manner. So here the daughters offensive manner which threatens the fathers parental authority brings on the conflict talkTextual conflict memes The conflict memes can also refer to the textual level or the actual usage of words even though they do not have ideational and interpersonal conflict memes. Put it more specifically and clearly, this level involves the fact that even though one does realize that the others memes are not arguable or disputable, they still insist on their personal opinions with offensive and threatening words in order to save face or maintain their power. Even though in some conflict talks, some memes are in a disadvantage position in the memetic competition, the host still does not want to lose the competition by using defensive and offensive words. 刘星：您难道就不想看看我亲爸爸吗?刘梅：我不想看，我告诉你，你给我收起来。刘星：您这是喜新厌旧。刘梅：我就喜新厌旧了，怎么着吧。我还就告诉你， 妈妈我就喜新厌旧了，你给我收起来，我告诉 你啊，这照片可是我生活的阴影。刘星：可是这阴影是我亲爸爸。刘梅：我，我不管是谁，你给我收起来。(过去收， 夏东海拦)刘星：(抢过照片)凭什么呀，凭什么小雪能摆，我就 不能摆啊?刘梅：你就不能摆，你给我收起来。刘星：我不给，我就不给。 In this example, the aggressive expressions like “怎么着吧，我不管是谁，你就不能摆” uttered by the mother are offensive to the son, so finally the son feels that his mother treats him unfair and does not willing to give way. This conflict talk is simple raised by the mothers rude words.