The Speech Behaviour of a Dialect Language Personality in Conflict Situations

The article examines the speech communication of a dialect speaker in the field of conflict interaction. The analysis is based on the materials of the discourse of a Siberian peasant woman. She is Russian, semiliterate, born in 1909. The study showed that her speech practice contains interpersonal conflicts in the absence of intrapersonal and group conflicts. Behavioural, property, and ideological conflicts are identified with the predominance of behavioural ones. The stages of conflict communication and the tactics the speaker used are considered. The tactics mainly focus on cooperative/confrontational interaction with the opponent. At the pre-conflict stage, the speaker consistently avoids actions and statements that may cause conflict. For this purpose, she uses the tactics of refusing from potentially conflicting intentions and actions, non-interfering in conflicts between other persons, keeping silent about negative emotions in dialogues with interlocutors, refusing from verbal countering in case of disagreement with interlocutors, accepting gifts in confirmation of friendly relations; most of the tactics are cooperative. At this stage, the tactics are rarely supported by words. At the stage of open conflict, when direct speech interaction with interlocutors takes place, the speaker is extremely rarely the initiator (the exception is a series of episodes related to the situation of her husband’s betrayal and his leaving the family). When communicating with the aggressor, she relies on both cooperative and confrontational tactics, which are regularly supported by verbal and non-verbal means. As part of cooperative tactics, explanations are frequent; flattery, plea, and persuasion are also observed. When counteracting the opponent, the speaker uses a calm tone, a pleading intonation, nonjudgmental proper and common nouns. Among confrontational tactics, reproach is often observed; threats (including appeals to the authorities), orders, declarative denials in case of disagreement, and categorical refusals are less frequent. Their usage is accompanied by an irritated tone, abrupt pronunciation, irony, cliched constructions (shame on you), imperatives, and a reduction in the volume of statements. At the same time, conflict-generating markers are often mitigated through euphemisms, ellipsis of negative nominations, jokes, replacement of direct criticism of interlocutors with indirect one. At the stage of post-conflict interaction, the communicants return to standard everyday communication without reproaching each other or breaking off relations (breaking off communication with the speaker’s exspouse and the “marriage wrecker” is an exception). Taking into account the prevalence of cooperative tactics in the informant’s discourse, it was concluded that cooperative strategy dominates in her speech behaviour as aiming to prevent confrontation with her interlocutors, to smooth it out, and to reconcile the parties. The identified features of the speaker’s speech behaviour are based on the dominants of traditional folk culture (maintaining friendly relations is important for ensuring safe and comfortable coexistence in the village community) and are supported by the individual qualities of the language personality of a cooperative type, characterised by benevolence, tolerance, restraint in the manifestation of emotions, adherence to basic moral norms and etiquette.

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