TY  - THES
T1  - Power plays : the representation of mother-daughter disputes in contemporary plays by women ; a study in discourse analysis
A1  - Spitz,Alice
Y1  - 2006/04/21
N2  - This thesis investigates women';s discursive practices in constructing and negotiating mother-daughter disputes and underlying power relationships. It is based on a corpus of contemporary plays by women, conflict talk being an essential feature of drama. The study pursues various strands of analysis. It attends to the turn-by-turn details of conflict talk as situated local interaction, it looks at aspects of the (para)linguistic choices speakers make in designing and delivering their utterances, and it considers the role of wider contextual aspects such as the participants'; gender, social identities and relationship for the production and interpretation of talk. In doing so, the study draws on a range of methodological frameworks that fall under the umbrella of interactional sociolinguistics, drawing, inter alia, on the analytical tools of conversation analysis, Gumperz'; concept of contextualisation and the notion of face (work) and politeness (Goffman,  Brown & Levinson). 
The study explores how the sequential organisation of mother-daughter disputes contributes to the contextualisation of this speech activity. In particular, it examines the procedures which highlight the adversative character of oppositional moves in mother-daughter arguments. It also looks at the types of argumentative actions that occur in these disputes and at the ways in which these actions and their responses are formatted and sequenced to uncover the dynamics of the delicate power play that can take place between mothers and daughters in conflict talk.
The results of this study call into question the still-prevalent notion of women as generally displaying an orientation towards cooperative, face-saving interaction and consent. They show that in examining women';s talk-in-interaction it is vital to adopt a context-sensitive approach, which takes into account such features as the situational context and interpersonal relationship aspects. 
This research has implications for the study of naturally-occurring conflict talk, for although it looks at constructed dialogue, it yields insight into underlying patterns of knowledge about the workings of real disputes. It also contributes to a number of other research fields, including work on family interaction, intergenerational communication, female discourse, stylistics and power in talk-in-interaction.
KW  - Diskursanalyse
KW  - Macht in sprachlicher Interaktion
KW  - Kontextualisierung
CY  - Saarbrücken
PB  - Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek
AD  - Postfach 151141, 66041 Saarbrücken
UR  - http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2006/595
ER  -