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Uncategorized (4)
Journal of the English Scholars’ Association of Nigeria (JESAN)? ISSN: 0029-0009
This paper examines how confrontations and conflicts may be minimised in
line with the spirit of Peace Linguistics. The study draws insights from
rapport management theory with a view to identify the linguistic keys that
enhance social relationship amongst language users, and those capable of
damaging it. Data is randomly taken from intuitive and social media sources.
The intuitive-source data is useful in advancing the theoretical underpinnings
of the paper while the social media data drawn from English Scholars’
Association of Nigeria’s WhatsApp platform is useful in demonstrating the
empirical instances of language use where confrontations and conflicts are
minimised or unminimised in the course of interaction. The choice of this
platform is motivated by the fact that members are English language
teachers/professionals, people whose language choice is expected to reflect a
high pragmatic competence. The paper identifies four strategies engaged to
minimise confrontations and conflicts, and concludes that the strategies can
be individually used or combined with one another. The more the strategies
used, the more the confrontations and conflicts can be minimised. While
conflicts and misunderstandings in language use are inevitable, it is important
that language users mitigate the possibility of unintended conflicts (and
misunderstandings)
