Overview

The study examines romantic confession as an interactive and co-constructed process of persuasion between romantic confessors and confessees. Specifically, we explore on a micro level the persuasive, refusal, and acceptance strategies devised by confessors and confessees to achieve communicative purposes. Based on the twenty-hour discourse data collected from the popular reality dating TV show, Perfect Dating, we propose models of persuasive, refusal, and acceptance strategies to represent

and discuss the patterns of strategy use in the context of romantic confession. We find that interlocutors in our data prefer using rationally or emotionally appealing strategies such as reward-based or rationale-based strategies to persuade, reject, or accept in romantic confessions. Furthermore, the study investigates on a macro level the discourse structure of romantic confession to demonstrate further the effects of conversational interaction and co-construction between romantic confessor and confessee. It is the goal of the current study to provide new insights on the important role language plays in romantic relationships and suggest the establishment of Romantic Discourse as a field of study in linguistics research.

The present study examines romantic confession as Romantic Persuasion and further proposes models of persuasive, refusal, and acceptance strategies to explore the

tactics adopted by confessor and confessee to achieve communicative purposes.

Persuasion, a topic that has been considered to be important in the study of language and rhetoric’s ever since the time of ancient Greece, is found to be pervasive in

everyday conversation (Burke, 1969; Hartelius and Browning, 2008). In the context of romantic confession, the confessor’s intention and goal of communication is to persuade

his/her romantic interest into establishing a relationship with him/her. And as for the confessee, the objective is to either reject or accept the persuasion initiated by the confessor. Thus, romantic confession can also be viewed as a form of deliberate

persuasive communication in which the interlocutors adopt verbal and nonverbal strategies to influence each other’s views and behaviors.

Our study also investigate the data from a more general perspective and proposes a discourse structure of romantic confession to further illustrate the conversational

characteristics of the romantic confession discourse. As stated by Dascal (1992:35),

“Some ‘conversations’ (e.g. a doctor-patient consultation; a round-table debate; a

cross-investigation of a witness) are obviously ‘structured’ (i.e. they have a clear

sequencing pattern, a more or less well-defined purpose and topic, and more or less accepted criteria of relevance).” Romantic confession, one of the most important

conversations that facilitates and enables relationship establishment between potential couples, is found to demonstrate a complex and non-linear structure (See Chapter 6 for

more discussions on the discourse structure of romantic confession).

Previous studies in the field of romantic relationship and relationship initiation have supported the view that conversation and communication are critical in the development, maintenance, and improvement of relationship (Guerrero and Mongeau, 2008; Derlega, Winstead, and Greene; 2008). In language and linguistics studies, however, only a relatively small number of studies have been conducted in the past to examine the language and conversation between lovers and couples (Channell, 1997;

Gould, Kurzman, and Dixon, 1994; Pasupathi, Lucas, and Coombs, 2002; Veroff et al., 1993; Ranganath, Jurafsky, and McFarland, 2013; Wilkins and Gareis, 2006). Unlike some of the more developed subfields of discourse analysis studies (political discourse, clinical discourse, pedagogical discourse, etc.), the language and conversation between romantic partners are seldom studied by linguists due to the difficulty of data collection.

Thus, many questions regarding how language can be used to establish, maintain, and improve the quality of our love life are still left to be answered. Fortunately, with the increasing popularity of romantic TV reality shows in recent years, linguistics researchers now may have better opportunities to further explore and investigate the role

language plays in romantic relationship.

Since television has become the “dominant medium of social discourse and representation in our society” (Hall, 1982: 75), popular TV shows might become a good

platform for linguistic researchers to collect the type of data that may otherwise be comparatively more unattainable in everyday life. In the case of the current study, the discourse data of romantic confession is acquired from the reality dating TV show – Perfect Dating. Through conducting a study with a huge amount of conversational data

(i.e., approximately 20 hours), we seek to contribute to the field of romantic discourse analysis and provide new insights on the important role language plays in romantic relationships. It should be noted that although reality TV shows can be good medium for

linguistics researchers to study contexts and topics that are usually private and exclusive, the “double-framing” effect of reality TV shows (i.e., interlocutors on the show are

oriented to the co-present interlocutors as well as the general audience watching the show) may still result in dynamics that are different from everyday conversation.

However, it is for that very nature, the current study was able to gain a perspective on

the more “preferred” ways to persuade, reject and accept in a romantic confession. That is, since the interlocutors also have to consider the “imagined” public opinion on their

communicative behaviors, they may tend to communicate in ways that are more “ideal”

and “socially acceptable.”

In short, our study aims to illustrate the context-specific characteristics in romantic confession through proposing models of persuasive, refusal, and acceptance strategies to study romantic confession on a micro level as well as developing the general

structure of romantic confession discourse on a macro level with data collected from the romantic reality TV show. In addition, by providing insightful analyses and findings in our study, we seek to demonstrate the crucial role language plays in the development of romantic relationships. It is our goal to direct attention to the discourse between (potential) romantic partners in the field of linguistics and propose the importance for a line of research to contribute to studying romantic discourse (romantic confessions, phone calls or text messages between lovers, wedding proposals, breakup conversations, etc.).