Scripting the Silent War: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Passive-Aggressive Marital Conflict in Malay Television Dramas

The Malay community is known to value culture and courtesy especially in their daily conversations and interactions which consequently leads to the adoption of covert confrontation including in the marriage context. As a result, the marital conflict frequently manifests through a passive-aggressive communication pattern. Despite the vast research done on marital conflict, a large body of research traditionally focuses on overt verbal abuse resulting in the under-examination of covert marital conflict like passive-aggressive language use to control or manipulate spouses. This paper explores the linguistic weaponisation of indirectness to understand how passive-aggressive language is used in the context of Malay marriage to manipulate domestic situations. As Malay television dramas act as a cultural reflection of the real-world Malay households, this paper employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and pragmatics specifically Impoliteness Theory by Jonathan Culpeper (2011) to unearth the passive-aggressive language features like innuendo and mock politeness in the scripted dialogues. The findings are expected to reveal the use of passive-aggressive language in Malay marital settings while maintaining plausible deniability in the name of cultural indirectness. This paper helps to establish a wider literature of covert confrontation in the private domestic discourse specifically in the context of Malay households.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Passive-Aggressive Language, Impoliteness Theory, Malay Television Dramas, Malay Marital Conflicts

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