Analysis Of Oprah Winfrey Show From The Perspectives Of The Politeness Principle And The Cooperative Principle

Conversation is the main means of our daily communication. How to communicate effectively has long been the concern of oration, rhetoric and later, linguistics. During the last century, as the rapid development of linguistics and its subbranches, researches on conversation have been done through different aspects. The Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle, as two fundamental theories in the field of Pragmatics, have been applied to the interpretation of conversation extensively. The CP focuses on describing how people have or have not observed the CP and its maxims; while the PP emphasizes the reasons why people would choose to act at the cost of being non-cooperative.With the widespread of television, talk show becomes a new and popular form of entertainment. Among the various talk show programs in the world, Oprah Winfrey show could be counted as the most popular and influential one. Many scholars have probed into the show introducing varied approaches, and these researches have already achieved outstanding findings. This thesis is going to investigate this type of discourse from the perspectives of Pragmatics, adopting the CP and the PP.Thus the analysis is divided into the observation of the CP and the PP and violation of the CP and the PP respectively. Through investigation, it is discovered that the hostess is always the party who can abide by the CP better because her effort is the foundation of the whole interview, without which the smooth going of the conversation would be impossible. In contrast to the hostess, the guests are more likely to flout the CP for they are often confronted with some questions they do not want to or feel awkward to answer. Under such circumstances, they have to flout the CP. However, as a rescue, they often follow some maxims of the PP consciously or unconsciously, through which they could mitigate the damage to each other's face.Due to many limitations, subjective or objective, there is still large room for improvement. The present research is not done thoroughly and satisfactorily, and there are still many aspects that have not been touched upon. Hopefully the imperfection can be averted in the future studies.