A Study Of Verbal Politeness From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Verbal politeness is in all language and it plays an important role in communication. Scholars in the field of pragmatics have extensively studied politeness and have postulated their own theories from different perspectives. However, all of these theories have failed to give a detailed description and interpretation of verbal politeness. Brown and Levinson hold a face-saving view of politeness. But they only focus on the politeness strategies. Lakoff points out that "Be clear" and "Be polite" are two rules of language use, but she does not mention what level of politeness is required. Leech has further studied the conversational principle and has proposed the influential principle called "Politeness Principle", which is also criticized. Some scholars think that Politeness Principle separates from the communicative context. Gu Yueguo, the Chinese linguist, puts forth a new theory from the cross-cultural angle to revise the Politeness Principle, but they can only explain the verbal politeness in the given culture. Because the notion and the features of verbal politeness have not been clearly explained yet, these theories are unable to account for the complexity and diversity of verbal politeness.Therefore, this paper employs Adaptation Theory as the theoretical framework to explore verbal politeness.This theory can make an effective interpretation on verbal politeness.This thesis includes five parts. It begins with a brief introduction to the thesis. The following chapter is the review of relevant literature at home and abroad, and they are pointed out that there are limitations of these theories to interpret verbal politeness. The second chapter is theoretical framework. The third chapter is the study of verbal politeness from the perspective of adaptation theory. It starts from illustrating the notion and the features of verbal politeness, and then verbal politeness is analyzed from the aspects of contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, the dynamics of adaptability and the salience of adaptation process. The last part is the conclusion. With adaptation theory, it is possible for us to explain verbal politeness more convincingly, and it is more reasonable and comprehensive than those of the previous studies.