A Study Of Politeness In TV Interviews Under Adaptation Theory

Politeness begins to receive the attention of linguistic researches in recent years. A complete politeness theory should consist of researches on politeness and impoliteness. Brown and Levinson’s Face Theory (1978) is regarded as the most influential one among the abundant related theories. They take politeness as the want of face which is defined as the public self-image that all rational social members possess. A speech act is considered as a face-threatening act when it intrudes on another person’s face want. In fact, according to Brown and Levinson (1978), almost all the speech acts are potentially face-threatening. Mitigated face threating acts are taken as being polite while unmitigated ones are considered as impolite. Sometimes language users have to resort to unmitigated face threating acts for certain communicative purposes. Verbal politeness and impoliteness both play important roles in communication. At present, theoretical researches on this language phenomenon has not been paid enough attention.In TV interviews, the host and interviewees do perform both politeness and impoliteness verbal acts to obtain communicative goals. Despite it, little work has been done to account for such a phenomenon. Besides, previous studies more or less fail to make a satisfactory explanation. The Adaptation Theory proposed by Verschueren (2000) integrates cognitive, social and cultural factors with pragmatic study, thus it provides a relatively new perspective for the illumination of language use with a strong explanatory power. Hence, the present study aims to conduct a relatively comprehensive investigation into politeness and impoliteness in TV interview discourses within the framework of the Adaptation Theory.This thesis adopts a qualitative research method in the light of the Adaptation Theory. Through the analysis of discourses extracted TV interview programs, the research will firstly examine politeness and impoliteness with the Adaptation Theory and thus justify impoliteness in TV interviews. Moreover, the study will also explore the mechanism behind the choice of polite and impolite verbal acts in TV interviews under Adaptation Theory. Finally, it will illustrate the linguistic realization of verbal politeness and present some specific politeness strategies for the interviewees.The author hopes that this thesis provides a new perspective for theoretical researches on politeness; gives some inspirations to hosts and interviewees for performing politeness speech acts appropriately; and to some degree facilitates a better interpretation of the communicative intention behind the choice of politeness speech acts in TV interviews.