A Pragmatic Approach To The Interactive Discourses In Grey’s Anatomy

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics which studies the implicitstatements and the ways to interpret utterances in situational contexts. As a disciplinein language science, pragmatics covers the theories of presupposition, conversationalimplicature, speech act theory, conversational structures and other approaches to studylanguage behaviors. It throws a new light on analyzing how conversation participantsemploy pragmatic strategies to achieve communication goals in different types ofdiscourses. Nowadays the medical TV drama has been one of the most popular genres.As a representative work, Grey’s Anatomy has provided rich language materials butfew pragmatic studies have been conducted on it. The thesis focuses on a descriptivestudy of the discourses collected from Grey’s Anatomy from a pragmatic approach. Byusing a qualitative method, it discusses the pragmatic strategies used by the speaker indramatic context as well as analyzes the personal traits of characters.Within the theoretical framework of classical pragmatic theories, the thesis aimsto address the following research questions:(1) What kinds of pragmatic strategieshave the speaker used to express his implicit meaning?(2) What is the significance ofconversational structures in certain socio-pragmatic contexts?(3) How do theinteractive discourses reflect the personal traits of characters in Grey’s Anatomy? Onthe basis of these research questions, the thesis discusses the selected discourses fromfive perspectives. Firstly, it makes a detailed analysis based on presupposition. It findsthat inserting presupposition in sentences is regarded as a pragmatic strategy, whichhelps the hearer to know the background information and the speaker’communicationaims. Secondly, it explores the discourses based on conversational implicatures. Theresult suggests that the speaker prefers to express his implicit meaning throughmaking some conversational implicatures by deliberately violating the conversationmaxims. Thirdly, it investigates the discourses based on speech act theory, especiallythe indirect speech act theory proposed by Searle. Through discussing theconventional indirect speech acts performed by doctors and interns, the thesis findsthat the speaker often invokes inquiries or statements concerning the hearers’ conditions instead of directly asking them to do something. In addition by analyzingthe non-conventional speech acts, it discovers the ways of construing speech actassignment by employing pragmatic strategy in the situational context. Fourthly,based on communication accommodation theory, it argues five types of pragmaticstrategies, which are employed by the characters to accommodate their speech as toachieve better social relationships. Finally, the thesis discusses various ways toorganize conversational structure in terms of adjacency pairs, sequences, turn-takingmechanism in the local structure as well as the opening and closing section in theoverall structure. It is found that the structure moves beyond the specifics ofcomprehension and production of single messages to what happens when two or morepeople talk to each other. What’s more, during the process of pragmatic study onmedical dramatic discourses, the personal traits of different characters have beenshowed vividly through analyzing their ways of producing utterances.