| As a communicative strategy which is frequently used in people's daily communication,the evasive reply has attracted foreign linguists' attention since the middle of the twentieth century.Chinese linguistic scholars also began to study evasive replies at the end of the twentieth century.However,the literature review shows that the previous studies mainly confine to political or news corpora.Even though there are some scholars who try to study evasive replies in non-political discourses,the case study on a particular TV interview is scarce.Taking these issues into consideration,the present thesis chooses Yang Lan One on One as the source of its research corpus to study evasive replies employed by the interviewees.As one of the first high-end interviews,Yang Lan One on One enjoys a great popularity among Chinese people since it was premiered in 2001.In the program,Yang Lan invites elites from all walks of life around the world to talk about their life experiences or some hot issues.Different from other high-end interviews,Yang Lan One on One has diversified topics including life,education,art,politics,economics and so on.In addition,there are various kinds of language expressions in the process of the interview,which is of high research value.This thesis downloads all videos of the program(from 2010 to 2016)from www.v.qq.com and www.iqiyi.com.41 English programs(which are listed in the appendix)are selected and transcribed into 522 adjacent pairs.Among,this thesis marks 130 evasive replies and constructs a corpus of the present thesis.The present thesis mainly adopts Verschueren's linguistic adaptation theory as its main theoretical base.By taking Brown and Levison's face theory and Bavelas' avoidance-avoidance conflict into consideration,the study sets up a new pragmatic conceptual framework to study evasive replies in the interview.This thesis aims to explore the following three questions:(1)What are the strategies of evasive replies in Yang Lan One on One?(2)What are the interviewees' motivations in adopting evasive replies?(3)What are the pragmatic effects brought by evasive replies in the interview? Based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of evasive replies,this thesis has the following findings:(1)Strategies of evasive replies.Based on Galasinski's classification of evasive replies,this thesis classifies evasive replies into two categories,namely overt evasive replies and covert evasive replies.The thesis demonstrates an overall distribution of two kinds of evasive replies based on the quantitative analysis of the collected corpus.The data shows that all of the evasive replies adopted by the interviewees in Yang Lan One on One are covert,which means that none of the interviewees makes it clear that he or she refuses to give any replies to the question posedby Yang Lan.The thesis regards these covert evasive replies as manipulations of either questions or replies in the interview.Based on detailed analysis of the corpus,the author concludes five evasive strategies adopted by interviewees: shifting the topic focus of the question,canceling the presupposition implied in the question,manipulating the key words in the question,attacking the question and giving an explanation.Among these strategies,the first four belong to manipulations of questions posed by Yang Lan;the last one manipulates replies provided by interviewees.(2)Interviewees' motivations in adopting evasive replies.In this thesis,the adaptation to the contextual correlates is studied as the main motivation of the interviewees in adopting evasive replies.The thesis further studies the adaptation from three aspects,namely,social world,mental world and physical world.The adaptation to the social world includes the adaptation to interviewees' social position,social background,and social convention.The adaptation to the mental world includes the adaptation to the interviewees' motivation,personality and avoidance-avoidance conflict.As for the adaptation to the social world,this thesis mainly analyzes the adaptation to the interview setting.(3)Pragmatic effects of evasive replies.The present study explores the pragmatic functions of evasive replies from four angles,namely,protecting interviewees' face,withholding secret information,maintaining a harmonious interpersonal relationship with the third party and minimizing responsibility.All in all,this thesis studies evasive replies adopted by interviewees in Yang Lan One on One from three aspects,namely,strategies of evasive replies,interviewees' motivations in adopting evasive replies and pragmatic effects of evasive replies.There are two aims that the thesis manages to achieve: on the one hand,the thesis tries to make up the limitations of the previous studies in the theoretical framework and research corpus;on the other hand,this thesis aims to dig out the essence of the evasive reply so that it can help people to recognize and use evasive replies in an effective way. |
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