Self-politeness And Gender: A Pragmatic Analysis Of "Desperate Housewives"

Conflict talk is a common linguistic phenomenon in dailycommunication. This term was first used by Grimshaw in1990and wasdefined as “the verbal interaction known as arguments, disputes, quarrels,squabbles and the like”(Grimshaw,1990, p.37). Since the1970s,conflict talk has been studied in different fields, such as philosophy,anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguistics and so on. However,pragmatic studies on conflict talk are relatively few and most of thesepragmatic studies adopt Cooperative Principle or Brown and Levinson’sface-threatening theory, which focus on the hearer’s face and do notconsider the speaker’s own face. Since there isn’t sufficient pragmaticstudy on conflict talk between couples living together, this thesis offers adetailed study on conflict talk between couples with both a quantitativeand qualitative approach.The theoretical framework of this thesis is based on the speech acttheory and the model of self-politeness proposed by Chen in2001. Thedata of this thesis is collected from the first three seasons of DesperateHousewives and265conflict episodes between couples are collected asthe corpus of this study. Through the quantitative and qualitative analyses,it is found that there exist some similarities and differences between couples in the strategies used to mitigate the self-face loss:(1) Both thehusband and wife tend to choose the strategy of ‘with redress’ and ‘offrecord’ while the strategy of ‘baldly’ and ‘withhold the SFTA’ are rarelyadopted;(2) In terms of the strategy of ‘baldly’, the husband tends tothreaten his negative face to defend his own face while the wife prefers tothreaten her positive face such as using an apology baldly; In terms of thestrategy of ‘with redress’, the husband prefers to use humor while thewife favors hedges and the strategy ‘attach condition’; In terms of thestrategy of ‘off record’, the wife overwhelmingly breaches the Maxim ofQuality and the Maxim of Manner; In terms of the strategy of ‘withholdthe SFTA’, the husband withholds SFTA more frequently;(3) The reasonsbehind the choices of different strategies can be explored from theperspectives of self-politeness, social-psychology and culture.Through a detailed analysis, I hope that this study will providean understanding of why couples get into conflicts and what causes themto say what they say when engaged in conflicts. It is also hoped that thefindings contribute to the study of gender, particularly gender differencesin communication.