Linguistic Taboo In 《Brokeback Moutain》from The Perspective Of Politeness

The word 'taboo'comes from the language of Tonga Island in the South Pacific Ocean. It means sacred, untouchable or somebody or something (including language) we must pay extreme attention to. Something is defined as taboo when it reflects a sensitive phenomenon in society. It plays a more and more important role in increasing Cross-Culture Communications. Taboo language has already penetrated into daily life and become an inevitable part of language practice, which can reflect cultural connotation in particular historical periods and social environments.Although taboo language is objectively very widespread, its subjective qualities are very important. It is quite common in every culture in the world, with varying changes of values, ranging from the individual to the social life. Therefore, the study of taboo words must be put in a specific context, taking into account the situation with the communication participants, resources, functions and strategies.People might follow the Cooperate Principle and Politeness Principle when doing research on taboo language in Cross-Culture Communication activities. Grice talked about the Cooperate Principle and its four criteria of communication in his Logic and Conversation. He described the basic framework that speakers use in conveying their intentions. But the Cooperation Principle did not solve the issue of politeness. Leech raised the principle of Politeness in 1983, and this theory "saved" the Cooperate Principle. Leach believes that speakers in communication should make each other feel respected as much as possible, and then get a good impression which can contribute to the smooth communication.If the speaker and the listener have different points of view on cultural values in the communication, from minor to major differences, this leads to varying degrees of communication failure.Due to the different culture conflicts in Cross-Culture Communication, some utterance of both sides will be inevitably unaccepted. These utterances may regard as taboo language in the listeners' culture. The maximum transmission for language and the culture language contained in the globalization time is movie.Movie is a true portrayal of particular social life. It is dealing with culture as well as social relations inextricable and is reflecting the cultural and social factors on people's demands and constraints of verbal communication from different perspectives. As an integral part of language, taboos in movie context are the undoubtedly highlight and the conditions for the implementation of Politeness Principle. The social cultural factors appear in movie context, such as power and social distance, where the constraints of Politeness Principle are obviously expressed.In this thesis the author collect taboo samples from the dialogues of American movie Brokeback Mountain, which tells a homosexuality story. The movie won eight Oscar nominations as well as the best vision and best director, and became a peculiar milestone of "love story". Therefore this issues a certain challenge to multicultural thought pattern, religious belief and Christianity.Brokeback Mountain is an adaptation of American novelist Anne Plowkiz's literary output. It is a story about two Wyoming young cowboy's 20-years homosexual love, and happened in the western area of United States in 1960s. Due to the novel writing background is extolling time of American masculinity and traditional values. Cowboy myth becomes the spirit of American settler's totem. The primitive and heartfelt emotion between cowboys shows a precious feeling relative in the society full of material desires. This movie reflects contradiction and conflict between homosexuality and social traditions by using simple sentences without subject words in its dialogues.I collect 50 statements which can express distinctive sex characteristics and time features from totally 108 sentences in the dialogue of Brokeback Mountain. These statements can clearly express protagonist's emotion. The result shows 70% of the taboo words exist in the time featured movie, have people's original psychological worship and cognition as their sources. These ineffable words which have inelegant meanings expressed some deeper implications in the specific movie context. Such as, joke between friends, intimacy between lovers and scoffing for the hard life, even used showed respect to the other side. Speakers can directly express their intentions by using certain commonalities word in particular crowd to open communication deadlocks in order to enhance emotional acceptances. This is also the major reason why most of the people prefer to choose taboo language as the best strategy during communication activities in some given contexts.Movie is a mirror of society. Based on the analysis of the movie language, English learners could understand taboo and culture diversity to make the process of Cross-Culture Communication smooth, and could further understand the vocabulary in special culture background to promote further understanding in moral value and belief.