A Pragmatic Study On Evasive Answers In TV Interviews

Evasion, as a common language phenomenon, has received attention from linguistics since 1950s. Scholars led by Bavelas and Bull conducted a series of systematic researches both on evasions in field of daily communication as well as political interviews. In the end of 20 century, Chinese scholars also began to show their interest in this topic. But the later on studies refined themselves in the field of political interviews. So in this thesis, the author intends to broaden the research data scope by introducing nonpolitical topics into her study. Through this she can study the language phenomenon in a more diversified data base.The data of my study derives from the spontaneous utterance form Talk Show programs and celebrity news interviews at home and abroad. Such as Larry king live, Piers Morgan Tonight , The Oprah Winfrey Show, Talk Asia, Yang Lan Interview and Kevin Hour.The author applies Grice's Cooperative Principles and Brown and Levinson's Face theory to explain and discuss the definition, features, classification, inducements of evasive answers in the TV interviews as well as the various evasive strategies those celebrities apply during their interaction with the interviewer. The celebrities are mostly bothered by interviewers'face threatening questions. Deep inside their heart, an avoidance-avoidance conflict between whether to answer the question honestly or to turn down the question totally formed. In order to maintain their public faces, celebrities applied different strategies to muddle through. As a result, they fulfilled the obligation of answering the question without revealing the key information which may potentially harm faces of both sides.In the last chapter of the thesis, the author divides the strategies into two categories, which are strategies on questions and strategies on answers. Through author's observation, all the strategies have violated at least one of Grice's four maxims. Base on the two fundamental inducements: avoidance-avoidance conflict and face concern, the author suggest the so called optimal strategy, which must settle the conflict without disturbing mutual faces and these strategies serves the same purpose as Brown and Levinson's off record face saving strategies.The author hopes through investigating the delicate and brilliant conversations between the interviewers celebrities, language users may be more aware of this language usage, understand its nature and wisely apply this communicative strategy into daily use.