Pragmatic Strategies Concerning Mitigated FTAs In TV Talk Show-An Adaptation-based Approach

Politeness has proved to be a universal topic for language researchers in recent years. Among abundant politeness theories, the Face Theory put forward by Brown and Levison (1978) stands out as the most influential. They define "face" as the public self-image that all rational adult members in society possess. They argue that if a demand or an intrusion needs to be made on another person's public self-image or autonomy, it is a potential face-threatening act (FTA). When faced with the problem of performing an FTA, speakers are supposed to perform it with redressive action to lessen the degree of offence to the hearer, thus achieving politeness.In TV talk shows, interviewers/interviewees do perform mitigated FTAs to achieve communicative goals. However, little work has been done to account for such a phenomenon. Besides, the previous theories of politeness more or less fail to make a satisfactory explanation of FTAs. From a rather new perspective, Verschueren's Adaptation Theory (AT) integrates cognitive, social and cultural elements into investigation, so it is invested with a strong explanatory power to illuminate linguistic choice not only linguistically but also strategically. This thesis aims to make a relatively comprehensive investigation on pragmatic strategies concerning mitigated FTAs in TV talk show discourses with the AT as the theoretical framework.In the light of the AT, this study, methodologically speaking, relies on the qualitative analysis of the data in oral forms, which are mainly accessed through the recording and transcriptions of authoritative TV talk shows. On the base of AT and on the premise of collected data, the present study has achieved some findings through answering the two questions:(1) What are the mechanisms and motivations behind the choice of mitigation strategies concerning FTAs in TV talk show? (2) How are pragmatic strategies concerning FTAs realized in concrete TV talk shows?As to the first question, it is found that the mechanisms and motivations behind the choice of mitigation strategies concerning FTAs in TV talk shows lie in the innate demand of interviewers'or interviewees'linguistic choice--------making for dynamic adaptation to various communicative contextual correlates with high consciousness. Such correlates involve the roles of language users, the mental world, the social world, and the physical world, which are always interwoven in actual interaction instead of being independent from one another.As far as the second question is concerned, a generalization on the sub-strategies has been made on the mitigation strategy in TV talk shows. In such a case, the speaker is provided with possible linguistic expressions to produce polite utterances strategically. Meanwhile it also facilitates a better understanding of interviewers'/interviewees' intension behind the choice of a specific strategy.