A Pragmatic Study Of Understatement In Friends From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Understatement is a widely used linguistic phenomenon in our daily life. As a communicative strategy, it uses the mild, soft expression instead of the direct or threatening language so as to make the communication reserved and peaceful. The use of understatement can enhance the expressing power of the discourse, and leave a deeper impression on the communicative participants. A lot of scholars both at home and abroad have done some researches on understatement, but so far, these studies are not comprehensive. Most of the pervious studies treat understatement as a static linguistic phenomenon, which is opposed to the real situation that the production of understatement is a dynamic process.From a pragmatic point of view, the present study will draw support from Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory to analyze the specific language strategy. The main purpose includes identifying the different expressions of understatement in the American sitcom Friends, and discussing the adaptation of understatement to different communicative contexts as well as its pragmatic effect. Since Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory has a strong explanatory power, a lot of scholars try to analyze different linguistic phenomena based on the adaptation theory. According to the adaptation theory, the author sets up a working model of the adaptation of understatement in this thesis, which is also a creative point of this thesis. Theoretically, the present study to some degree enriches the relative studies of understatement, and proves the great explanatory power of the adaptation theory. In practice, it helps people to use understatement more flexibly and lead to a better communication so that the language user could get the expected effect.According to the above research purposes, this thesis adopts a qualitative method based on the data collected from the sitcom Friends. The qualitative analysis is mainly about the systematic study of understatement in Friends according to the adaptation theory. With these linguistic materials, this thesis studies how the characters adapt to all kinds of contextual correlates (mental, social and physical world) and make linguistic choices to understate so that the communication could go smoothly. Besides, this thesis finds the pragmatic effects of using understatement are as follows:maintaining the face-threatening effects, avoiding conflicts, withholding information, and dodging responsibilities.