A Study On Probing Speech Act Of Late Show With David Letterman

Probing is a type of speech act, which is used to unveil the secrets and hidden facts by utilizing tactful and strategic linguistic means.Through the ages, the speech act of probing has been taken as questioning for a long time. This study explores features of the speech act of probing, identifying an independent status for it.Austin’s and Searle’s Theories on Speech Acts, together with Brown and Levinson’s Theory on Politeness, constitute the theoretical framework for the present study. Searle’s four felicity conditions for performing a speech act are taken as the criteria for defining the speech act of probingThe study has analyzed probing speech acts in transcriptions of eight episodes of the talk show program:Late Show with David Letterman and some general findings have been drawn from the present study.Probing is a speech act in which the speaker attempts to get the hearer to release privacy or withheld information for the speaker or a third party’s benefit, which might involve the hearer into a disadvantageous situation. It is directed at the change of the hearer’s internal world from reluctance to willingness to tell as is expected by the speaker. The psychological state expressed is "desire"The probing speech act has its own linguistic realization. From the aspect of formal realization, high pitch, short duration and frequent pause are phonetic features; modal verbs and mitigative exclamations are frequently adopted; eight sentences patterns have been detected; mechanic repetition or paraphrasing is used to highlight the speaker’s insistence on eliciting the information.From the aspect of semantic realization, there are three categories according to the standard of subject or propositional content. The three categories are sentences concerning the speaker, the hearer and the act itself.From the aspect of pragmatic realization, the probing speech act as a primary illocutionary act, is armed with the most powerful force of all speech acts, which can be realized by three kinds of secondary illocutionary acts:interrogative, assertive, and directive. Interrogative is the most frequent way to perform probing speech act.Totally twenty-one politeness strategies are detected in speaker’s utterances in performing the probing speech act in a semi-institutional setting. Viewed from the frequency of use of the strategies, positive politeness strategies take overwhelming share, which are followed by off-record ones and negative ones in succession.