An Analysis Of The Implicature In TV Program You Are The One According To The Off-record Strategy

Along with the fast development of modern society where the living pace of city lifebecomes faster and faster, young people who struggle in big cities bear much stress. So manyyoungsters who are above the average age for marriage are still single. Because of thisphenomenon, many TV dating programs come into being, and You Are the One is one of them,which is generated by Jiangsu Channel and widely liked by audiences for its new style--humorous conversations between male and female guests and hosts, reasonable and sinceresuggestions. This thesis reviews the development of China’s TV dating program and recentresearches about the program You Are the One. The author found that at present acomprehensive and in-depth study of this kind of program from pragmatic perspective has notbeen attempted. Based on Brown and Levinson’s off-record strategy, this thesis studies theconversational implicature in You Are the One in a comprehensive and in-depth way.This thesis recognizes that dialogues in TV dating programs have strong randomness,which requires both sides of conversation think quickly to deal with difficulties inconversations in time and offer reasonable answers to keep the conversation go on smoothly.Based on the13videos downloaded from the official website of You Are the One,15typical short dialogues chosen from this program are studied by using off-record strategy. The15short dialogues include conversations between male and female guests, male, femaleguests and hosts. The present thesis adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods andanalyzes the conversational implicature of the15dialogue. It is found that both guests andhosts violate the Cooperative Principle deliberately by applying off-record strategy to expresstheir real intentions, and through this they can reduce face threatening of each other, avoiddirect conflicts and achieve their communicational aims. This thesis takes Brown and Levinson’s off-record strategy as the theoretical framework.The paper firstly analyzes the situational context of You Are the One, then puts forward theoff-record strategy used in the15conversations: ironic expressions, metaphors, rhetoricalquestions, understatements, overstatements, displacing hearers and ambiguous expressions.The illustrations are classified into different types for detailed analysis. Through the study wecan explain how the conversational implicature are produced.Analyzing the conversational implicature in You Are the One not only broadens theapplication of pragmatic theories in TV dating programs but also helps the audiences betterunderstand the real intentions of guests and hosts. Besides, through studying Brown andLevinson’s off-record strategy people can better communicate with each other and achievetheir communicational aims.