Analysis Of Speech Acts In TV Program "If You Are The One" From The Perspective Of Politeness Principle

In recent years，the hit TV show “If You Are the One” of JiangSu TV catches people’seyes, leading a new trend of Chinese love and marriage programs. The speech acts ofguest to a certain extent reflect people’s views on love and marriage in new era. But theguests usually violate Cooperative Principle and certain conversational maxims in theprogram: One reason of violating is quite a few of guests speak their opinions directly andthus threaten other’s face; the other reason of violating is the guests take account of thespeaker’s face and the politeness principles in communications and express themselves inan indirect way. In the previous studies, how to use strategies to minimize facethreatenings and maintain politeness has not been paid enough attention. This thesisintends to study politeness from the perspective of pragmatics.Selected abundant polite and impolite conversations from “If You Are the One”, thecurrent study attempts to analyze what speech acts follow or violate the PolitenessPrinciple, can Politeness Principle or Face Theory fully explain the politenessphenomenon in the program? What politeness strategies do the guests use to make theirFace Threatening Acts sound friendly? And moreover, further discuss several pragmaticfunctions of euphemistic expressions in politeness strategy, such as euphemistic request,refusal, comment and response etc… In order to reduce the face damage to the hearer andobserve the communicative etiquette, the speakers always express his or her real meaningand feeling in a seemed politeness way to avoid the direct confrontation andembarrassment. On the basis of the theories mentioned above, this thesis interprets theconcept of indirectness，explains the relationship between politeness and indirectness,elucidates the factors influence the directness application in politeness in order, such aspower, social distance, right and obligation and cultural difference.To sum up, this thesis analyzes the polite and impolite languages in “If You Are theOne” from the proper aspect of politeness. It proves that the politeness theories putforward respectively by Leech, Brown and Levinson are practical and useful in explainingthe politeness phenomenon and the linguistic strategies used in “If You Are the One” forthe guests to create and maintain the harmonious relationships with each other. And ofcourse, some ideas and argumentations are far from mature. The author hopes this thesiscan enable the guests to regulate their speech acts better in the program, thus help theaudience express themselves appropriately to avoid pragmatic failures and achieve the goal of the communication.