Pragmatic Strategies For Mitigating FTAs In Talk Shows: An Adaptation-based Approach

The present study focuses on the utterances for mitigating face-threatening acts(FTAs) chosen by hosts and guests in some successful talk shows.Recently, the issue of politeness has been brought into focus for many languageresearchers for its wide use in people’s daily life and work. It is true that plenty ofpoliteness theories have been put forward by some excellent linguists, but the FaceTheory advanced by Brown and Levinson (1978) stands out as the most influential.They hold that “face” is the public self-image that everyone wants and expects everyoneelse to recognize. If anyone invades another person’s self-image or autonomy, facethreatening act emerges.In the typical conversational program, speakers in talk shows need more strategiesof politeness for lessening the degree of offence to hearers, thus to create a harmoniousatmosphere in conversation. Therefore, in talk shows, mitigated FTAs have been provedto be very effective pragmatic strategies to win hosts’/guests’ favor. However, fewlinguistic researches have been done in this field and the previous theories of politenessdon’t seem to have given a better explanation of FTAs. Verschueren’s AdaptationTheory (AT), from a new perspective of pragmatics, well explicates the dynamicadaptation of the mitigated FTAs on politeness phenomenon, correlated with hosts’/guests’ social world and mental world. Therefore, the present study aims to make arelatively comprehensive investigation on pragmatic strategies concerning theutterances for mitigating FTAs in talk shows based on the theoretical framework ofAdaptation Theory.The present study mainly belongs to a qualitative analysis based on the datacollected from some publications of the authoritative talk shows. By analyzing theadaptability of utterances for mitigating FTAs, three questions are going to be rasied:1.What are the generative mechanism for the choice of mitigating FTAs in talk shows?2.How are pragmatic strategies concerning FTAs realized in talk shows?3. What are thepragmatic functions of these strategies in talk shows?According to the research, to the first question, the answer is that the choice ofmitigating FTAs is the result of speaker’s dynamic adaptation to kinds of contextualcorrelates including language user’s social world and mental world. As to the secondquestion, three kinds of strategies, such as evasive answers, pragmatic empathy and hedges, have been illustrated on mitigating FTAs in talk shows. The speaker generallychoose the appropriate strategy to satisfy his communicative needs. And by analyzingthe last question, the study finds the above strategies have the following pragmaticfunctions: avoiding conflict, protecting self-image and showing politeness andtenderness.FTAs are unavoidable in communication, so the present study not only hopes tobetter illuminate the explanatory power of adaptation theory, but also expects to helphosts, guests and audiences to perform and understand the utterances in a strategic way.