Analysis Of Conversational Implicature In Sitcom Good Luck Charlie From The Perspective Of Politeness Theories

The theory of conversational implicature proposed by Grice is considered thesecond major theory in pragmatics and many scholars have paid much attention to it.According to Grice, in daily conversation people follows the cooperative principlesub-consciously or unconsciously, while sometimes they do not usually say thingsdirectly but tend to imply them, which explains the production of the conversationalimplicature. Leech proposes politeness principle and views politeness as one main reasonof people violating the cooperative principle. Based on this, Brown and Levinson furtherstudy the politeness strategies from the perspectives of face and face threatening acts(FTA) and put forward the face saving theory, this thesis studies the conversationalimplicature in Good Luck Charlie surrounding the off-record strategies which areconsidered the most used politeness strategies.The research explores that how a speaker produces conversational implicatures byusing off-record politeness strategies and how he makes the conversation polite andkeeps it moving on, when the speaker has to do face threatening acts (FTAs). It involvestwenty-four typical conversations from Good Luck Charlie (from Season One to Four)and classifies them into different types according to the categories of off-recordstrategies. By employing the off-record strategies, the characters in the sitcom oftenviolate one or more maxims of cooperative principle so as to reduce the face damage ofthe hearer and finally realize their intention. By this way, the speakers convey their realideas implicitly and make the exchanges go on; therefore, on the surface, the charactersviolate cooperative principle, but they are actually observing it better at the deep level.With the case analysis of conversational implicature based on the above theories,the study hopes to provide a novel perspective for the non-English speakers to appreciateAmerican situation comedy or even some other English works, it is proved once againthat politeness is the main reason of people breaching cooperative principle andoff-record strategies are very effective polite ways in reducing face damage. Throughanalyzing the chosen conversations with these strategies, the author hopes it will help thenon-English speakers appreciate the western literary works better and use thesepoliteness strategies properly in the cross cultural communication.