When Mother Meets Mother-in-law:a Multimodal Analysis Of Impoliteness In Family Interaction

During the past decades, the primary method of analyzing impolite utterance was the discourse analysis, concerning itself with the use of language in a running discourse, and most analysts’data was taken from written texts and tape recordings rather than multimedia resources. Given the rapid development in modern multimedia technologies, non-verbal aspects (like gestures, body movements, and facial expressions) now are able to be the clues to impoliteness in the course of visual analysis.A major objective of the present thesis is to broaden the scope of previous impoliteness studies which tend to focus narrowly on single lexically or grammatically-based strategies like most politeness studies. Although it is a widely held belief that both verbal languages and paralinguistic elements play an integral role in the formation of meaning during conversations, it is quite unclear how the visual and the verbal can be coordinated during the process of meaning-creating. This contribution attempts to employ a multimodal analysis of impoliteness utterances and behaviours in TV drama When Mother Meets Mother-in-Law and to move beyond lexically and grammatically based illumination in order to clarify the extent to which visual and non-verbal aspects form meaning.This thesis will apply naturalistic, data-driven and multimodal inquiry to the research. The theoretical foundations of the present thesis are Culpeper’s (2005) model of impoliteness and response framework (Culpeper et al.,2003), supplemented with multimodal discourse analysis of the TV drama When Mother Meets Mother-in-Law.Through the exploration of a multimodal discourse analysis of impoliteness (including nonverbal elements, e.g. gestures, body movements, and facial expressions) in When Mother Meets Mother-in-Law, the author successively answers the three research questions.(1) What are the causes for the occurrence of impoliteness in the data?(2) How are Culpeper’s (2005) five impolite strategies realized in the data?(3) How will the targets of face threats respond once they confront impolite illocutions?...