A Study Of Face-threatening Acts In TV Interview Programs From The Perspective Of Adaptaion Theory

language researchers have paid great attention to politeness phenomenon for many years. Among many theories about politeness, the Face Theory proposed by Brown and Levinson plays the most significant role. In this theory, the notion "face" is defined as the public self-image that all rational social members want. Face-threatening acts (FTAs) will be produced when the verbal acts of the speaker hurt the face of the hearer. In fact, nearly all speech acts are FTAs in real interaction. FTAs includes mitigated FTAs and unmitigated FTAs. When FTAs are unavoidable, speakers are supposed to take mitigated strategies of FTAs, which means performing them with redressive action, so as to mitigate the face threat to the hearer and show their politeness. However, for the achievement of certain communicative goals, speakers have to perform unmitigated FTAs in some cases. Linguistic researchers have paid more attention to mitigated FTAs, which leads to the neglect of unmitigated FTAs. For the present study, one of the research objective is to conduct a relatively comprehensive analysis of FTAs, including mitigated FTAs and unmitigated FTAs.The present study takes Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory as the theoretical framework and analyzes the strategies taken by the host and interviewees in Dialogue. This theory integrates social, cultural and cognitive factors into investigation, so it can give a strong explanatory power to language choices both in form and strategy and provides a new angle for the research of language use. According to the Linguistic Adaptation Theory, the language use is actually the process of continuous choice-making. This linguistic choice is not always conscious, and it is sometimes conducted unconsciously. The linguistic choice-making has three properties:variability, negotiability and adaptability. Based on adaptability, the Adaptation Theory provides four angles for the description and interpretation of linguistic phenomenon. They are contextual correlates of adaptability, which includes communicative context and linguistic context, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability, and salience of adaptability. The present study mainly takes communicative context of contextual correlates as its angle of investigation, which includes language users, the social world, mental world and the physical world, and explores the mechanism and motivation behind the choice of strategies taken by participants in the TV interview program.This thesis adopts a qualitative research method and conducts analysis of examples extracted from the printed version of Dialogue:Highlights of Dialogue. It aims to conduct a relatively comprehensive analysis of FTAs, and explores the mechanism and motivation behind the choice-making of strategies performed by the host and interviewees. At the same time, the author also hopes that this study can give enlightenment to the hosts and interviewees on how to strategically ask and answer questions and establish a harmonious relationship.On the basis of the Adaptation Theory and through the analysis of collected data, we find that unmitigated FTAs are also performed by the the host and interviewees in the TV interview program. Both mitigated and unmitigated FTAs are all effective pragmatic strategies. Mitigated strategies are mainly employed and unmitigated strategies are occasionally used for the achievement of certain communicative goals. Additionally, the pragmatic strategies concerning FTAs chosen by the host and interviewees are the consequence of dynamic adaptation to different communicative contextual correlates with great consciousness. These correlates include language users, social world, mental world and physical world.