Analysis Of Oprah Winfrey Show From The Perspective Of The Relevance Theory And The Politeness Principle

Language plays an irreplaceable role in human communication. How to use language appropriately has long been the concern of orators, rhetoricians and later linguists. The Relevance Theory and the Politeness Principle, as two important theories in pragmatics, have been widely applied to the interpretation of verbal communication. The Relevance Theory focuses on interpreting how interlocutors get the communicative intentions of each other by ostension and inference, while the Politeness Principle emphasizes how to use the Politeness Principle and Redressive Strategies to behave politely during communication.TV Talk Show is essentially a type of communication. Oprah Winfrey Show is one of the most famous TV talk shows, for the hostess Oprah has a good command of language. Many scholars have probed into the analysis of the show by different approaches, resulting in outstanding findings. This analysis of the talk show will be conducted on the basis of the combination of the Relevance Theory and the Politeness Principle.The analysis includes the discussion of the application of the Relevance Theory, the application of the Politeness Principle and the combination of the two theories.. It is found through the investigation that the hostess and the guests of the talk show tend to observe the Relevance Principle during the communication. In other words, in general, the questions raised by the hostess and the answers given by the guests are the most relevant or need the least effort to understand. However, it is also found that there are cases in which questions are concerned with the privacy of or bad rumors about the guests, and the guests will thus use tactics that seems to violate the Relevance Principle and use some irrelevant utterances to answer those questions. The reason why the hostess and the guests can normally observe the Relevance Principle and choose the utterance with different degrees of relevance to communicate without interrupting conversation is that ostensive behavior and contextual factors get the inference carried on in a right way. Meanwhile, the hostess and the guests of the show would try their best to behave politely in conversation. The hostess will make her efforts to save the guests’ face when asking questions and the guests try their best not to reject to answer the questions. But as many speech acts are intrinsically face-threatening, the hostess will use some redressive strategies to make the compensation.The author hopes that this study can shed some light on future studies of Oprah Winfrey Show and how to use language to communicate effectively in daily life.