Redressive Strategies Of Politeness In Chinese And American TV Talent Shows-an Adaptation-based Approach

The present study focuses on the linguistic choice of redressive strategies of politeness in Chinese and American TV talent shows.Politeness is a pragmatic and social phenomenon, which is widely used in daily life and work. Recently, the issue of politeness has been brought into focus for many language researchers. Among many theories on politeness, the Face Theory advanced by Brown and Levinson in 1978 stands out as the most influential. They hold that “face” is the public self-image that everyone wants and expects to be recognized by others. In communication, “face” will be threatened inevitably by certain speech acts. If people’s self-image is infringed, face threatening acts(FTAs) emerge. Therefore, speakers need to take appropriate measures to mitigate the offence to the hearers.In TV talent shows, judges have to make comments on the performances of contestants. The judges need politeness strategies for lessening the degree of offence to contestants and create a harmonious entertainment atmosphere when the face-threatening acts occur. Therefore, redressive strategies have been proved to be very effective pragmatic strategies in talent shows. Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory(AT), integrating with the factors of psychology, society and culture in the process of language use, well expounds the dynamic adaptation of redressive strategies of politeness from a new perspective of pragmatics. Therefore, the present study aims to make a relatively comprehensive analysis on the choice of redressive strategies in Chinese and American TV talent shows with the support of theoretical framework of Adaptation Theory.The data is collected from two TV talent shows: Chinese Idol and American Idol. Based on a self-built closed corpus, which consists of 6 episodes in Chinese Idol and 6 episodes in American Idol, the study investigate the linguistic choice of redressive strategies. By analyzing the data, two questions have been raised: 1).What redressive strategies of politeness are used respectively in Chinese Idol and American Idol? With the support of Adaptation Theory, what are the causes for adopting redressive strategies in both Chinese Idol and American Idol? 2). What are the similarities and differences on the choice of these strategies in the two shows? What are the underlying factors that influence these similarities and differences from the perspective of Adaptation Theory?According to the research, the major findings are: 1. Both Chinese judges and American judges adopted redressive strategies. Among 25 redressive strategies put forward by Brown and Levinson, 15 strategies are employed by Chinese judge and American judges respectively. The distribution table of the frequency on the strategies used has been presented in chapter five. From the perspective of Adaptation Theory, employing redressive strategies in the two talent shows is the result of dynamic adaptation to language user’s social world and mental world. 2. Chinese judges and American judges share the most of the redressive strategies and some strategies with high frequency are almost the same. However, after analyzing the positive strategy and negative strategy respectively, the study found that Chinese judges prefer to adopt positive politeness strategies. American judges adopt more negative politeness strategies than Chinese judges. In addition, there are some obvious differences on the use frequency of several sub-strategies. The reason is that the judges are obliged to adapt to the common goals and universal context in TV talent show. At the same time, the judges in the two shows adapt different cultural norms subconsciously.FTAs are unavoidable in communication, so the present study not only hopes to better demonstrate the explanatory power of adaptation theory, but also expects to provide relative valuable suggestions for language users to perform and understand the utterances in a more suitable and strategic way in specific context.