A Pragmatic Study Of Verbal Impoliteness Behaviors In Grey’’s ANatomy

Since Brown & Levinson(1978/1987) put forward Politeness Principle, researches on Politeness Principle have prevailed in western countries and become the focus of linguists. Meanwhile, linguists begin to study the politeness in quantity to explore the cause for the emergence of politeness and the function of this kind of language. However, impoliteness which is in contrast to politeness is overlooked and it is thought to be a phenomenon that is unnecessary to be studied. In recent years, people begin to realize that impoliteness is not unnecessary and it occurs frequently in man’s daily life. Polite utterance can promote human communication and keep society harmonious while impoliteness may lead to interpersonal conflict and affect social stability which will generate severe consequences. Hence, it is rather necessary to have a study on impoliteness phenomena.This paper aims at studying the verbal impoliteness behaviors and their pragmatic function in Grey’s Anatomy which is a US TV series. This series mainly tells a story about the work life of Grey, who is an intern in American Seattle Great Hospital, with her colleagues, friends, superiors and patients. Derek Bousfield’s impoliteness theory is adopted as the theoretical basis in this study to categorize and analyze the verbal impoliteness behaviors in the previous two seasons of this series. Then the pragmatic function of impoliteness put forward by Jonathan Culpeper is used to analyze the pragmatic function reached in this series. The relationships between characters in this series are divided into three types: between colleagues, between superiors and subordinates and between doctors and patients. Then, this paper addresses four questions: 1) What impoliteness strategies are employed in the series? 2) Are the impoliteness strategies adopted by people of these three different relationships the same or not? And what are they? 3) What probably are the reasons if the impoliteness strategies adopted by people of different relationships are different? 4) What are the pragmatic goals or functions of these verbal impoliteness behaviors in this series?Findings of this study are the following: 1) Thirteen impoliteness strategies occur in this series and seven of Bousfield’s do not occur. Among these thirteen impoliteness strategies in this series, Hindering/ Blocking, Combination of strategies and Using taboo words are three strategies which occur much more frequently than others; 2) The strategies used by people of these three different relationships are not the same. Verbal impoliteness behaviors occur much more frequently between colleagues while not between superiors and subordinates or between doctors and patients; 3) Power imbalance, intimacy between interactants and authority are the reasons for the different use of impoliteness strategies by people between different relationships and play an important role in these three kinds of relationship; 4) The pragmatic functions for people in this series to have verbal impoliteness behaviors are affective function, entertaining function and institutional function.