An Analysis Of Face-saving Strategies In The Big Bang Theory

The Politeness theory was first put forward by Brown & Levinson in 1978 and was revised in 1987. They consider politeness as linguistic strategies to satisfy communicative and face-oriented ends. Thus, their theory is often called politeness strategies. To them, to be polite is to save face, and the central notion in their theory is "face"; therefore, their theory is also called face-saving theory. Brown & levinson analyzed the phenomena of politeness. They believe that in order to enter some certain social relation network, we have to admit and recognized "face", namely "the public image of the hearer" or "self recognition"In the United States, situation comedy has become the most basic type of TV program, after the 1990s, it has gradually occupied the prime-time television series, become a very popular type of program.This paper will analyze the dialogue in The Big Bang Theory, combined with the face-saving theories and the analysis of the face-saving strategies, in order to make the theory better and more intuitive combined with the practical application of the theory.This thesis consists of an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. Its main contents are as follows:The first part is introduction part. The introduction part is mainly divided into two parts. The first part discusses the face-saving strategies, including its development and research scopes; the second part introduces American TV dramas, which mainly discusses the study of American dramas at home and abroad.The second part is the main part of the thesis, which is composed of three chapters:The first chapter is literature review. This part mainly introduces some theories which will be used in the second and third chapter. The literature review part firstly introduces Grice’s cooperative principle, and Leech’s politeness principle, then it introduces Brown & Levinson’s face-saving strategies in detail, including the definition of "face", whether there is a face threatening action to face or not and the limitation of face-saving strategies. At the same time, it introduces the TV drama The Big Bang Theory, including its main contents and the main characters.The second chapter is a reflection of "on-record" strategies in The Big Bang Theory. The "on-record" strategies contains positive face-saving strategies, negative face-saving strategies and "bald-on-record" strategies which is a strategy about speaking something directly. At the same time, some practical examples are found in The Big Bang Theory to make a more specific and vivid analysis of the implementation of these strategies. The purpose of this chapter is analyzing the implementation of the "on-record" strategies in real life by combining the American drama The Big Bang Theory.There are some similarities between the second and the third chapter. Both of them combine The Big Bang Theory to analyze the application of face-saving strategies in real life, but the difference is that this chapter uses of different face-saving strategies from the second chapter, this chapter uses strategies that belong to another branch of face-saving strategies, namely the "off-record" face-saving strategies. When using "off-record" strategies, the speaker uses conversational implications or indirect languages to reach the communicative purpose, so it is a strategy that it is the most indirect and has the smallest strategy to threat face.The last part is conclusion, which makes a summary to the preceding critique and analysis, and points out the main purpose and significance of this thesis. In The Big Bang Theory, a lot of plots are set on the basis of face, face is just the thing what ordinary people care a lot. Most humor in this drama came from threatening to others’ face or trying to maintain their own face, and because of their respective concept of "face", a lot of laughing scenes appeared. This drama can not only bring happiness to people, but also can increase the science knowledge and achieve the purpose of oral training. In our real life, we should try to maintain others’ face rather than harming others’face, then to make communication smoothly, and also can let the society more harmonious.