An Analysis Of Strategies And Pragmatic Functions Of Mock Politeness In Downton Abbey

Studies on politeness have become one of the focuses in the fields of pragmatics and sociolinguistics since the politeness theories of Brown & Levinson and Leech were introduced. Meanwhile, politeness theories have become an important part of pragmatics and there have been thousands of books and papers on politeness. However, language, as a tool of human communication, includes not only polite language, but also impolite language. So far, there have been a lot of theories on politeness, such as the Face Saving Theory of Brown & Levinson and Leech's Politeness Principle etc. But to some extent, they cannot well explain impolite language phenomenon, especially mock politeness language phenomenon. So a new theoretical framework is needed to explain and analyze mock politeness. In 2000, Helen Spencer-Oatey put forward Rapport Management Theory, which aims to explore how to use language to establish, maintain or threaten the interpersonal and social relationship from the perspective of the individual and the society. Compared with other theories, Rapport Management Theory can explain the nature of mock politeness more comprehensively.This paper aims to explore the strategies and pragmatic functions of mock politeness under the guidance of Politeness Principle and Rapport Management Theory. The corpus of this paper is selected from the British drama Downton Abbey, which mainly talks about various problems and conflicts resulted from property inheritance in an upper noble family of England. Up to now, it has been updated to the fifth season. In order to show the life of the English nobility and the servants under the severe hierarchical system, the playwright Julian Fellowes skillfully uses mock politeness language, which contributes to reflecting the real life of English people at that time and has both literary value and entertaining value. Therefore, in order to facilitate the study, the paper selects twenty-four episodes in three seasons as corpus. This study describes the mock politeness languages in Downton Abbey objectively and analyzes the related examples. It has explained the three strategies of realizing mock politeness:iron fist in a velvet, token empathy and allusion. At the same time, it has also illustrated the pragmatic functions of mock politeness, which are maintaining interpersonal rapport, constructing identity, indirect coercive function, expressive function and recreational function. Thus, this study is conducive to better understanding and using mock politeness and promoting the establishment of harmonious society. On the other hand, it also shows that Rapport Management Theory is powerful to explain the mock politeness language in Downton Abbey.This study takes Rapport Management Theory as the theoretical foundation to analyze the mock politeness languages in Downton Abbey. On the one hand, it shows that this theory is able to explain the choice and use of mock politeness language in the play. On the other hand, it also shows that the theory can be used to make a pragmatic analysis of other texts in Chinese and English. Therefore, this research has certain significance in the theory construction and the practical application.