A Study Of The Response Strategies To Impoliteness In Downton Abbey From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Impoliteness, a much pervasive phenomenon in daily verbal communication, is seen as one of the communication strategies. To reach the specified aim, sometimes speakers even use impoliteness on purpose. But it has been ignored as "appendage" and "opposite" of politeness for a long time, which leads to the unbalanced situation between politeness and impoliteness. And the little specialized research on impoliteness is also carried out on the basis of Leech's (1983) Politeness Principle. The writer gives impoliteness a new definition on the basis of the Politeness Principle and the previous studies of impoliteness, and tries to explore the powerful pragmatic functions of impoliteness from the perspective of pragmatics, specifically the construction function and the deconstruction function.Verbal response is the prerequisite for successful communication, and it is a process of language choices to decide what kind of response strategy we use. We are constantly making language selections intentionally or inadvertently. The previous studies of politeness and impoliteness mostly came from the perspective of speaker, little considering the hearers' response to impoliteness and explaining the reasons why they act in this specified way. Culpeper (2011) defined impoliteness as "a negative attitude to a behavior in the specific context". Putting impoliteness into context, he put forward impoliteness strategy and the corresponding response selection framework based on the Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory. Bousfield (2008) found there are three response models in conflict talk which are all results of language choosing.This thesis studies the impolite dialogues in the television series Downton Abbey, emphasizing the response strategies that the hearers use to react to impoliteness. On the whole, this thesis can be regarded as a qualitative study based on the literary text. The theoretical framework is Adaptation Theory, which is put forward by Jef Verschueren. Theoretically, this thesis is aimed at testifying whether the Adaptation Theory has the great explanation power on dialogues in TV programs, specially for the hearers' responses to impoliteness:namely, whether response strategy is adaptable to the hearers' mental world, physical world and social world. Impoliteness is one of the main measures for successful TV programs, as it plays an important role in helping plot development, making conflicts, revealing the theme and intriguing viewers' interest. In order to have a deep understanding of response strategy choices made by hearers to impoliteness, viewers have to take into account the factors like psychology, social culture, cognition, language rules and so on. In terms of the Adaptation Theory, proposed by Verschueren, the process of language using is generally a cognitive, social and cultural activity. It is a continuous process of choice-making, which is influenced by three properties of language, namely, variability, negotiability and adaptability. Besides, the choice-making is inter-adaptable to the communicative context including the mental world, the social world and the physical world.Analyzing the response strategies to impoliteness in TV series Downton Abbey from the perspective of Adaptation Theory can make up for the unbalanced situation of traditional interpretation methods to impoliteness. After a detailed analysis, this thesis shows the underlying reasons or motivation behind the particular response strategy to impoliteness which is adaptable to their own mental world, physical world and social world when they receive the impolite utterances. The response models are usually offensive, defensive and compromising response model. In the meantime, this thesis further verifies the "both sides" pragmatic function of impoliteness and proves the great explanatory power of the Adaptation Theory which offers great help in understanding and appreciating TV programs.