A Pragmatic Study Of Impoliteness And Its Responses In If You Are The One

Polite utterances and impolite utterances occur in our daily life frequently.Politeness in utterance has attracted much attention in the field of linguistics since the 1970s;while the study of impoliteness in utterance started a little later both abroad and at home.Jonathan Culpeper is considered the first person who showed his academic concern for impoliteness and studied impoliteness in utterance systematically.Based on Culpeper's system of impoliteness,this thesis tries to analyze impolite utterances collected from If Yuu Are the One,a popular dating and entertaining TV program in China,and investigate the impoliteness strategies,the responses to these impolite utterances,and explore the pragmatic functions these impolite utterances have in the program.Culpeper classified impoliteness strategies into five aspects.They are bald on record impoliteness strategy,positive impoliteness strategy,negative impoliteness strategy,sarcasm or mock politeness strategy,and withhold politeness strategy.Culpeper,Bousfield and Wichmann observed that the addressee may respond or not respond to impolite utterances in interactions.If addressees respond to impolite utterances,they may accept or counter the impolite utterances.Furthermore,the addressee's countering responses can be divided into defensive countering responses and offensive countering responses.The analysis of the data in this thesis shows that in If You Are the One,Defense Countering is the strategy often used by the addressees in their responses to the impolite utterances.Besides,when the speaker employs the bald on record as well as the positive impoliteness strategies,he means to irritate or embarrass the addressee,which induces response of Defense Countering or Offense Countering on the part of the addressee.When the speaker employs impoliteness strategy such as sarcasm or mock,the addressee tends to accept the impolite utterances and the strategies in responding are Do Not Respond and Accepting.This study has also discussed pragmatic functions of two main types of impoliteness in the data.They are entertaining impoliteness and institutional impoliteness.Entertaining impoliteness refers to the entertaining properties in the program which enables the participants and the audience to enjoy pleasure brought about by impolite speeches.Institutional impoliteness refers to impoliteness used by institutions for the purpose of promoting activities to threaten a person's face or rights in order to entertain others.There are many impolite utterances in If You Are the One.This program makes full use of the participants' threatening of each other's face to draw the audience's attention so that they can achieve a higher audience rating.Meanwhile,these impolite utterances also make the addressee feel embarrassed.This program has tried its best to satisfy the audience by making the participants embarrassed.