An Investigation Into Politeness Functions Of Person Deixis In TV Talk Show Intimate Talk With Li Jing

Deixis is one of the important research points in pragmatics.Generally speaking,it includes five categories such as person deixis,time deixis,place deixis,social dexis and discourse deixis.This thesis makes a research into the politeness functions of person deixis in TV talk show based on politeness theories.The previous pragmatic study about person deixis ranges from Adaptation Theory,Conversation Analysis,Cooperative Principle,and Speech Act Theory,which mainly target at literary text,law text,teacher’s classroom utterance,and inaugural address,etc.This research takes the Chinese TV talk show Intimate Talk with Li Jing as the research object and corpus,and studies person deixis’ s politeness functions in different communicative contexts.As a kind of institutional discourse,TV talk show has been closely related to people’s daily life.In this kind of institutional discourse,the interviewer and the interviewee choose different types of person deixis to signal different communication relationships and to explore the politeness functions of person deixis.This provides us another domain to observe person deixis’ s pragmatic functions in daily communication,and it is of practical significance for people to comprehensively understand the politeness functions of person deixis.This study chooses such methods as literature review,text collection and record,qualitative and quantitative analysis,and inductive method.(1)literature review.The first part is the review of deixis and the second part is the review of TV talk show;(2)sample collection and record.20 episodes of TV talk show are chosen as the research object and are recorded;(3)qualitative and quantitative analysis.Quantitative analysis is used to calculate the number and frequency of person deixis.Qualitative analysis is used to analyze how politeness principle is reflected in person deixis;The pragmatic functions of person deixis are explored and analyzed in the framework of politeness theories which mainly includes Lakoff’s(1973)politeness rules,Brown and Levinson’s(1987)face theory and Leech’s(1983)politeness principle;(4)inductive method.The inductive method is used to make the inductive conclusion to the numbers and frequency of deixis in TV talk show.After the investigation,it has been found that the number of first person deixis is larger than second person deixis and third person deixis in the 20 episodes of the TV talk show.In each episode of the TV talk shows,the frequency of the singular form of each kind of person deixis is larger than that of the plural form.Both the interviewer and the interviewee are regulated by politeness principle when they choose person deixis,which testifies the politeness functions of person deixis in daily communication.