A Study Of Strategies And Pragmatic Functions Of Verbal Impoliteness In Parent-Child Conversation In Fresh Off The Boat

Though politeness has been a research focus in pragmatics,verbal impoliteness,as a common phenomenon in interpersonal interaction,has now attracted more attention from scholars at home and abroad.In recent years,impoliteness theory has been greatly developed.Parent-child conversation is a basic unit of daily communication,in which verbal impoliteness extensively exists.For this reason,parent-child conversation has gradually become a central topic in impoliteness studies and relevant research results,to some extent,have enriched and perfected impoliteness theory.In 1996,Culpeper propounded a world-famous model of impoliteness strategies,namely,bald on record impoliteness,positive impoliteness,negative impoliteness,sarcasm or mock politeness and withhold politeness.Based on Culpeper's impoliteness strategies(1996)as theoretical framework,this study uses parent-child conversation as point of departure.It seeks to analyze impoliteness strategies that are employed in mother-son and father-son conversation and to explore pragmatic functions of verbal impoliteness in parent-child conversation.The corpus used in this study comes from an American TV series Fresh off the Boat.It is about how two parents get along with three teenage sons in a Chinese-American family.In this TV series,verbal impoliteness widely exists.This study takes three seasons that are up to 60 episodes as corpus.After identifying impoliteness in mother-son and father-son conversation,the author transcribed the spoken language into extracts and then analyzed the impoliteness strategies.The total amount of collected extracts is eighty-seven,which includes forty-nine extracts of mother-son conversation and thirty-eight extracts of father-son conversation.Research findings are as follows:(1)Positive impoliteness and bald on record impoliteness are the most employed impoliteness strategies in both mother-son and father-son conversation.However,the percentage of each impoliteness strategy implies that mother and son prefer more straightforward impoliteness strategies in talking while father and son tend to use mild impoliteness strategies.(2)The pragmatic functions of verbal impoliteness are to express the speaker's emotions properly,to make the hearer do something,to entertain as well.These findings are of significance in impoliteness theory as they verify Culpeper's impoliteness strategies and indicate that impoliteness plays an active role as politeness does in interaction.In real life,people—especially parents—can learn how to employ impoliteness strategies in interaction so as to avoid disharmony.