A Pragmatic Study Of Teasing From The Perspective Of Mock Impoliteness

As a common means of interpersonal communication,teasing is used by speakers to express certain emotions or accomplish specific communicative purposes.Teasing has a dual nature,being provocative and playful.Foreign scholars have conducted rich research on teasing,while domestic research is relatively less.Meanwhile,most of the studies have been done in western cultural contexts.However,few studies combine teasing with mock impoliteness in Chinese contexts.In view of this,this thesis firstly analyzes the linguistic strategies according to Haugh’s model.Then it intends to study teasing in talk shows from Culpeper et al.’s and Dobs and Blitivich’s participant response model under the guidance of Haugh and Bousfield’s mock impoliteness theory.This thesis collects the teasing discourse in the talk show “Rock & Roast”broadcast by Tencent Video as the research data,and uses the qualitative and quantitative research methods in order to solve the following three problems:(1)What linguistic strategies are used to initiate the teasing?(2)How do the teasing recipient’s and witnesses’ responses influence the evaluation of the teasing?(3)What pragmatic functions does the teasing accomplish in Rock & Roast?The major findings of the thesis are as follows:(1)The linguistic strategies used to initiate the teasing include lexical exaggeration,formulaic and idiomatic expression,contrastiveness and abusive expression.Lexical exaggeration has the highest proportion of 39.3% in all strategies.(2)The recipients can choose to accept the teasing,counter the teasing and not to respond.The witnesses can corroborate the teasing,deny the teasing,react to the teasing and take no response.The distribution of the recipients’ responses shows that they are more willing to stay silent and accept the teasing.Among these responses,the most frequently employed response of witness is reacting to the teasing,which accounts for 44.7%,because the reaction to the teasing can strengthen the dramatic effect and create a sense of humor.If at least two participants regard it as an allowable offence,it can be evaluated as mock impoliteness.(3)The thesis explores the pragmatic functions of teasing which include amusing and entertaining,fostering the intimacy and expressing real emotions.The significance of this thesis is that it combines teasing with mock impoliteness theory in Chinese context to judge whether teasing can be mock impoliteness by exploring the responses of multiple parties in a discourse.This thesis enriches the integration of teasing with mock impoliteness in Chinese context and helps people have a better understanding of teasing in Chinese contexts.