Analysis of the Conversational Implications of Dialogues in Young Sheldon from the Perspective of Politeness Principle

Abstract

Politeness plays an important role in people's daily communication, and it is a norm for the relationship between people. The politeness principle which was put forward by Leech is a principle to be followed in daily conversations, and it includes six maxims. But sometimes people do not abide by the politeness principle in the dialogue for some reasons, and the whole dialogue contains more implied meaning. The current researches on conversational meaning only from the perspective of the politeness principle are not sufficient. The author chooses the popular American drama Young Sheldon in recent years as the research object. This study adopts the corpus method, and 20 dialogues of the characters selected and analyzed in the first three seasons of Young Sheldon. These dialogues are divided into eight groups from the perspective of observing and violating the politeness principle. According to the context in which these dialogues occur, the author analyzes the implied meaning of the speaker's words and analyzes the reasons how the speaker abides by or violates the politeness principle. It can be found that in most cases, the speaker will abide by the politeness principle and show generosity, praise, agreement and sympathy to the listener. There are also some situations that he violates the principle, such as for self-interest or when both parties have trouble, so the author is able to analyze the deeper conversational meaning of the speaker’s words. We can analyze the overall conversational meaning of the dialogue, so that the listener can better understand the speaker's intention and readers could better understand the character's characteristics and the author's real intentions. And it is useful for people’s daily communication.