Pragmatics, representation and minorities

Abstract

This paper aims at analyzing the American TV series Glee, in order to reflect on how the face, maxims, rules and strategies of the Politeness Theory are presented before characters who are read as part of a minority group, compared to characters seen as a majority and relies mainly on the contributions of scholars such as Thomas (1995) and Yule (1996) and their study in the field of Pragmatics; and Brown and Levinson (1987) and their investigation on politeness. We also rely on reflections by authors who discuss representation, language, and meaning (HALL, 1997; JODELET, 2001; MOSCOVICI, 2000; SOARES, 2007). Our corpus is composed of excerpts from three episodes of the series that were analyzed from a qualitative-interpretative perspective. Glee is a TV show that represents multiple realities through fiction and the excerpts selected allow us to reflect on the discrepancies in the interactions that involve characters considered to be a minority compared to characters read as a majority. As a result of our analysis, it became evident that politeness, highlighted in the excerpts, was primarily used towards characters considered the majority. Concerning minority groups, impoliteness, mainly displayed by the principal and the teacher, prevailed.