Research on Address Terms in Downton Abbey from the Perspective of Leech’s Politeness Principle

Abstract

Downton Abbey as the representative of British classic historic TV drama has been widely acclaimed since its first episode, which arouses a frenzy of interest in British culture in Edwardian. One of the important reasons for its popularity is that the linguistic style of the script is consistent with the rigid English social hierarchy. It precisely describes the elegant manner and strict etiquette of British society as well as their modest and humorous behaviors. Address in the script as an linguistic symbol can reflect the national customs, history, traditions and politics well. The address forms are rich and accurate in this drama, which is suitable for this study. Therefore, this thesis chooses the addresses from all six seasons as a corpus and divides them into two categories: social address and kinship address. Besides, Leech’s Politeness Principle is also used to analyze the social meaning and affective meaning that the addresses express in Downton Abbey, which is helpful in learning the use of address forms and promoting successful exchanges with different classes of English people. This thesis adopts exemplification and qualitative analysis method to make a detailed analysis of address terms. At the same time, through the combining method of static description and dynamic description, this thesis explores social culture and emotional expressions behind the linguistic characters. This study aims to enrich the address corpus and provide some references for intercultural communication to help English teaching and learning.