POLITENESS AND MINORITIES: A LINGUISTIC-PRAGMATIC READING OF THE AMERICAN TV SHOW GLEE

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. In the first chapter, we present reflections on Pragmatics as a linguistic field and discuss aspects of Politeness Theory, by Brown and Levinson (1987). In the second chapter, we present discussion on minority groups, as well as reflections on representation, language, and meaning. In the third chapter, we discuss the methodological procedures of the research. Our corpus is composed of excerpts that were analyzed from a qualitative-interpretative perspective. This paper relies mainly on the contributions of scholars such as Levinson (1993), 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 (MOSCOVICI, 2000; JODELETE, 1986; 2001; HALL, 1997; 2005; SOARES, 2007). In chapter four, we reflect on Glee as a TV show that represents multiple realities through fiction. In addition, we present the characters involved in the excerpts to, finally, offer an analysis of the excerpts selected from four episodes of the series. 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.