Cooperation and Politeness in Television Discourse

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine instances of cooperation and politeness in television discourse with emphasis on televisiontalk shows in Nigeria. Several works have been examined using the cooperative principle and politeness theory, butlittle has been done on television discourse. This work thus intends to use the talk show genre with the aim of callingthe attention of researchers to the viability of the genre. The theoretical framework adopted for this study is Grice’scooperative principle and Levinson’s Politeness’ theory. Three popular Nigerian TV talk shows were sampled for thestudy. Four episodes were selected from each for analysis. Our analysis reveals that while the hosts and participantssought to cooperate and exhibit politeness in the discourse, there were several instances of flouting and hedging ofconversational maxims and face threatening acts.