Pragmatic Adaptation of Doctors’ Talks in the Medical TV Show "The Doctors"

Abstract

language is a tool that allows people to communicate with each other. The speakers can change their language to adapt to what the audience demands. This study attempts to clarify the pragmatic adaptation of doctors’ talks in the medical TV show "The Doctors."  Pragmatic adaptation is the process of switching from one set of pragmatic principles to another to properly perceive the text or speech. The present study endeavours to examine adaptation to audience demands in this TV show. Hence, the following research questions are posted to be discussed, and they include the following: What are the pragmatic strategies used by the speakers in the medical TV show "The Doctors" to meet the audience's demands? What are the pragmatic strategies that score higher frequency to achieve the audience adaptation process? What is the aim of using pragmatic strategies to potentially achieve the audience's demands? The current study adopts an analytical framework which is based on adopting Searle's classification of Speech Acts (1975) and Grice’s concept of implicature (1989) that will be the basic apparatus for analyzing the data. As for the selected data, two selected episodes from the medical TV show "The Doctors" have been chosen for analysis.  It was found that the pragmatic strategies of speech acts and implicature are employed to convey adaptation in this TV show. Moreover, the speech acts are more frequently used than the implicature in these two episodes