This article reports on an investigation into the pragmatic functions of shields “I think, I believe” in TV chat shows based on the Linguistic Regulation Theory (LRT). LRT studies how people use language to regulate their social behavior and maintain or improve harmony of different communications. We choose three famous TV chat shows in China as corpus, analyzing how involvers adopt shields in three dimensions: physical, psychological and social to achieve communication goals. The pragmatic failures of shields “I think, I believe” are also explored here.
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https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511813085
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