Presentation
Distinguish ladies and gentlemen. My name is Xing Shuying. I’ve been here, BNUZ for learning English for about two years as a transferred student. I love the study environment here, because we have good teachers, no matter foreign teachers or domestic teachers. I want to say “thank you” to my thesis supervisor—Miss Liao. She gave me a lot of useful suggestions to my thesis writing, so that I can finish my thesis on time.
The topic of my thesis is The Pragmatical Study of White Lies in Pretty Little Liars. And the thesis is aiming at finding out “what is white lie?”, “Why people tell white lies?” and “What is the positive function of white lies?” I use three pragmatical theories in this thesis—Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Face-saving Theory. White lies always violate Cooperative Principle, and obey Politeness Principle. Face-saving Theory focuses on the “Face” which is an important thing that people try to protect in the mutual conversations. With these research achievements, white lie examples in this paper can be analyzed in a clearer and a more detailed way.
So why I chose White Lies as the object of my study, and why I chose the American series—Pretty Little Liars as the material of my study? It’s because I was fascinated by all the plots in Pretty Little Liars, especially their white lies. Four leading ladies live unsafe and unstable life, but they use white lies to quiet their lives, to keep their lives peaceful. The characters live very close to people’s real life, and their lives reflect people’s daily life. So, to some extent, I think we can learn some communicational skills form them.
The basic concept of this thesis is trying to know more about the intention and the positive function of white lies telling, in order to make readers have a correct understanding on white lies and to use white lies in a proper way.
After finishing the paper, I find that there are still some limitations. For example, the plots of this series are not enough to be discussed in this thesis. Because different countries have different cultures, and people from different nations have different point of views of white lies, this study just shows the white lies phenomena from one nation, from one perspective. So I think this is the most obvious limitation of my thesis.
All in all, I hope that we can be honest to tell truth, rather than hiding anything to others.
Thank you!
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