Pragmatic Analysis

Theoretical background

In my paper I will focus on the cooperative principle, which according to Grice we use this principle in order to interpret language on the assumption that that its sender is obeying four maxims. These maxims are the maxim of quantity, where the contribution to the conversation must be informative, but no more informative than is required, the maxim of quality, where you do not say what you believe to be false, so this maxim requires truthful information, the maxim of relation, refers to being relevant in a conversation, and the last maxim is maxim of manner, which tells us to avoid ambiguity and to be brief.

After that I will use the conversation analysis, which purpose is to discover how participants understand and respond to each other in their turns at talk. This conversation analysis will help me to analyze the turn-taking mechanism. This mechanism presents the fact that the conversation involves turn-taking and also presents the end of one speaker’s turn and the beginning of the other speaker’s turn. I tried to focus on repairs and sequence organization. Sequence organization refers to the organization of the actions in the conversation and repairs present the way in which participants from the conversation deal with different problems such as problems in speaking, hearing and understanding. We have four types of repairs classified according to two categories: who initiates the repair and who resolves it. So, the four types of repairs are: self-initiated self-repair, where the repair is both initiated and carried out by the speaker of the trouble source, other-initiated self-repair, where the repair is carried out by the speaker of the trouble source but initiated by the recipient, self-initiated other-repair, in which the speaker of a trouble source may try and get the recipient to repair the trouble, and the last one is other-initiated other-repair in which the recipient of a trouble source turn both initiates and carries out the repair.

Modern Family is an American comedy series which present the story of Jay Pritchett, his second wife and his stepson, and his two children, Claire and Mitchell, and their families. Claire’s family consists of Phil, her husband, and Haley, Alex and Luke, her children. Mitchell’s family, which is a gay family, consists of Cameron, his boyfriend and their adopted daughter, Lily. The last family, Jay Pritchett’s family consists of his wife, Gloria and his stepson Manny.

This analysis will be made on various conversations between these family members, from various episodes such as the pilot episode, the episode number 3, 5 and 7 from the season 1. In this analysis I will try to observe the way in which participants interact with each other and also I will try to show how they perform their repairs.

The first conversation which will be analyzed is a conversation between Claire and Phil. Claire is busy making breakfast for the family. Phil enters in workout clothes.