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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background
Language is an important communicating tool and the carrier of information aswell. Since becoming the member of this complex society, it is necessary to get acorrect understanding of the meaning of others’ utterances. Like what Halliday(1987:7) says “each individual is a member of the society and each individual’sexistence mutually presupposes that of the others’ because we are always livingwithin interpersonal network and keeping relations with surrounding people”. In theinterpersonal relationship, romantic relationship is a special one and the conversationbetween lovers bears its own characteristics. So how lovers talk and convey theirtruly meanings arouse linguists’interest.Austin (1962) firstly put forward the concept of speech act in his work “How todo things with words”, in which he explained that language is a tool to describe theworld as well as an act which refers to speech act. Based on inheriting and criticizingAustin’s theory, John Searle, Austin’s student, elaborated the Speech Act Theory inthe work Speech Acts:An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), in which hementioned the concept of indirect speech act(ISA). He noted that there were someprinciples people should obey in order to reach the communicative purposes, andunconsciously, people can successfully express themselves even flout some of theprinciples. Later he further classified the ISA in his later work Indirect Speech Act(1975), namely conventional ISA and non-conventional ISA. Since then, manyscholars dedicated themselves into the investigation of ISA by using variousmethods and theories to explain the rationality of it, and broadened the application ofit.
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1.2 Research Objective
This study is to investigate the conversations between lovers from the Americansoap opera Gossip Girl to figure out if the off-record strategy which is one of thestrategies in politeness strategy can be applied in using ISA in romanticconversations, to summarize the distributions of these fifteen off-recordsub-strategies used by female and male in conflict phase and non-conflict phase, toillustrate the off-record sub-strategies applied in these two different phases of love relationship, to find out the different consequences after using the same off-recordsub-strategy in different stages.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

Since the emergence of pragmatic, numerous scholars have kept a watchful eyeon DSA and ISA for decades. A lot of achievements, both in foreign countries and athome, have been made on this field.

2.1 A Brief Review of the Development of SA and ISA Abroad
In the early 20thcentury, the western scholars began to transfer their attentionfrom traditional philosophy to linguistics which shaped an upsurge on the research oflinguistic philosophy. It is J. L. Austin who published his influential work How to DoThings with Words (1962) marked the foundation of Speech Act Theory (SAT). Hedivided SA into three acts, namely locutionary act, illocutionary act andperlocutionary act. And when a person utters a speech, these three acts are performedsimultaneously. He also mentioned the indirect performative sentence which he gavea tentative analysis. His student, J. R. Searle modified and developed SAT, firstlyobserved and proposed the ISA. In Indirect Speech Acts (1975), he put forward thenotable ISAT and explained th