The Theme of Gossip in The Sitcom of Friends: A Pragmatic Approach

Gossip is a social habit that occurs when two or more people talk behind someone’s back.The present study tackles the speech acts of gossip in the sitcom of Friends . It aims at identifying the strategies, the types of speech acts, and impoliteness strategies that are employed to perform gossip in the analyzed data. The study is directed to answer the following questions: 1) what are the types of speech acts employed in these episodes to perform gossip. 2) What are the strategies of Impoliteness employed to perform gossip in the selected episode ? It is hypothesized that various speech acts and strategies of Impoliteness are used to perform gossip among people. To verify these hypotheses, the reaearchers adopted two models; Searle’s (1969) model of speech act and Culpeper’s (1996) model of impoliteness. The analysis reveals that criticizing and claiming are the most used speech acts in the analyzed data. Also the characters in the episodes use impoliteness strategies to offend the gossipee by inciting others to share their negative sentiments about him