Little Miss Sunshine Movie Analysis

Little Miss Sunshine is an American film produced in 2006. This essay chooses a small clip from the movie to analyze the children discourse in adult’s issues. The clip is mainly about how adults deliver suicide and homosexual issues to their children: Uncle Frank tries to kill himself but he failed. His sister, Sheryl, takes him home to have dinner with her family, the father Richard, daughter Olive, Grandpa Edwin and the son Dwayne. Through their conversation, my purpose here is to investigate the strategies adopted by the adults to achieve their goals, either not to talk about the issues, or to say them to Olive in a simplified way. The way on how children interpret the issues will also be investigated. This essay will use a pragmatic approach

The first concept, implicature, is introduced by the British philosopher Paul Grice. According to Huang (2012), implicature is “any meaning implied by a speaker and inferred by the addressee which goes beyond what is said in a strict sense” (p.73). This means that when a person uses implicature, his utterance has a derived pragmatic meaning. The hearer, thus, needs to work out what is inferred. To achieve implicature, one need to apply the Cooperative principle. Grice (1989) stated that a conversation is maintained by the contribution of both speaker and hearer in a cooperative manner and there are four maxims inside the principles: maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relevance, maxim of manner, which we will discuss later when we come across

Now she intends to tell Olive the truth by using directness strategy but in a simplified way. She tells Olive that Uncle Frank did not have an accident but he is trying to kill himself (Line 13). Sheryl is updating the information to Olive and in the utterance, she is also using presupposition. She is using the implicative verb “did not”. Verschueren and Östman (2009) states that an implicative verb presupposes that negation of its complement. Therefore, when Sheryl negates the fact on the “accident”, she also presupposes Olive did believe Frank hurt himself because he has an accident. Hence, when she needs to achieve her goal of telling Olive the truth, she has to use directness to clarify the fact. Moreover, she also simplifies the word from “suicide” to “killing himself”. The reason behind could be because Sheryl tries to find a more suitable word that is understandable for a child. According to De Leo, Schmidtke and Diekstra (2007), only ten percentage of fifth-grade children like Olive understands what the meaning of the word “suicide” yet eighty percentage know about “killing oneself”. Hence, Olive will gain a greater understanding if Sheryl uses simplification. The strategy also leads to a success when Olive directly say “You did? Why?” in a high intonation (Line 14). As a child is said to be the same inwardly as he is outwardly (Rieber and Robinson, 2013), it is possible to say that