Analysis on Diego’s Characters in Ice Age 2 Based on the Politeness Principle and the DiSC Model

Diego, depicted as a protagonist in the film Ice Age 2, has complicated character and plays a very important role, who symbolizes a certain group of people in our daily life. This paper figures out Diego’s character type in Ice Age 2 and shortcomings of this type, so as to provide methods of getting along with people like him in our daily life. To achieve these goals, the author employs qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze his utterances and character factors in the real contexts based on Geoffrey Leech’s Politeness Principle and the DiSC model. First, the author extracts Diego’s 141 utterances and those of others that are closely related to his from the film script and categorizes them into different maxims of Geoffrey Leech’s Politeness Principle. Then, the author analyzes his utterances obeying and violating these six maxims in the real contexts and finds that he has 15 character factors. After this, the author adds up these factors belonging to the same character type to find his final type. Among these 15 factors, ten of them fall into the Dominance (D) character type, which far outnumbers that of character factors falling into other types, indicating that he has the D character type. Finally, the author finds that people owning D character type like Diego has five character shortcomings and gives five relevant suggestions on how to avoid the character shortcomings of people owning the D type like Diego according to the DiSC model, which helps build better relationships with other people.