Politeness. A Theoretical Review of Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics grade: 10 Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (Institut für fremdsprachliche Philologien) course: Core Pragmatics language: English abstract: As efficient communication plays a crucial far-ranging role in our everyday life it is highly interesting to examine how we transport the information we want to communicate. Yet in contrast to what efficient might implicate the actual language use is rather characterized by indirectness and the flouting of Gricean maxims (Blum-Kulka 1998: 50) than by clear and direct expressions. One of the main reasons for this process lies within the concept of politeness: Since roughly speaking the more indirect a request is being articulated the more polite it will be considered. Thus this paper aims to contemplate the aspect of politeness in interactions as it greatly influences the choice of speech. Therefore I will make use of Brown and Levinson's notion of politeness and present their concept in theory before I will continue by questioning the practicability and universality of this model.