Some aspects of politeness in public speaking
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2007 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Topics in Linguistics |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | politeness - politeness strategies - coherence - public speaking - forms of address - self reference - other reference - footing |
| Description | This paper studies aspects of politeness in public discourse in international institutional communication. The analysis is performed on a sample of speeches made by the Director-General of UNESCO; it focuses on the salutation part of the speeches, which indicates the alignment of the speaker with the audience. The paper relates linguistic markers of politeness, such as lexical choice, modality and forms of address, to discourse strategies which may be regarded as genre-specific. The study has evidenced that positive- and negative-politeness strategies used by the speaker are interwoven and that they correlate with discourse strategies indicating the alignment of the speaker with the audience to achieve existential coherence. The analysis has also proved that the language means used to convey politeness cannot be categorically assigned to particular politeness strategies and that their function and politeness value is context-dependent. |