Politeness. A comparison of two pragmatic approaches towards polite acting in speech

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, Catholic University Eichstatt-Ingolstadt, course: Seminar: Language Structure and Language Use: Pragmatics, language: English, abstract: This term paper is concerned with the question of whether or not two pragmatic approaches to language can be adapted to the phenomenon of politeness and be combined under certain aspects. The specific question is: Can Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson’s model of politeness completely be described through the terminology and perspective of Grice’s? I will therefore, in a first step, compare both models under these aspects and then try to combine them. Depending on to what degree this can be done, I shall afterwards explain the differences that hinder a complete merging, if they exist. In a second step, I will adapt the new knowledge exemplarily to a corpus and repeat the comparison deductively on a practical level.