Abstract
This paper addresses the issue of linguistic realization of politeness strategies in the American talk-show: Piers Morgan Live. The analysis of the data has been carried out within the politeness framework suggested by Brown and Levinson. The corpus data analyzed includes fifteen interviews selected from Piers Morgan Live, CNN. The analysis involves chosen interview extracts which contain verbal exchanges in which positive and negative politeness strategies are deployed. On the basis of the analyzed interviews, the study strives to examine the communicative behavior of Piers Morgan as an interviewer. Having justified why a politeness framework is needed, we explore the notions of politeness, face and FTAs; in addition, we consider whether the politeness strategies identified in Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory can be found in another discourse type, namely the talk show discourse type. Firstly, we will offer an analysis of the linguistic realization of positive politeness and then an analysis of negative politeness strategies. Hence, the analysis reveals that politeness theory seems to be relevant for the study of communicative behavior of the interviewer in the discourse of television interviews. Although both the strategies of positive and negative politeness are deployed in Piers Morgan’s communicative behavior, positive politeness strategies seem to prevail in the communicative behavior of the interviewer. Consequently, it seems reasonable to assume that the strategies of positive politeness which are used contribute to (a) closing the social distance between interlocutors; (b) putting the interviewees at ease by creating a friendly atmosphere to allow them to ‘open up’. Moreover, more than one strategy is realized within each utterance. More importantly, we tend to believe that the strategies, deployed in the communicative behavior of the interviewer, are all strategic to Piers Morgan’s extralinguistic goal of having a good interview. Keywords: politeness theory; face; positive face; negative face; FTA; positive politeness; negative politeness; positive politeness strategies; negative politeness strategies.
Highlights
The given paper suggests how Penelope Brown and Stephen C
Conclusion one of the conclusions that may be drawn from our study is that Piers Morgan’s communicative behavior tends to combine both strategies of positive and negative politeness though, from our careful observations, with the evident predominant use of positive politeness strategies
It seems reasonable to assume that those strategies of positive politeness used contribute to (a) closing the social distance between interlocutors; (b) putting the interviewees at ease by creating friendly atmosphere to allow them to ‘open up’
Summary
This paper addresses the issue of linguistic realization of politeness strategies in the American talkshow: Piers Morgan Live. On the basis of the analyzed interviews, the study strives to examine the communicative behavior of Piers Morgan as an interviewer. The analysis reveals that politeness theory seems to be relevant for the study of communicative behavior of the interviewer in the discourse of television interviews. Both the strategies of positive and negative politeness are deployed in Piers Morgan’s communicative behavior, positive politeness strategies seem to prevail in the communicative behavior of the interviewer. We tend to believe that the strategies, deployed in the communicative behavior of the interviewer, are all strategic to Piers Morgan’s extralinguistic goal of having a good interview
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