Language in use: The pragmatical term politeness in reference to the serial 'Friends'

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Duisburg-Essen, course: Pragmatics, 8 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In 1987 Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's book Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage was published. They analyzed the pragmatically term politeness and the concept of face. But it was not only them who worked on that topic. Other persons who dealt with pragmatics too started to write books about politeness, mostly in reference to Brown's and Levinson's theory. Most of the books that were published are theoretical. Some of them include examples to underline the expositions and to make them more understandable. But the question is if pragmatical politeness is a phenomenon that is also noticeable in everyday language or if it really is a more theoretical term and therefore can hardly be practiced. To answer this question it is important to first give a definition of the pragmatical term politeness and to analyze it by using those theoretical books. Only then is it possible to prove if politeness is either used in everyday language or not. After that it is necessary to analyze a medium that is representative of daily situations. In this case one episode of the serial Friends will be worked on to see if it includes examples of the different parts of pragmatical politeness. When the analysis of both parts, the theoretical and the practical, is completed the question if pragmatical politeness is a more theoretical term or if it is noticeable in everyday language too will be answered.

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