The Master's thesis focuses on the concept of politeness from a pragmatic perspective. Based on pragmatist theories, such as Austin and Searle's speech acts theory, Grice's maxims, Leech's principle of politeness and Brown and Levinson's concept of images, we define politeness. It is a principle that controls human communication and strives to strike a balance and maintain contact between the speaker and the interlocutor. Since the speaker’s primary desire is to seek balance and protect both their image and the image of the interlocutor, the linguists identified the politeness strategies in speech, which allow certain acts that threaten the participant's image to be linguistically mitigated.
In the thesis, we focus on politeness strategies used in online advertisements, and we are interested in how an advertiser can persuade a potential buyer to buy a product. Most attention is paid to the Spanish and Russian address systems, as this is the most visible strategy concerning the target audience. Twenty advertisements of multinational cosmetics companies are analyzed and compared. In addition to politeness strategies and speech acts, language tools and the number of word classes from advertisements are included in the analysis. The latter also plays an essential role in establishing and maintaining contact.
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