An Analysis Of Linguistic Features And Politeness Strategies In TV Shopping Speech

In modern society with the rapid development of commodity economy, advertising has penetrated into every corner of our life like air. It plays a vital role and arouses people's serious attention and great interest. The main purpose of advertising is to promote products or services, therefore advertisers should establish a good interpersonal relationship with consumers by all means, thus achieving their goal. So what kinds of strategies should be employed in advertising speech becomes necessary and important. Even since Geoffrey Leech pioneered the linguistic analysis of advertising speech, it has been well addressed from the perspectives of sociolinguistics, cross-cultural studies, stylistics and pragmatics, etc. However, it is found that few efforts have been spread on the politeness strategies applied in advertising speech. In this thesis, advertising speech is confined only to the Chinese TV shopping speech. On the one hand, TV shopping advertising has sprung up in recent years; on the other hand, it is a special one, whose speech combines different features of traditional advertising speech and sales speech.Thereby, a lot of Chinese TV shopping ads will be collected by recording and transcription. First of all, its linguistic features will be described from lexical, syntactical and rhetorical aspects, which will provide people with a preliminary comprehension of TV shopping speech. And in light of Brown & Levinson's politeness theory, classification and description of politeness strategies, interpretation as well as analysis of TV shopping speech will be given from pragmatic point of view. In addition, a simple analysis is given on the factors which influence the choice of politeness strategies with Brown & Levinson's Wx Model and the copywriters are offered a certain way to employ proper politeness strategies in ads.The significance of present study on TV shopping speech is that it gives some clues to the copywriting of advertising, like how to apply a proper politeness strategy in a certain advertisement so as to enhance the persuasion of TV shopping ads. And the author hopes this thesis can be useful and provide some help for future studies in this field.