A Study Of The Relationship Between Politeness And Indirect Speech Act

Pragmatics is a very important branch of linguistics, which studies on the effect oflanguage on human behavior. It includes a lot of disciplines and theories, among them thepoliteness and indirect speech act are two very important ones; they have a great influence onhuman communication.Politeness is pervasive in our everyday life. As it is known to us, in the communicationprocess, to achieve the aim of successful communication, people usually employ somestrategies to serve their purposes. So in this way the polite language is becoming more andmore popular, in fact it is relevant to every aspect of life as a social phenomenon. Naturally alot of scholars have focused their attention on it; they have put forward their theories andprinciples on politeness. Meantime, indirect speech act is another important one concerningpragmatics. Since Austin has put forward the speech act theory, it suggests utterances are usedto do things, Searle has made a further step by putting forward the indirect speech act theory,and it is a breakthrough in the development of pragmatics. This is because in thecommunication process, to be direct in making an utterance may sometimes be inappropriate,so people choose to say something in an indirect way.As politeness and indirect speech act are two important parts of pragmatics, it would beof great significance to study the relationship between politeness and indirect speech act,which will be of great help to the communication. This thesis is divided into four parts. In thisthesis Chapter One deals with the theories and studies concerning politeness. While ChapterTwo is an introduction to the theories about indirect speech act. In Chapter Three an analysisof the relationship between politeness and indirect speech act is made, which is the mainfocus of this thesis. While in the fourth part, the factors involved in the relationship betweenindirect speech act and politeness are analyzed.