A Study Of The Politeness Strategies In The Persuasive Talks With Examples From Growing Pains

As the politeness strategy is prevailing in many languages, linguists have adopteddifferent approaches to the study of this specific phenomenon. However, all of themhave some inadequacies. Based on the politeness strategy of Brown and Levinson, thisthesis investigates the linguistic realizations of politeness strategies and the way theyare influenced by contextual factors in persuasive talks among family members in theTV series Growing Pains.Previous study shows that in social environment, power, rank and distance playvery important roles in interactions. But this is not the truth in family conversations.For instance, the parents are not supposed to show their authority and the childrenpresent their self-awareness freely. This is the reason why the realization of politenessstrategies in family settings has its own features.Based on examples from the situational occurred speech data collected fromGrowing Pains, an analysis of the data is conducted to examine the linguistic devicesthat are used in the persuasive talks in family settings. Based on fore-going studies ofpoliteness strategies in persuasive talks, this thesis explores potential accounts for theusage of politeness strategies in family settings.The result of the analysis shows that varieties of politeness strategies are used inpersuasive talks between family members. Among these strategies, negative andpositive politeness strategies are used with significant divergences in amounts.According to Brown and Levinson's listed strategies, positive strategies such asclaiming in-group membership and claiming common are favored, and negatives oneslike hedges and being indirect are salient. It also shows that the hierarchies ofpoliteness strategies suggested by Brown and Levinson do not work well in familysettings. It is thus concluded that politeness strategy is a context-dependent conceptand its linguistic actualization is based on specific devices.