Files
Abstract
The present study seeks to analyze the ways in which pragmatic politeness is used in certain speech acts in Spanish and English magazine advertisements in the United States. Models of politeness including those of Brown and Levinson (1987) and Leech (1983) are applied to directive and commissive speech acts, as defined by Searle (1976), in order to determine (1) how these speech acts are carried out in magazine advertising, (2) how politeness strategies are reflected in these speech acts, and (3) whether there are any differences in the use of speech acts and politeness strategies between Spanish and English.In this study, we find that the speech acts within the Spanish and English advertisements in this data set tend to orient towards positive politeness strategies. We also find that there are structural linguistic features specific to each language within the speech acts that can support politeness strategies.