Politeness In Written English Addresses

This thesis presents a descriptive and qualitative study of politeness in one genre of written English addresses-inaugural addresses made by American Presidents. At the same time, this study attempts to provide some empirical evidence for the validity of politeness theories, especially of Xu's theory of the revised politeness principle.The present study is made up of six chapters. In Chapter One, an introduction is made of the significance and scope of the present study and such concepts as face and politeness. Chapter Two is about literature review on the study of linguistic politeness. Methodology comes in Chapter Three, in which the necessary corpus for the present study is collected. Chapter Four focuses on the analysis of linguistic politeness in written English addresses in terms of the inclusive we, complimenting and religious coloring. Chapter Five is a discussion, in which the assumption is supported by the findings that existing politeness theories can be used to analyze the written English addresses. This Chapter also provides evidence that the revised politeness principle raised by the Chinese scholar Xu Shenghuan is sound enough to explain politeness phenomena in language use. Concluding remarks come in Chapter Six.This thesis, through descriptive and empirical analysis of a corpus of ten inauguraladdresses made by ten American Presidents, holds that inaugural addresses by American Presidents, as one type of written English addresses, are characteristic of politeness and that the politeness theories respectively put forward by Leech (1983), Brown & Levinson (1978,1987) and especially Xu (1992) are useful in explaining some politeness use of language.