A Study Of Persuasive Speech Act From The Perspective Of Politeness Principle

As a type of speech act widely used in daily life,persuasive speech act has been studied by linguists for a long time.From the perspective of politeness theories,many researches have focused on politeness strategies in persuasion process,while few have analyzed persuasive speech acts that violate politeness theories in detail.Based on previous studies on persuasion,this paper adopts Politeness Principle(PP)and Speech Act Theory as the theoretical foundation to analyzes persuasive speech acts in TV program Mediation.Some other pragmatic theories are also very significant for this study,including Cooperative Principle(CP)and context.The research focuses on persuasion strategies used in this program,including polite strategies and those that violate PP.From the perspective of context,this study analyzes the background and motivation of persuasion strategies that breach PP,and explores the pragmatic functions of such language phenomenon.This paper applies the method of quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis,firstly,the use of various persuasion strategies is presented via data,then the application of these strategies is illustrated in detail through case analysis.The study finds out that in this TV program,polite persuasion strategies includes the use of pragmatic empathy in person deixis and directives with weak intensity in force,and these strategies observe the Agreement maxim and the Tact maxim respectively.Persuasion is realized through a great amount of indirect speech acts,such as criticism,threat,insult and directives including order and threat,theses speech acts breach Tact maxim and Approbation maxim of PP.The motivation of such violation of PP can be reasonably explained from the perspective of context,such as emergency degree of situation,social morality and law regulations.The pragmatic function of these persuasive speech acts is identity construction,since violation of PP contributes to building the speaker?s identity of authority and eldership,which helps realize the goal of persuasion.This paper focuses on persuasive speech acts that violate PP,which provides a new perspective to previous persuasion studies;the strategies summarized in this paper are believed to shed some insights to persuasion in real life.