Language in Use - The pragmatically term politeness in reference to the serial Friends

Scholarly Research Paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, printed single-sided, grade: 1.7, University of Duisburg-Essen, language: English, abstract: In 1987 Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson s book Politeness. SomeUniversals in Language Usage was published. They analyzed the pragmaticallyterm politeness and the concept of face. But it was not only them who worked onthat topic. Other persons who dealt with pragmatics too started to write booksabout politeness, mostly in reference to Brown s and Levinson s theory. Most ofthe books that were published are theoretical. Some of them include examples tounderline the expositions and to make them more understandable. But thequestion is if pragmatical politeness is a phenomenon that is also noticeable ineveryday language or if it really is a more theoretical term and therefore canhardly be practiced. To answer this question it is important to first give a definitionof the pragmatical term politeness and to analyze it by using those theoreticalbooks. Only then is it possible to prove if politeness is either used in everydaylanguage or not. After that it is necessary to analyze a medium that isrepresentative of daily situations. In this case one episode of the serial Friendswill be worked on to see if it includes examples of the different parts ofpragmatical politeness. When the analysis of both parts, the theoretical and thepractical, is completed the question if pragmatical politeness is a more theoreticalterm or if it is noticeable in everyday language too will be answered.