A pragmatic analysis of positive politeness Strategy in the film entitled “Until death”: the case of addict versus non-addict discourse

The purpose of this paper is to investigate pragmatically the politeness strategies in the discourse which is used by people who are addict versus those who are non-addict. This study used Brown and Levinson (۱۹۷۸) politeness model to analyze the discourse of addict and non-addict people. The discourse of these people is paid less attention regarding politeness aspect and this paper is absorbing because it is based on the film characters which rarely addressed in research studies and it helped us to get familiar with the discourse of these people and the strategies which they were using in their talks. To this aim, the authors chose a character who was called “Anthony”, based on a film entitled “until death”, who was addict for a while and then recovered. The discourse of the person with his wife whose name was “Valerie” in the film was analyzed both during the addiction and non-addiction periods. Four conversations were chosen and through the content analysis of the conversations, the results showed that addicted people mostly threatened the positive face of the hearer. But non-addicted people tried to observe the positive face strategies and save the face of the hearer. To summarize, non-addicted people mostly saved the positive face and cared for the wishes and wants of the hearer. Also, the result showed that these strategies: claiming common attitude and opinion and complementing the hearer are mostly flouted and observed by addicted and non-addicted people respectively.

Keywords:

positive politeness strategies , until death , addict discourse , non-addict discourse