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Abstract: The main objective of this master’s thesis is to compare the use of politeness in English and Slovenian and to compare politeness that occurs in the selected topics of online discussion forums. Another objective is to analyse which politeness strategies are applicable in the selected online discussion forums and to determine why some of them are not applicable. The master’s thesis presents an analysis of 4 online discussion forums and 2 specific topics (health, relationships). 20 discussions were chosen for the analysis, which is based on Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory (1987). Positive politeness strategies, negative politeness strategies and off-record politeness strategies are determined in the analysis and the findings in English and Slovene forums are compared. The language of online discussion forums, the place of conversational computer-mediated communication, is comparable to oral communication. The findings suggest that the discussions of the online discussion forums therefore offer a great potential to analyse the use of politeness in a language. A comparison of the findings provides an insight into the use of politeness in English and Slovenian in the online discussion forums and the differences between them. The analysis shows that Brown and Levinson’s theory is applicable to both languages, which is not the case for all strategies. Several differences were found in the use of politeness, which is more often used in English.
Keywords: politeness, computer-mediated communication, online discussion forum, positive politeness, negative politeness, Brown and Levinson
Published in DKUM: 19.03.2019; Views: 1724; Downloads: 157
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