The paper presents a qualitative analysis of 20 American and 20 Italian print car ads, and illustrates the textual means (i.e. choice of wording and topics) through which they realize positive and negative politeness strategies. The American ads appear to be positively politeness oriented: they are focused on creating the impression that the addresser and the addressee share experiences, opinions, aspirations, and cooperate toward achieving common goals (i.e. finding solutions to problems, which satisfy the addressee’s needs and inspire trust in the advertiser). The Italian ads, on the other hand, contain fewer instances of positive politeness strategies, and also focus on an “objective”, description of the goodness of the products advertised, the factual information provided about them taking the place of the advertiser’s exhortation to act.
Positive and negative politeness phenomena in Italian and American print advertising -- an exercise in cross-cultural pragmatics
GESUATO, SARA
2001
Abstract
The paper presents a qualitative analysis of 20 American and 20 Italian print car ads, and illustrates the textual means (i.e. choice of wording and topics) through which they realize positive and negative politeness strategies. The American ads appear to be positively politeness oriented: they are focused on creating the impression that the addresser and the addressee share experiences, opinions, aspirations, and cooperate toward achieving common goals (i.e. finding solutions to problems, which satisfy the addressee’s needs and inspire trust in the advertiser). The Italian ads, on the other hand, contain fewer instances of positive politeness strategies, and also focus on an “objective”, description of the goodness of the products advertised, the factual information provided about them taking the place of the advertiser’s exhortation to act.
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