Linguistic Politeness in Children’s Movies. : A quantitative corpus study of politeness expressions in The Movie Corpus

Sammanfattning: This study aims to analyze explicit politeness markers such as please and thank you in children’s movies using The Movie Corpus. Differences in use over time as well as between children’s movies and other genres of film are investigated, by extracting a variety of frequencies from the corpus for further analysis. The results show that politeness markers are, and have tended to be, more common in children’s movies than in other genres of film. However, the results also suggest that politeness markers are decreasing in frequency in both children’s movies and in other genres of film, but that the decreases are not consistent throughout all the decades analyzed. The study suggests that we seem to be moving towards a less polite society, or one where implicit politeness markers are preferred over explicit ones. In conclusion, it is suggested that further studies are needed to determine which results of this study that are exclusive to children’s movies rather than suggesting trends in film overall.