Politeness strategies in the film North and South

Sammanfattning: Politeness theory, developed by Brown and Levinson, has been applied to literature in linguistic research for in-depth analysis of discourse, whether written or spoken. Based on my understanding of politeness and the different politeness strategies suggested in the literature, this paper analyzes the different strategies mostly used by the main characters of the televised version of the novel North and South (1855), written by Elizabeth Gaskell, by focusing on some parts of the conversations in the televised version (2004), in terms of gender, social class and situation. The result shows that the film characters mostly resort to on-record and positive politeness strategies, while negative politeness and off-record strategies are less used in the conversations, which supports the story ambition to bridge gender and social gaps. The analysis demonstrates that much of our understanding of character motives in a novel/film relies on the way politeness strategies credibly reflect our experience and how strategies in interaction commonly work as theoretically described.