Language in Use - The pragmatically term politeness in reference to the serial Friends

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1.7, University of Duisburg-Essen, language: English, abstract: In 1987 Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's book Politeness. Some
Universals in Language Usage was published. They analyzed the pragmatically
term politeness and the concept of face. But it was not only them who worked on
that topic. Other persons who dealt with pragmatics too started to write books
about politeness, mostly in reference to Brown's and Levinson's theory. Most of
the books that were published are theoretical. Some of them include examples to
underline the expositions and to make them more understandable. But the
question is if pragmatical politeness is a phenomenon that is also noticeable in
everyday language or if it really is a more theoretical term and therefore can
hardly be practiced. To answer this question it is important to first give a definition
of the pragmatical term politeness and to analyze it by using those theoretical
books. Only then is it possible to prove if politeness is either used in everyday
language or not. After that it is necessary to analyze a medium that is
representative of daily situations. In this case one episode of the serial Friends
will be worked on to see if it includes examples of the different parts of
pragmatical politeness. When the analysis of both parts, the theoretical and the
practical, is completed the question if pragmatical politeness is a more theoretical
term or if it is noticeable in everyday language too will be answered.