Politeness Principle

Leech's Politeness Principle with a case study about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,7, Saarland University, language: English, abstract: The following term paper deals with Leech's Politeness Principle and the Maxims of Politeness, especially with its appliance on children's books. I think it is a quite interesting theme to analyse children's books according to politeness. At a first step I would like to show the coherence between the Politeness Principle and Gricean's Cooperative Principle, and to show problems with the CP. Next I want to give a short overview about positive and negative politeness and about the Politeness Principle itself. After that I would like to point out the six main maxims: Tact Maxim, Generosity Maxim, Approbation Maxim, Modesty Maxim, Agreement Maxim, and Sympathy Maxim. Further I also want to give a short overview about the Miscellaneous Principles: Consideration, Irony and Banter. After explaining the maxims I would like to find examples, where these maxims are broken. The resource for these examples is Lewis Carroll's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In a last step I want to give a short summary about how analysing the book functioned and whether Leech's Maxims can be adapt to children's books.