Violation of politeness maxims in "The Good Wife" movie, season 1

Author : Nhung Thi Phuong Nguyen

Abstract :Politeness in communication is an important factor in maintaining harmonious relationships. Leech (1983) proposes the principle of politeness consisting of six maxims: tact, generosity, approbation, modesty, agreement and sympathy. However, sometimes these politeness maxims are intentionally violated by participants in the communication. The purpose of this study is to analyze the violation of the politeness maxims in the American movie “The Good Wife”, season 1, based on Leech's theory. In addition, it also discusses the speech acts used in the violating utterances by the movie’s characters. The study used qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the conversations taken from the script of this movie. The results indicate that all six politeness maxims are violated and four types of speech acts, according to Searle's classification (1975), including representatives, directives, commissives and expressives, are used.

Keywords :Politeness, Maxims, Speech Acts, Communication

Conference Name :International Conference on Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis (ICSLDA-25)

Conference Place Manila, Philippines

Conference Date 30th Jan 2025