Politeness and impoliteness in fashion advertisements in Spanish

This study deals with discourse strategies used in fashion advertisements in Spanish language. Specifically, the aim is to analyze politeness and impoliteness as pragmalinguistic resources in order to convince the recipient to consume a product. Politeness is defined as a human strategy (Mariottini 2007) which tends to maintain the social equilibrium between the speaker’s and hearer’s faces (Goffman 1981) involved in a specific communicative situation. Within this theoretical framework, my aim is to examine politeness and impoliteness strategies in a corpus of more than 4 hundred Spanish fashion advertisements. Concerning the last ones, only in very recent times, some researchers have explored impoliteness (Culpeper 1996) as intentional strategy used in order to reach a specific goal.