Politeness Strategies vis-à-vis Genders and Exposures to Western Culture: The Case of ‘The Voice of the Philippines’ Coaches

Abstract

Politeness is one of the key concepts in Speech Act Theory, a major field in pragmatics. In a television platform, a number of studies were done to determine the politeness strategies performed by hosts and judges; however, none so far has focused on comparing them based on gender and cultural background. Using a corpus composed of 30 Blind Auditions video-clips randomly selected from YouTube, the present study aimed at describing the politeness strategies employed by The Voice of the Philippines’ coaches with emphasis on their genders and exposures to Western culture. Coaches’ utterances were classified following Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness strategies which include (a) bald on record, (b) perform speech acts using positive politeness, (c) perform speech acts using negative politeness, (d) indirect speech act or off the record.