Linguistic variation of politeness in written academic discourse: Hedges and boosters of the author's voice in the evaluation of sources

Abstract

As with most pragmatic elements, politeness plays an essential role in circumventing the unwanted effects that face-threatening acts cause. As a result, it establishes an effective communication when interpreting texts. The writer employs a series of interpersonal rhetorical resources ‒associated with the expression of the author's voice‒ in order to project his/her face and at the same time, establish an effective dialogue with the audience. The present research used textual analysis through which it has identified and classified the interpersonal strategies of politeness used by the authors in evaluating the sources of their study in the different sections of the 48 texts written in the discipline of Applied Linguistics. The corpus comprises 24 Master’s theses of 12 American students and 12 postgraduate Spanish students, both groups wrote in their native language, and another 24 research articles of 12 professional writers in English and 12 in Spanish. The results indicate that English speakers have a greater tendency to evaluate texts. This is especially common among professional writers who, unlike graduate students, use evaluative politeness. American students use negative face mechanisms to modulate the degree of illocutionary force in their voice and thus counteract possible face-threatening acts