Politeness strategies in motivational storytelling by American commencement speakers

Abstract

Politeness strategy is a technique used by people to communicate more appropriately. Politeness is evident in different forms of everyday communication regardless of the location at which people communicate. One of these forms is delivering motivational storytelling. The purpose of this paper is to describe the politeness strategies used by commencement speakers while presenting their motivational storytelling within commencement speeches at American universities. To this end, the researchers selected ten commencement speeches delivered at top three American universities from 2010 to 2019 based on the QS world universities ranking system. The researchers adopted Brown and Levinson's (1978) framework who classify the politeness strategies that can be used to reduce or prevent threatening the public image of others into four super-strategies: positive politeness, negative politeness, off-record, and bald-on record. The findings have revealed that American commencement speakers resort to these strategies variously, but rely mostly on positive politeness to create a sense of solidarity with the graduates while motivating them. Within each super-strategy of politeness, there is a preference of particular sub-strategies that helped the commencement speakers to deliver their motivational storytelling. Furthermore, the findings have also shown that the original professions of commencement speakers have no significant influence on choosing particular politeness strategies.