A Pragmatic Investigation of Politeness Theory and its Application in the Movie ‘Kingdom of Heaven’

Abstract

Ridley Scott’s epic action movie ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is one of the most watched movies during 2005. It is a historical drama set during the crusades. This movie provides a rich context for this analysis. Therefore, this study aims at examining and analyzing the movie script from a pragmatic perspective by applying politeness theories, which are Leech’s (1983) maxims with Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness strategies. This study adopted the qualitative research method alongside with the Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA to a lesser degree analyzing and describing the data. The data of this study was collected from printed books, ebooks, journal articles, and online websites. The results showed that there were different ways in which maxims are used, with ‘sympathy maxim’ being the most frequent, reflecting the movie’s context and hierarchical relationships. In the same way, ‘bald on record’ was identified as the most dominant politeness strategy, emphasizing direct communication in the historical setting. Such conclusions provide an understanding of how language is pragmatically employed on mass media thereby offering some suggestions for EFL education or even proposing future discourse analysis studies that will investigate how people use language in conversation depending on their social and historical contexts.