Politeness strategies in R. K. Narayan’s ‘An Astrologer’s Day’: A discourse analysis perspective

Abstract

Politeness is a linguistic phenomenon in which the participants, who are involved in a dialogue, use different politeness strategies in order to get the desired result. Sometimes, they want to save the face, the public self image, of their counterparts, and sometimes they want to take advantages with the use of some specific politeness strategies. Most of time, the face gets threaten by some verbal or non-verbal acts and it can be done deliberately to achieve some goal or it is done by mistake for some or other reasons. If one wants to save the face and wish to build a healthy social relationship, he uses politeness strategies accordingly. The present paper will try to explore this feature of politeness in the short story “An Astrologer’s Day”. It is the first story from the collection An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories by R. K. Narayan