| Summary: | 碩士 === 元智大學 === 應用外語學系 === 106 === Politeness has been such a hot topic in pragmatic research with many studies examining the phenomenon under different contexts, and approaches. However, so far there has been a few studies investigating politeness in the context of dissertation defenses - a very important academic genre but under researched. This study aimed to explore politeness strategies employed by examiners, advisors and candidates in dissertation defenses in two Taiwan universities, specifically the Question and Answer sessions. The study based on Brown and Levinson (1987) politeness theory which gives a comprehensive taxonomy of strategies for analyzing the phenomenon. The purpose of this research was to shed light on what strategies participants employed to achieve politeness in a context of dissertation defenses, which contain a lot of face threatening, face maintaining and face supporting acts (Haugh & Watanabe, 2009). The results showed that examiners and advisors used negative politeness most, then positive strategies and bald on record to manage face; while candidates preferred positive politeness than negative ones, and no bald on record instance was found. The genre, power and social distance were argued to influence on the participants’ selections of politeness strategies.
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