Face threatening acts and politeness strategies in summer school application calls

Abstract: This paper aims to explore the pragmatic aspects of summer school application calls in the framework of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory. The first part of the paper elaborates on the theoretical foundation of the phenomena of politeness and facework and the second presents the research work. The corpus for this study was comprised of sixty application calls from thirty-three European countries, referring to the period from 2009 to 2012. The content of the calls was analysed in terms of the frequency and quality of positive and negative face-threatening acts, as well as the deployment of various politeness strategies. The findings are also interpreted within the context framed by extralinguistic factors, such as the academic field, participation fee rates and the summer school venue.