POLITENESS STRATEGIES IN INSTITUTIONAL SPEECH ACTS

While there are numerous publications dealing with politeness phenomena in oral discourse, the study of politeness strategies in written discourse, notably in institutional and professional settings, is a relatively new field of research. This contribution is concerned with the language used in regulative institutional speech acts in the field of diplomatic discourse. The central object of study is the performative speech act in UNESCO resolutions with a particular view to relating the semantic analysis of directive and expressive speech act verbs to politeness strategies. The analysis suggests that the choice of directive and expressive speech act verbs and their co-occurrence with particular addressees are motivated by the socio-pragmatic situation.