Edited by Hans Sauer and Gaby Waxenberger
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 324] 2012
► pp. 209–222
This paper analyzes Late Middle English women’s mystical writing from the viewpoint of the Politeness Theory proposed by Brown & Levinson (1987). The main focuses of this study are address forms, requests and commands occurring in direct speech in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love and The Book of Margery Kempe. These texts are usually assigned to the same genre, mystical writing, but they have some differences in the strategies of building the structure of their text to communicate their intention of writing to the readers. By the analysis of these texts, we examine what types of politeness strategies are frequently used in the texts by the authors or others in direct speech in order to reduce the effect of face-threatening acts.