Polite voice of British companies: corpus based study in e-press releases

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to analyze how politeness strategies are applied in British e-press releases and to assess its effectiveness. The analysis of the e-press releases in the field of business is always attractive to the linguistics as it is adapted language to the social changes and its persuasive intention is always observable. The data were collected from the official website of very famous and old British company Unilever and were analyzed with the help of automotive data analyzing programs, which adds novelty and relevance to the research. Applying computer assisted programs led to gain accurate results. This descriptive qualitative research aims to apply Brown and Levinson’s theories of politeness strategy to trace certain pragmatics in e-press releases. The results show that e-press releases employ positive politeness strategies massively and this is because e-press releases are constructed considering cultural features of target audience. This tool works effectively to set positive image of the company.