Ricerc@Sapienza

This study deals with discourse strategies used in fashion advertisements in Spanish language. Specifically, the aim is to analyze politeness and impoliteness as pragmalinguistic resources in order to convince the recipient to consume a product. Politeness is defined as a human strategy (Mariottini 2007) which tends to maintain the social equilibrium between the speaker’s and hearer’s faces (Goffman 1981) involved in a specific communicative situation.

Every communication has a relationship aspect in addition to a content aspect: this axiom of Watzlawick's Pragmatics of Human Communication proves useful also when studying the dialogues contained in literary works. The ἀγαθός περ ἐών formula occurring five times in Homer’s Iliad has appeared difficult to interpret precisely because scholars have failed to take into account the relationship aspect of the verbal interactions described.