A multimodal analysis of facework strategies in a corpus of charity ads on British television

Abstract

The aim of this article is to carry out a qualitative multimodal analysis of the codification of verbal and nonverbal politeness strategies in a sub-corpus of five charity commercials aired on British television. Brown and Levinson's (1978, 1987) verbal politeness strategies are taken as a starting point together with a detailed analysis of facework that is realized through paralinguistic and extralinguistic modes of communication (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996;Machin, 2010). In what we have identified as the problem phase of the commercial, our analysis has revealed that advertisers deliberately attempt to create threats to the viewer's positive and negative face by making him/her feel responsible for the plight of others. In all five ads, through multi-scene montage, positive and off-record politeness strategies are enacted involving vivid case stories, demand images, sad music and serious extradiegetic voices. These strategies also help convey the idea that the suffering of others might also affect viewers at some point in their lives and thus strengthen the bond between the characters depicted in the ads and those watching them. During the solution phase, in which images, melodies and voice-overs begin to become more upbeat, negative politeness strategies are used to soften the actual request to donate while positive politeness strategies are employed to appeal to the presupposed solidarity of the viewers. Our analysis points to the need to carry out further research on the interplay between verbal and non-verbal communication, especially in the field of politeness studies.

The polite wiggle‐room effect in charity donation decisions

“…This is what was observed in a qualitative study of five British charity commercials, which were found to use politeness strategies to soften their requests-for example, phrasing the request as a question such as 'We save the children; will you?' (Pennock-Speck & Saz-Rubio, 2013). It is however easy to find examples that do not fit that template.…”

Imperatives in voice-overs in British TV commercials: ‘Get this, buy that, taste the other’

“…A possible explanation is that there is a balance between deferring to the addressee and insisting on the merits of a particular product. Too much deference might suggest that the product is not as good as it should be (Pennock-Speck and del Saz-Rubio, 2013: 51). Furthermore, copywriters know that viewers do not expect or indeed want the same politeness conventions from an anonymous VO as they would from a conversational partner.…”

Towards a Russian Multimedia Politeness Corpus

“…In linguistic studies of politeness, the British National Corpus 1 , both text and audio, is also often used (McEnery et al, 2002;Deutschmann, 2006;Vizcaíno, 2007). Additionally, there are a number of works on polite communication that use a range of multimedia corpora: political comics corpora (Abdel-Raheem, 2021), the Santa Barbara series corpora (Brown, 2014) and studies on TV charity commercials (Pennock-Speck and del Saz-Rubio, 2013). These studies show that corpora annotated with paraverbal features are important for a deeper study of politeness.…”