Pragmatic analysis of negative politeness in two selected Interviews in BBC's program "Hard Talk "

Abstract EN

This research examines negative politeness strategies in two interviews of BBC's program "Hard Talk".

Employing Brown and Levinson's theory (1987) , this research attempts to reveal that these strategies are effective linguistic devices which can attenuate the propositional content of the message by lowering the authoritativeness and definitiveness of the utterance and by singling respect to interviewee's privacy.

Using negative politeness strategies gives Hard Talk's interviewers a chance to guarantee a smooth and communicative interlocution ,and gives the audience the needed benefit achieved by such informative interlocution away from any provocation.

The analysis of two randomly selected interviews shows that these strategies enable the interviewer to avoid any friction with the interviewee by keeping social distance and by paying respect or deference.

Consequently, a successful and informative interview is achieved which can make the audience feel relaxed, getting the information looked for.