POLITENESS, RELEVANCE, AND GOAL-CONCILIATION: AN ANALYSIS OF “CAN YOU PASS THE SALT?”

Abstract Based on Rauen’s goal-conciliation theory, Sperber and Wilson’s relevance Brown Levinson’s politeness we model in this essay the utterance “Can you pass salt?”-taken as a classic example of polite request between theorists-assuming mobilization or attenuated speech act contributes to accomplishment practical goals. Next, discuss modeling considering some criticisms produced by second-wave studies relevance-theoretic studies. We conclude that aspects are part intentional action plans, affecting design lowest level goal superordinating respective informative communicative subgoals. claim speaker defines-in scope lower-level goal-the speech-act, super-strategy, formulation palette linguistic possibilities.