A Pragmatic Reading of Pusonnam Yiri’s Blindness of the Mind: Focus on Politeness Strategies Employed in the Text

The paper examines the pragmatic considerations that affect Yiri's linguistic choices in the literary text being studied, the politeness strategies employed by the author in the text and how these politeness strategies are used to advance the discourse goals of the text: Blindness of the Mind. The study is anchored in Leech's (1983) Politeness Theory. A qualitative research design is employed. Six extracts are selected from the text using non-random purposive sampling and subjected to textual analysis. The data are limited to three illocutionary acts that occasion the application of Politeness: rejecting offers, advising, and rebuking. The findings reveal that the lexical and syntactic choices made in the text are often motivated by pragmatic considerations of politeness. The politeness strategies employed in the text are predominantly negative consisting in hedging via indirectness, anecdotes, wordiness, conditionals, pragmatic particles and metaphor. These strategies are ushered in as mitigating and face saving devices to weaken the illocutionary force of the utterances and enable the speaker to conceal his real communicative intention by polite obliquity. The study concludes that the effective manipulation of these politeness strategies is instrumental to the fulfillment of the discourse goals of the text.