Linguistic concepts of politeness. A contrastive study between the Macedonian students of German and German native speakers

Abstract

The speaker, in each language situation, must decide which existing, politeness-
indicating tools are to be selected. He/she does it by using his/her
own knowledge of social relationships and conventions and therefore politeness
is a pragmatic phenomenon as well. Hardly anyone doubts that
the indirectness is a real phenomenon of the language use. However, how
they are to be reconstructed within the framework of a comprehensive theory
of grammar and pragmatics is very controversial and largely depends
on the underlying theories. In this article, we try to explain how the politeness
forms are expressed in the German-Macedonian language pair and
which cultural and socio-pragmatic differences exist in these languages.