Politeness in Dickens's tale of two cities

Abstract

This paper deals with the basics, levels, and various definitions of Politeness. The concept of politeness has always been the device through which the speaker commits himself/herself to the truth in his/her declaration and in confirming his/her speech. To be polite is to perform a complex speech act that is both an assertion and a conditional promise. It explains the concept of politeness in different context and also how these countries deal with politeness.  Beside its applicability on Charles Dickens's novel "A tale of two cities" we have extracted the quotations which contains a sense of politeness and the maxims that Charles Dickens used in this novel. The study concludes that both the benefit and cost of fulfilling the politeness act is linked to the hearer letting the speaker have no role to do but to mediate between the rewarder and the rewarded people. Moreover, in every day communications and particularly in commercial business politeness is commonly attained by two participants (the speaker and the hearer), while in other texts, the speech act of politeness is happily performed by the existence of three participants (the writer, the speakers, the mediators and the hearers.