Politeness Strategies and Power Play in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

This paper employs P. Brown and S. Levinson’s discourse model of politeness in order to investigate the linguistic strategies of politeness in Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It aims at showing how this discourse model can be utilized in analyzing the language of dialogues in literature. It attempts to answer the following questions: 1. What are the negative politeness strategies employed by the characters in the play? 2. What are the linguistic realizations of these politeness strategies? 3. How can such strategies help understand the relationship between the two main characters? 4. How can these strategies reveal the intricate power games that both characters try to manipulate? The paper concludes that there is an intricate relationship between language, social relations and power.