<![CDATA[Politeness strategies are meaningful not only because they mitigate face threat but also because they index how speakers position themselves toward others. Previous film-based politeness studies have commonly classified Brown and Levinson’s strategies, while the relationship between strategy choice and relational orientation has received less systematic attention. This study examines 70 coded utterances produced by Liesel Meminger in The Book Thief (2013) and asks how politeness strategies relate to interpersonal meanings in scripted cinematic discourse. The study uses qualitative pragmatic analysis, applying Brown and Levinson’s framework to identify bald-on-record, positive-politeness, negative-politeness, and off-record strategies, while interpersonal meanings are interpreted through DeVito’s communication perspective together with contextual variables of social distance, relative power, and rank of imposition. In the coded corpus, bald on record is most frequent (43; 61.4%), followed by positive politeness (17; 24.3%), negative politeness (8; 11.4%), and off record (2; 2.9%). The primary relational orientations are intimacy (38; 54.3%), solidarity (16; 22.9%), conflict (15; 21.4%), and status/deference (1; 1.4%). The findings illustrate that directness in scripted dialogue can occur within close, cooperative, or conflictual relationships and that strategy interpretation depends on the face-threatening act, scene context, and P–D–R configuration rather than on linguistic form alone.]]>
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