“I look with deep gratitude and admiration…” – praising and complimenting in papal speeches

Abstract

Abstract Recently, communicating admiration and appreciation in public discourse has become a subject of study since these acts play a very important role in shaping positive social relations not only on a micro scale, but also on a macro one. My goal in this study is to understand how public officials implement their intention to please addressees in an international arena, in contacts between different religious and national communities. In order to do this, 120 papal speeches delivered to representatives of different churches, religions and societies were analysed, identifying individual topics, functions and patterns of these speech acts, as well as their dependence on such parameters as the specifics of the sender, the addressee, the situation, and the discourse. The work demonstrates that the perlocutionary potential of praising and complimenting contained in papal speeches is strengthened by the linguistic exhibiting by the sender of his knowledge about the addressees and focussing attention on them. Furthermore, it becomes more powerful because of the use of lexical and stylistic measures to intensify positive evaluative expressions. The paper is concluded with the postulate of opening linguistic studies on politeness to other public discourses.