Playing with Politeness in Economic Journals: The Strategy Used by Authors to Bring about Solidarity and Respect

This study tries to analyse the dominance strategy of politeness used by authors in order to
bring about solidarity and respect in selected economic journals. The corpus consists of
78.064 words from 12 different articles from one reputable Economic journal in United
States namely the Economic Growth Journal (EG). The data were taken from six years latest
where this study conducted in 2012. The conceptual framework of the present study based on
the politeness theory by Brown and Levinson (1978) alongside the application onto scientific
writing by Myers (1989) and persuasive tactics proposed by Mulholland (1994). This study
calculated in total of 591 times the authors employ the tactics in order to maintain solidarity
and respect in their articles. Positive politeness strategies seems to be the highest frequency
(258 times) than the other 3 strategies. The data also reveals that EG authors have used 8
tactics in this strategy and it seems the 3 most used tactics was; by using in-group identity
marker (62 times), using in-group pronoun (59 times), and by informing readers about their
research (40 times). This study clearly sees that the strategies and tactics employ by the
authors in EG journal has a purposes to bring about solidarity and respect used by EG
authors in their articles somehow used to reach the demands of the academic discourse
community that expects scientific language to be objective and formal however not losing its
intimacy with the economic community members and this is seems in line with the nature of
positive politeness strategies.