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Abstract

The present study examines the strategies employed in the realization of the speech act of criticism in the Italian television series , highlighting the pragmatic properties of this important but under-researched speech act, as well as the influence of power relations between the speaker and the addressee on the performance of the speech act.

The data on criticism speech acts in this study were collected from 12 episodes (first season) with a total duration of 616 minutes. The collected data were classified and analyzed based on the criticism speech acts strategies by Nguyen (2005).

The findings demonstrate that the characters in the television series tend to use indirect strategies more than direct ones when performing criticism, suggesting a tendency to maintain social harmony and refrain from expressing direct criticism toward interlocutors. The data analysis indicates that the speech act of criticism is more frequently produced by socially superior speakers or by peers, rather than by individuals occupying lower social positions.

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/content/journals/10.1075/rro.25026.ali
2026-05-19
2026-06-07
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