LINGUIST List 14.2188

Tue Aug 19 2003

Diss: Pragmatics: Yarmohammadi: 'Politeness ...'

Editor for this issue: Naomi Fox <foxlinguistlist.org>

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  • nyarmohammadi, Politeness Strategies in English and Persian

    Message 1: Politeness Strategies in English and Persian

     Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 04:30:00 +0000
    From: nyarmohammadi <nyarmohammadiyahoo.com>
    Subject: Politeness Strategies in English and Persian


    Institution: Allame Tabataba'ee University Program: Teaching English Dissertation Status: Completed Degree Date: 2003

    Author: Niloufar Yarmohammadi

    Dissertation Title: Politeness Strategies in English and Persian in Contrast

    Linguistic Field: Pragmatics

    Subject Language: Farsi, Western (code: PES ) English (code: ENG )

    Dissertation Director 1: Zohreh Eslami Rasekh Dissertation Director 2: Lotfollah Yarmohammadi Dissertation Director 3: Seyed-Ali Miremadi

    Dissertation Abstract:

    Using the theoretical framework proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987), a study was carried out to compare and contrast the use of politeness strategies within the speech acts of favor asking (with perceived High and Low ranking of imposition), griping and complaint across the Persian and British English communities. This study also attempted to find out whether and to what extent these speech acts are face threatening. Further, this research aimed at highlighting several contextual variables, ie, power, ranking of imposition and gender that can affect the production of speech acts, and hence contribute to our understanding of the concept of politeness as verbally realized in these speech communities.

    The participants included 142 volunteers representing three cultural/linguistic backgrounds: British native speakers of English (NSE), Tehrani advanced learners of English (EFL), and Tehrani monolingual speakers of Persian (NSP). Each group was further divided into male and female groups.

    A written discourse completion task consisting of 24 enhanced situations built around Billmyer and Varghese (2000) was designed to elicit the speech acts. There were 6 types of relationships representing equal and low to high social status/power. Each situation was followed by 2 sets of questions requiring the participants to envisage themselves to be at first interlocuting with a person of the same gender and next with an interlocutor of the opposite gender. They were to write what they would say to each and mark the ranking of imposition they felt on a Likert scale of 1 to 3 from least to most. The tactic of back-translation was employed to produce the Persian version of the task.

    The results of the study revealed significant differences between male and female NSE, EFL and NSP groups in their choice and frequency of strategies in carrying out the acts. The NSP and EFL groups have mostly used more than twice as many strategies as the NSE, making their utterances considerably longer, and with respect to the type of strategies more indirect than the NSE, which also shows a transfer effect from Persian to English for the EFL. Moreover, to the NSE the gender of the interlocutor made no difference in their production of the speech acts, but to the EFL and NSP it did, making their utterances more indirect.

    The analyses further revealed that to the 3 groups, the size of imposition mattered with respect to the speech acts. They all shared the view that favor asking (Low) involving the requirement of less expenditure of services and goods was less imposing than favor asking (High), which requried more expenditure of services and goods. Similarly, griping was found to be less imposing than complaint to the groups. Also, the power of the interlocutor was deemed and important factor in calculating the size of imposition for the NSE and EFL. But for the NSP, the perceived level of imposition proved to be the same for interlocutors of the equal and unequal status.

    In sum, with respect to the above-mentioned findings and the abundance of differences, it seems likely that cross-cultural communication between the two communities in terms of these speech acts can pose considerable difficulties. And factors such as, the number and type of politeness strategies, the amount of indirectness, ranking of imposition, power and especially the gender of the interlocutor as conceived by the two communities are considered areas, which can bring about cross-cultural miscommunication.