Towards the Typology of Persian Politeness Markers based on Persian and English Conversations

The notion of politeness is formed by different cultural perceptions. In different situations and contexts, politeness may be interpreted and evaluated differently by various cultures. The study of polite markers has received a great deal of attention by Linguists. However, to the best of our knowledge, no work has been conducted on a thorough typology of Persian politeness markers. To this end, the present study made a comparison concentrating on the pertinent markers in a number of English and Persian conversations as the corpora of the study scrutinizing based on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) and Watts’s (2003) models of politeness markers. Politeness Markers in Persian and English conversations were found to be 451and 363 respectively. Furthermore, the obtained data were subjected to Chi-Square computation to check the statistical significance of the observed difference. The results of Chi-Square indicate that there is a significant difference in application distribution of politeness markers used by Persian and English in conversations. Moreover, the findings of the study can be important for EFL teachers because they should also pay attention to teaching cultural aspects as a part of the curriculum when teaching a foreign language.

کلیدواژه ها:

Politeness markers (PMs) ، Persian conversations ، English conversations ، Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model ، Watts’s (2003) model