A Classification of Persian Politeness Markers

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 based on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) and Watts’s (2003) models of politeness markers concentrating on the pertinent markers in a number of English and Persian journals and conversations as the corpora of the study. Based on the analysis, 1708 and 451 Politeness Markers found in Persian Journal and Conversation Corpus respectively; these numbers were higher than those in English Journal Corpus (1687) and English Conversation Corpus (363). Afterwards, the obtained data were subjected to Chi-Square computation to check the statistical significance of the observed difference. The results of Chi-Square indicated that the difference between the two languages with regard to PMs Application in journals is insignificant; however, there is a significant difference in application distribution of PMs 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:

Corpus ، Persian and English conversations ، Persian and English journals ، Politeness markers (PMs) ، typology