The Analysis of Politeness Strategies Used in English Textbooks

Politeness, as an area in pragmatics, has been the subject of research recently. The strategies people use in their speech so as to save face and its first notion by Ervin Guffman (1955/1967) has influenced many researches in this field. It is feasible to treat politeness as a firm concept, or as a number of general principles for being polite in social interaction within a particular culture. In every society this concept may differ. The image of politeness is directly related to its culture. In this paper, we investigated the use of politeness strategies in the conversation parts of four widely used English books in order to find out the frequency of negative and positive politeness strategies according to Brown and Levinson’s model. Our findings showed that partners in conversation exchanges do not use negative politeness strategies as often as we might expect in encounters, no matter what the social distance between participants is, but they rely heavily on positive politeness strategies, especially those relating to claiming common ground’, ‘conveying cooperation’ and especially ‘noticing the interlocutors’ interests and needs’. The lack of all kinds of strategies would indicate that you cannot rely completely on the textbooks as a source of pragmatic knowledge, because they are not true representatives of real English usage of pragmatics. And there is a need for complementary sources in order to foster learners’ pragmatic competence.

کلیدواژه ها:

politeness ، politeness markers ، textbooks