Typology of Persian Politeness Markers based on Persian and English Journals

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 journals 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 journals were found to be 1708 and 1687 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 the difference between the relevant languages considering politeness markers is insignificant. 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.

Keywords:

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