Politeness strategies and markers in email-requests sent by Iranian EFL learners to professors

This study investigated politeness strategies and politeness markers in email-request sent by Iranian male and female EFL learners to professors. Strategies used by males and females in email-requests were also analyzed. 52 emails of M.A. students of TEFL studying at Azad University consisted the data in this research. To analyze the corpus, politeness strategies in each email were examined according to the four strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson's (1978) Politeness Theory. Finally, the frequency of syntactic and lexical politeness modifiers in each email-request of male and female was found and compared. The results showed that negative politeness strategy was the most frequent strategy used by males and females in email-requests. Also, embedding was the most frequent syntactic politeness modifier and subjectivizerswere the most frequent lexical politeness modifiers used by both males and females in email-requests.

Keywords:

Politeness Strategies , Syntactic Politeness Modifiers , Lexical Politeness Modifiers , Politeness Theory