A Contrastive Study of the Use of Politeness Strategies in Disagreement among Characters with Different Power Relations in English and Farsi Novels

Abstract

In order to communicate properly in a language, it is essential to understand how the meaning, not just the physical words and grammatical rules, are conveyed in that language by learning its pragmatic rules. One way of achieving this is to study the use of speech acts in that particular language and the strategies used to keep the conversations as harmonious and conflict-avoiding as possible. The present study using a mixed-method design, tries to investigate the use of face saving strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987), among the interlocutors with different power relations when using the speech act of disagreement, in English and Farsi novels. This speech act is applied differently with addressee's of different power status, being more indirect as the power status of the addressee gets higher than that of the speaker. Five English novels written by English authors were compared with five novels written by Iranian authors to detect the contexts in which the characters use the speech act of disagreement and employ politeness strategies to soften its threatening effects. To analyze different types of disagreement, the taxonomy proposed by Rees-Miller (2000) was employed. The frequency of their use by the characters and their percentages were manually calculated. The findings showed that in contrast to their different cultures, the interlocutors of the two languages performed almost equally when using this speech act and the differences were mostly in employment of politeness strategies. The results will probably lead to some understandings about pragmatic rules governing the two languages.