Abstract
One aspect of short message service (SMS) communication through a cell phone is use of politeness strategies. As it is extensively argued that females are more polite language users, the present study sought to describe the strategies used by these two groups and to find out whether there is any significant difference between male and female English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in the use of positive and negative politeness strategies in sending SMS to their professors, considering that there is an asymmetric power relation and social distance between them. To this end, a corpus of 300 L1 (Persian) and L2 (English) request messages was compiled. Results of qualitative and quantitative data analysis showed no significant difference between the two groups. Results of the study have implication in politeness research.
Highlights
Communication through the media, a cell phone, has developed its social, technical, and communicative functions in people’s everyday lives (Ling & Pedersen, 2006)
The following are the findings of negative politeness strategies used in L1 text messages by the participants and some examples extracted from the corpus are presented as well
Because some of the tables related to L1 text messages are the same as those to L2, they have been placed only in the sections “Results of Positive Strategies in L1” and “Results of Negative Strategies in L1”; so, we proceed only to exemplify and, if necessary, explain the findings concerned with positive and negative politeness strategies used in L2 messages
Summary
Communication through the media, a cell phone, has developed its social, technical, and communicative functions in people’s everyday lives (Ling & Pedersen, 2006). Nearly many aspects of people’s lives (e.g., daily conversations, shopping, giving information, job) have been influenced by the communication possibilities made available by cell phone. Cell phone was developed for oral purpose, it is widely used for other applications such as text messaging. Short message service (SMS) as one technological innovation and development can potentially influence language use (Baron, Squires, Tench, & Thompson, 2005). SMS communication through a cell phone is a new development in the study of language as a genre of language and medium of communication. As Emigh and Herring (2005) suggest, communication in every genre has certain structural properties. SMS communication is not an exception and enjoys certain characteristics
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