Politic offering behaviour among Saudi females: Is there any place for quantitative analysis in discursive politeness?

Abstract

Although discursive scholars emphasize that norms of appropriate behaviour play a vital role in politeness evaluations, the relational work framework has yet to provide analytic tools that capture these norms or identify patterns of politic use in corpora. This study explored offering interactions in Saudi female friendship groups and proposed a new means to investigate politeness, in particular, politic behaviour in such encounters. A quantitative analysis of some concepts of discourse, principally the exchange unit, helped detecting politic patterns in spontaneous/naturally occurring offers between ten participants. After careful analysis of three naturally occurring encounters, 143 offer exchanges were identified in the corpus. Results showed that many offers were non-verbal and reoffering may not constitute a dominant practice in Saudi friends’ interactions, which indicated that politeness norms in these friends’ interactions may have deviated from the stereotypes of the Saudi culture. Quantitative analysis may allow researchers to examine the dominant norms and the politic patterns in offers because for a behaviour to be politic, it needs to occur frequently in order for it to be perceived as expected in a given social situation. However, quantitative analysis cannot be used alone because exploring the evaluative reactions is fundamental in discursive approaches.