Socioeconomic Status, Gender, and Politeness Strategies: Studying the Usage of Request Speech Act in Pakistani Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Politeness strategy has non-linguistic as well as linguistic apprehensions. Moreover, it is observed as part of the sociolinguistics and conversational competency of the orators of a particular language. This recent study investigates the politeness strategies in the context of Punjabi language. The goal is to classify the politeness strategies as a part of Pakistani set culture particularly with reference to Punjabi language context. To make this study valid, Brown and Levison’s (1987) framework is employed as a ration ground for this study. The variable of gender and socioeconomic factors has been analyzed to investigate the impending result by stalking down the politeness strategies especially in Pakistani culture context. A survey was conducted through an open ended questionnaire. For this study (DCT) Discourse conclusive test is selected as a modified version. A group of 120 people which is comprised of male and female native speakers of Punjabi language are selected. This study investigates that in Pakistani culture particularly with reference to Punjabi language, people tend to remain informal when making requests which can be classified as informal politeness strategies. This study investigates socioeconomic status of Punjabi language speakers both male and female by not making in gender specific. Through this study frequency of politeness strategies has been undergone in Punjabi language.