Politeness Strategies and Politeness Markers in Email Request Sent by Iranian EFL Learners to Professors

Subject Areas : Journal of Teaching English Language Studies

Elahe Rahmani ¹ (MA candidate, Islamic Azad University, Takestan Branch)
Ramin Rahmany ² (Islamic Azad University, Takestan Branch)

Received: 2014-03-02 Accepted : 2014-04-20 Published : 2014-05-01

Keywords: Politeness strategies, Syntactic Politeness Modifiers, Lexical Politeness Modifiers, Politeness Theory,

Abstract :

This study attempts to investigate politeness strategies and politeness markers in email-request sent byIranian male and female EFL learners to professors. The comparison between strategies used by malesand females in email-request were also analyzed. 52 actual emails of M.A students of TEFL studying atAzad University consisted the data in this research. To analyze the corpus, politeness strategies in eachemail were examined according to the four strategies adapted by Brown and Levinson's (1978) PolitenessTheory. Finally, the frequency of syntactic and lexical politeness modifiers in each email-request of maleand female were found and compared. The results showed that negative politeness strategy was the mostfrequent strategy used by males and females in email-requests. Also, embedding was the most frequentsyntactic politeness modifier and subjectivizers were the most frequent lexical politeness modifiers usedby both males and females in email-requests.

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