impoliteness

The purpose of the present study is to compare the impoliteness strategies employed by Iranian and English students in English and Persian Languages. The participants consisted of 6o Iranian EFL learners at intermediate level of language proficiency, 60 Iranian non-English major students, and 212 native English-speaking students. The data were collected through an open-ended questionnaire in the form of discourse completion task where responses to different threatening situations were elicited. The questionnaire consisted of six situations with variations in social power. The data were analyzed based on Limberg’s (2009) model of threat responses. The findings showed variations in the use of strategies employed with variation of social power in different situations. Moreover, the overall findings displayed the frequent use of tendency strategies, that is, toward compliance, toward non-compliance, by the three groups of respondents. It is hoped that the findings of this study can add to the body of knowledge in impoliteness studies and to our understanding of how threat responses vary cross-culturally in particular.

This study set out to examine how stereotypes as social psychological phenomena are enacted in everyday discourse. Besides discussing how ingroups and outgroups are formed in mundane talk, it is argued that stereotypes are ideological constructs that are jointly achieved in social contexts. Moreover, it is assumed that the ways in which stereotypes are constructed and discussed in discourse are informed by a number of underlying moral conceptualizations which might justify the potential face-threatening acts and the impoliteness inherent in prejudiced talk targeted to a third party. The study is an ethnographic case study informed by an eclectic approach to the analysis of data so as to shed light on how the expression of thoughts and feelings are constructed as talk in ordinary social interactions unfolds and what these expressions achieve. The analyses revealed that the construction of outgroup stereotypes is a mutual accomplishment and possibly a face-threatening act moderated by mitigating discourse features