Politeness Strategies in Turkish and Persian: Compliments, Good Wishes and Giving Deference

This paper presents an analysis of compliments, good wishes and giving deference as politeness strategies in Turkish and Persian. The study of realizations of politeness strategies in Turkish and Persian presented in this paper begins with pan-cultural interpretability of politeness phenomena. The most efficient tools for the analysis of most commonly discussed speech activities (requests, apologies, compliments) is Brown and Levinson’s model. According to this model “face” is theoretical construct which was taken from the work of Erving Goffman. Face is the public self – image and consists of two aspects: positive face as the positive consistent self – image or “personality”, and negative face as the basic claim to freedom of action and freedom from imposition. In general people cooperate to maintain face in interaction and such cooperation is based on the mutual vulnerability of face. Any rational agent will seek to avoid these face-threatening acts or will employ certain strategies to minimize the threat: bald on record (without taking any repressive action), positive politeness (strengthen solidarity and rapport between speaker and listener expressing approval and sympathy with listener - using various means like compliments, intimate address forms), negative politeness (the aim is to avoid imposing on the hearer, using hedges, diminutives, apologies) and off record strategies (using hints, metaphors or other devices to sound deliberately ambiguous). Compliments and good wishes represent positive politeness strategies in the best way. By using compliments the speaker shows that he/she has noticed something about the hearer and that he/she approves of it. Good wishes are expressions of care and sympathy for the hearer. In this paper we analyze distribution and language devices of compliments and good wishes in Persian and Turkish, which belong to two different language families. Although differences have been noticed in these two languages as regards the realization of compliments and good wishes, there are also interesting similarities. A study of this kind helps not only in understanding different languages but different cultures at the same time.

Keywords

Politeness strategies, Compliments, Good wishes, Giving deference, Turkish, Persian.