Uzswlu the English language faculty 1 English language integrated skills department №1

politeness and hesitation devices

This is a comparative linguistic politeness study that investigates the range of linguistic choices employed by three communities of speakers in order to maintain sound interaction. The study proposes that there are language variations inherent to languages and that make expressing politeness easier and simpler in certain languages as compared to others. The problem that multilingual speakers encounter when shifting from a language to another is finding equivalents in conversational exchanges. Hence, the objective of this study is to compare/contrast the linguistic politeness markers and formulaic expressions of three languages: Arabic, French, and English. The study is useful for trilingual speakers who usually code-switch according to the situational context. It probes into a comparison of the linguistic and the pragmatic features that reflect the different levels of politeness. In this analysis, there is reliance on Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness and on the language parallels. The results show that several linguistic variations exist among the three languages and the proof is that English lacks a grammar system that codes social ranking. Also, French and English speakers usually recur to negative politeness strategies because they highly respect the intimacy of the interlocutors. Hence, they select linguistic devices that increase the distance between participants and use a wide range of stylistic and syntactic devices to express politeness. On the other hand, Arabic is superfluous with fixed politeness formulas and Arab speakers manipulate the rhythm, rhyme of words and other phonological features to distance themselves from the bad denotations of face-threatening expressions.