خلاصة:
The present study on politeness is an attempt to examine (dis)agreeing strategies utilized by EFL learners while chatting on the internet. Subjects of the study were forty male and thirty-three female Iranian natives whose internet relay chat (IRC) interactions, composed of 400 excerpts, were collected between December 2007 and September 2008. Data analysis was based on the general taxonomy of politeness strategies suggested by Brown and Levinson (1987) which is the baseline of many politeness studies today. The results indicate that IRC is a mode of communication whose characteristics are typically different from face-to-face and real-life conversational settings. Some common face threatening acts (FTAs) like ‘direct disagreements’ are performed widely in chat channels. Furthermore, gender-oriented differences were found not to be statistically significant on the internet.
ملخص الجهاز:
Due to their direct involvement in the communication of (dis)agreements, BL’s positive politeness strategies seek agreement and avoid disagreement receive prominent attention in the present study.
343) suggests that women tend to avoid, minimize or mitigate disagreements while they prefer to agree with others and express support in order to be positively polite.
1 Chi-Square 2 degree of freedom 3 asymptotic significance Regarding disagreement avoidance subtypes, the frequencies for hedging opinions, token agreements and voice as questions are 420, 367 and 123, respectively.
000) showed that males had statistically meaningful preferences for certain strategies like hedging opinions as they decided not to communicate their disagreements directly.
Regarding females, while 164 disagreeing responses were softened via hedging opinions, 155 instances were communicated as token agreements.
3. Male versus Female Disagreeing Preferences In order to examine the existence of any significant relationship between chatters’ gender and their strategy-use preferences, Chi-Square analysis was carried out.
285) two- tailed levels of significance showed that the second null hypothesis stating that there is no difference between male and female preferences for the communication of disagreements was verified.
000) showed that chatters significantly preferred to utilize the most frequent mechanism express agreement and agree with their interlocutors directly.
The application of positive politeness strategies while disagreeing requires speakers to find efficient ways to communicate their true ideas while maintaining an atmosphere of agreement.
The reason for the preference of hedging opinions over token agreements and voice as questions can be discussed in terms of moves and elements required for each mechanism.