خلاصة:
The present research scrutinized the use of politeness strategies in gratitude expressions of English and Persian users of Instagram. For that purpose, 200 gratitude posts were collected, 100 of which belonged to English users and the other 100 posts were composed by Persian users of Instagram. This investigation alsoevaluated gender roles in the production of gratitude utterances. Seeking to discover the politeness patterns for each language on Instagram, the data were analyzed based on Brown and Levinson's (1987) taxonomy of positive and negative politeness strategies. The findings suggested some differences in the use of the second (Exaggeration), the forth (Use of in-group identity markers), and seventh (Presuppose/raise/assert common ground) positive politeness strategies, and the seventh negative politeness strategy (Impersonalizing the speaker and the hearer) between the English and Persian users which might be due to some existent cultural transfer, and regarding the gender investigation, no significant differences were observed between females and males of each language. This is indicative of the idea that Instagram has turned into a distinguished genre of language possessing certain features such as gender-free, direct, and intimate language.
ملخص الجهاز:
The findings suggested some differences in the use of the second (Exaggeration), the forth (Use of in-group identity markers), and seventh (Presuppose/raise/assert common ground) positive politeness strategies, and the seventh negative politeness strategy (Impersonalizing the speaker and the hearer) between the English and Persian users which might be due to some existent cultural transfer, and regarding the gender investigation, no significant differences were observed between females and males of each language.
As it was raised by several studies (Brown, 1993; Kashdan, Mishra, Breen, & Froh, 2009; Ye, Hashim, Baghirov, & Murphy, 2017), females tend to deploy more polite language in comparison to males even within the context of social networking sites.
Therefore, the current study is a contrastive study comparing the discourse structure of gratitude speech act in English and Persian languages considering the type of positive and negative politeness strategies on Instagram.
The current study seeks to explore the use of politeness strategies within gratitude expressions by male and female English and Persian users of Instagram.
In fact, this research question sought to compare the use of each strategy by each nationality and find out whether English and Persian Instagram users prefer to deploy different positive and negative politeness strategies in expressing gratitude in social applications.
Considering the gendered use of language for Persian Instagram users, Table 7 manifests the frequency of each politeness strategy by females and males.
With respect to the gendered use of language for Persian and English Instagram users, as the results indicated, no significant difference was observed for all of the politeness strategies.