University of Babylon College of Education for Human Sciences/ Department of English Postgraduate Studies/ PhD Programme

A Sociolinguistic Study of Politeness in Iraqi Arabic and in English

A Proposal for a PhD Dissertation Submitted to the Seminar Committee in the Department

by Ahmed Sahib Jabir

March, 2013

1. The problem
It is a widely acknowledged fact that politeness is the key feature of smooth interaction in daily communication. Failure to observe it often results in communication breakdown, in addition to a certain degree of offence. As such, it is a vital factor for establishing and maintaining social relations between interlocutors. Being of such an importance, politeness has been under the microscope to precisely scrutinize the way it works in terms of the factors that affect its realisation. Although as a phenomenon it has a very long history, yet attempts at theorizing it are relatively recent. In this regard, a theory is usually mentioned: that of Brown and Levinson (1978). This theory, by no means the only one, has received much attention from scholars of relevant domains (i. e. sociolinguistics, anthropology, pragmatics, pragmalinguistics, sociopragmatics, etc.) to verify its claim of universality. In addition, there are other theories introduced to describe the way politeness is realized in different societies. Examples are Blum-Kulkas (1992) study for the Israeli society, Ides (1989) study for the Japanese society, Gus (1990) study for the Chinese society, and Zeyreks (2001) study for the Turkish society. As for the Iraqi Arabic, it seems that there are still no serious attempts to give a reasonably comprehensive description of the social factors affecting the realisation of politeness in Iraqi Arabic and the influence they have on Iraqi EFL learners when they express politeness in English. A thorough search on the net turns out without any significant results; there are few papers which describe certain restricted areas of politeness (e. g. mostly about euphemism or speech acts with reference to

politeness) with no endeavor to describe the social factors that influence the choice of one expression rather than another. It is for this reason that this study will seek to fill part of this gap in the literature by attempting to give a description of the social factors influencing the realisation of politeness in the Iraqi Arabic dialect. More specifically, the study will try to find answers to the following questions: 1. What are the most influential social factors that affect the realisation of politeness in the Iraqi Arabic dialect? 2. How do these factors influence Iraqi EFL learners realisation of politeness in English? 3. What are the differences in the way the social factors affect the realisation of politeness in the Iraqi Arabic and English? 4. How far do the Iraqi EFL learners estimate the English social factors in the realisation of politeness in English?

2. Aims of the study

The study sets itself the task of fulfilling the following aims: 1. Identifying the most influential social factors that affect the realisation of politeness in the Iraqi Arabic dialect. 2. Investigating the extent to which these factors influence Iraqi EFL learners realisation of politeness in English. 3. Specifying the differences in the way the social factors affect the realisation of politeness in Iraqi Arabic and English. 4. Exploring the extent to which Iraqi EFL learners estimate the English social factors in the realisation of politeness in English.

3. Hypotheses
In the light of the aims mentioned above, it is hypothesized that: 1. The most influential social factors that influence the realization of politeness in Iraqi Arabic are age, power, and gender. 2. The Iraqi social factors highly influence Iraqi EFL learners realization of politeness in English. 3. The main difference in the way the social factors affect the realisation of politeness in Iraqi Arabic and English lies in the weight they assign to each social factors. 4. Iraqi EFL learners poorly estimate the English social factors in the realisation of politeness in English.

4. Limits of the Study

This study will be confined to the following limits: 1. The selected variety of Iraqi Arabic will be the colloquial one. 2. The empirical work will include the following groups: a) Group (1): Iraqi Arabic native speakers will comprise people with an academic degree (minimally bachelor) from the Provinces of Babylon, Baghdad, Basra, and Ninawa. b) Group (2): Iraqi EFL learners will comprise fourth-year students who have not spent a significant period of time in an English speaking community chosen from the Universities of Babylon, Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. c) Group (3): English native speakers will comprise people with an academic degree (minimally bachelor).

5. Procedures
In order to achieve the aims of the study, the following procedures will be adopted: 1. Presenting a theoretical background consisting of: a) A general survey of the social factors that affect the realisation of politeness in general. b) A description of the socio-cultural features of the Iraqi Arabic society. 2. Conducting an empirical work via two discourse completion tasks: a. The first is written in Iraqi Arabic to be applied to Group (1). b. The second is written in English to be applied to Group (2) and Group (3). 3. After analyzing the data of the three groups: a. The social factors that affect the realisation of politeness in Iraqi Arabic will be specified and described to identify the most influential ones (Aim No.1). b. The results of Group (1) and Group (2) will be compared to find out the effects of the social factors on Iraqi EFL learners realisation of politeness in English (Aim No.2). c. The results of Group (1) and Group (3) will be contrasted to find out the differences in realisation of politeness in Iraqi Arabic and English (Aim No.3). d. The results of Group (2) and Group (3) will be compared to find out how Iraqi EFL learners estimate the English social factors in the realisation of politeness in English (Aim No.4).

6. Value of the study

It is hoped that this study will be of both theoretical and practical value for all those interested in social, sociolinguistic and EFL studies. In addition, it might be of interest to scholars of related fields of study such as pragmatics, discourse analysis, anthropological linguistics. Not to mention its benefit to textbooks writers, syllabus designers and students. References Blum-Kulka, S. (1992) The metapragmatics of politeness in Israeli society, in Watts, R. J., Ide, S. and Ehlich, K. (eds.), Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory and Practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 255--80. Brown, P. and Levinson, S. 1978, Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena, in Goody, E. (ed.), Questions and Politeness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 56--289. Gu, Y. (1990) Politeness phenomena in modern Chinese, Journal of Pragmatics 14(2): 237--57. Ide, S. (1989) Formal forms and discernment: two neglected aspects of linguistic politeness, Multilingua 8(2/3): 223--48. Lakoff, R. (1973) The logic of politeness; or minding your ps and qs, Chicago Linguistics Society 8: 292--305. Leech, G. 1983, Principles of Pragmatics, London: Longman. Zeyrek, D (2001) Politeness in Turkish and its linguistic manifestations: A socio-cultural perspective in Arin Bayraktarolu and Maria Sifianou (eds) Linguistic Politeness across Boundaries The Case of Greek and Turkish. Amsterdam: Benjamins Publishers.