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Article published In: International Journal of Language and Culture
Vol. 7:2 (2020) ► pp.164–193

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Age and gender in Iranian ‘taaroff’ politeness system

 | University of Saskatchewan
 | University of British Columbia
Published online: 8 March 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.20005.mak
Abstract
This paper focuses on the Iranian taaroff politeness system. We report a quantitative analysis of the attitudes to taaroff held by 60 Iranians (30 women and 30 men) of two age groups (20–29 and 40–59 years old) and their use of formulaic taaroff expressions in conversations. The data come from dialogues elicited from the participants in Iran via short scripted scenarios and from their answers to a questionnaire survey about their attitudes to taaroff. Taaroff expressions were manually extracted from the dialogue transcripts and their overall use as well as frequencies of each expression were compared across the gender and age groups with the help of t-tests. The participants’ answers to the survey questions were compared across the groups with Kruskal-Wallis H tests. The results show statistically significant differences in the participants’ attitudes to taaroff and in its use in dialogues by gender and age group.
Article outline
  • 1.Politeness systems, the role of age and gender in politeness, and Iranian ‘taaroff’
    • Politeness systems and cultures
    • Politeness and interactional social practice, the moral order
    • Age factor in politeness
    • Gender factor in politeness
    • The Iranian ‘taaroff’ politeness system
    • Goals of the study and research questions
  • 2.Materials and methods
    • Research design
    • The speech production part and ‘taaroff’ expressions
    • Questionnaire design
    • Participants
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Questionnaire results
    • 3.2The use of taarof expressions
  • 4.Discussion
    • A general discussion of the results
    • Age
    • Gender
    • Limitations of the study
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
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