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Article published In: Language and Dialogue
Vol. 7:3 (2017) ► pp.413–431

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Politeness at the extremes

Iranian women’s insincere responses to compliments

 | Shahrood University of Technology (Iran)
Published online: 27 November 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.7.3.05mog
Abstract
This study addresses the issue of politeness in compliment responses (CRs) among Iranian female university students. Using naturally occurring talk, 235 compliment-response exchanges were recorded during focus group interviews. The findings revealed that to mitigate impoliteness the interviewees displayed five extreme culture-specific politeness strategies as (1) tarof, (2) shekasteh-nafsi, (3) hyperreciprocation, (4) sha’n, and (5) double positive response. In female-female CR exchanges, interviewees attempted to foster a good impression by resorting to politeness strategies of tarof, hyperreciprocation, and double positive response whereas in male-female CR exchanges, interviewees tried to undermine the appraised impression imposed by the opposite-sex compliments through politeness strategies that are anchored in sha’n and shekasteh-nafsi. This article concludes that Iranian women respond diversely to compliments by virtue of interaction among integrated components: the compliment topic, the complimenter’s sex, and cultural burdens.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Compliment responses in Iranian context
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Corpus
    • 3.3Coding
    • 3.4Procedure
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Tarof
    • 4.2Shekasteh-nafsi
    • 4.3Hyperreciprocation
    • 4.4Sha’n
    • 4.5Double positive response
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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