Politeness Strategies Used in Text Messaging

Abstract

One aspect of short message service (SMS) communication through a cell phone is use of politeness strategies. As it is extensively argued that females are more polite language users, the present study sought to describe the strategies used by these two groups and to find out whether there is any significant difference between male and female English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in the use of positive and negative politeness strategies in sending SMS to their professors, considering that there is an asymmetric power relation and social distance between them. To this end, a corpus of 300 L1 (Persian) and L2 (English) request messages was compiled. Results of qualitative and quantitative data analysis showed no significant difference between the two groups. Results of the study have implication in politeness research.