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Title "A Cross - Linguistic Study of Politeness and Impoliteness Strategies in Urdu Short Stories and their English Translation "

Author(s) Nimra Sadeed

Abstract In the field of pragmatic studies, no study has been conducted that considers both politeness and impoliteness in two different languages of same culture. The current study focuses on exploring politeness and impoliteness strategies in the Urdu and English texts of short stories, a collection compiled and translated by Amina Azfar. The study considers eighteen short stories out of twenty-two that best fit the study criteria. Only utterances containing pragmatic strategies are taken from these short stories. The study follows two models i.e. politeness model by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) and the impoliteness model by Culpeper (1996, 2005) under the theoretical lens of “Pragmatic Equivalence” by Baker (1992) to interpret politeness and impoliteness respectively. The findings of the study state that politeness and impoliteness are present in the respective short stories of both source and target texts with a difference in frequency. Moreover, variations in the manifestation of politeness and impoliteness strategies have been observed in Urdu and the English language. Although these changes are apparent on a smaller scale i.e. 23% variation in politeness and 9% in impoliteness, yet they wield a significant impact and present distinguishable features of both language sets. It has been observed that this is due to linguistic and cultural gaps of each language, resulting in the variation of strategies as Urdu markers are more straightforward, implicit, and informal and English shows more formal, explicit, and deferential language. Additionally, since the stories were originally written in Urdu and later translated into English, the translation process resulted in the loss/change/addition of certain politeness and impoliteness strategies. Furthermore, research extends the model by adding three new sub-strategies of positive politeness named, appeal/request, showing appreciation, and swearing. Hence, the current study proves that both languages contain politeness and impoliteness strategies, however frequency of strategies vary across the languages.

Type Thesis/Dissertation

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2024-11-15

Subject Linguistics

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