Politeness strategies employed by graduate and undergraduate native speakers of Jordanian Arabic at Yarmulke University

Abstract EN

The study attempts to investigate to what extent the content of the compliment and the relationship between the conversational parties govern the way people respond.

Furthermore, the study sheds light on culturalimplications related to compliment responding behavior.

The impact of gender on the choice of a certain strategy is also discussed.

The researcher designed a questionnaire to achieve the purposes of the study.

Sixty-five graduate and one hundred thirty - five undergraduate male and female students at Yarmouk University (Irbid- Jordan) were the subjects of the study.

The subjects' responses were analyzed and classified into twelve different strategies.

The first ten were originally developed by Chen [1] while the last two were developed by the researcher.

These twelve strategies were further categorized into six superstragies.

The responses to each situation in the questionnaire were categorized according to strategy and sex.

Such analysis and classification enabled the researcher to establish relationships between the strategy chosen and the content of the compliment, relationship between the interlocutors as well as the sex of the responder.

Then the percentage of each superstrategy was calculated.

The findings of the study revealed that the majority of respondents returned the compliment.

It was also found out that the lexical content of the compliment sometimes caused a certain response to occur most.

The responses to any compliment were also affected by the relationship between the interlocutors.

As for the impact ofgender, statistics showed that sex influence was restricted only to some of the situations in the questionnaire.

The way Jordanian students responded to compliments indicated that compliment responding behavior is culturally shaped and determined.