Authors : Razieh Rabbani Yekta and Abbass Eslami Rasekh
Abstract: This study is a report of a comparative study of English and Persian verbal politeness in two classic masterpieces of literary world i.e., “The Complete work of Hafiz and Shakespeare's sonnets”. Assuming that degree of verbal politeness correlates with degree of shift in speaker's point of reference, reasearchers in the present study, try to indicate the difference in the degree of politeness as it changes by the intended shift in deixis. To this end, social and empathetic deixis have been focused on as the indicator of such a shift. The results of χ2-test showed that Persian in contrast with English is abundant with the means through which the empathetic shift is carried out which is best exemplified in Hafiz love poetry; quite aligned with Leech's East-West divide in the continuum of politeness Hafiz is placed somewhere closer to the polite extreme while Shakespeare is placed far lower than him. From there, reasearchers pointed out that there must be a concern for developing a model for quantifying the degree of politeness in terms of the deictic shift and the distance that is allowed by the speaker for going with the addressee around the temporal and spatial immediacy.
Razieh Rabbani Yekta and Abbass Eslami Rasekh, 2010. Hafiz or Shakespeare? Which One Is More Polite?. The Social Sciences, 5: 454-457.