Politeness Strategies in Complimenting in British and Persian Family Discourse

Although some scholars believe that politeness is a universal nature to save the desired image of people through interpersonal interactions, meanwhile, there are linguistic distinctions which display distinctive understandings of politeness and distinctive strategies of politeness among cultures [Holtgraves & Joong-Nam 1990, Larina 2015, Leech 2005, Leech & Larina 2014, Sifianou 1992]. The purpose of this study is to explain how British and Persian cultural values make the style of interactions in family setting. It is aimed at analysing the politeness norms and strategies with delving into the speech act of complimenting in everyday interpersonal interactions. The material was collected from a discourse completion test (DCT), responded by 112 of British and Persian objects and our ethnographic observations. Our results emphasize that the style of interactions between British parents and children is egalitarian. Meanwhile, in Persian familes, extensive differences have been recognized among communicative styles between top-down and bottom-up contexts.