Politeness Strategies Used in the Iranian and American Newspapers: The Case of Iran s Nuclear Deal

The appropriate employment of language by politicians can settle many of the current global problems and crises. Iran’s nuclear deal with all its complexities and subtleties is one of the most contentious global issues that demands a lot of tact and prudence on the part of the politicians to be resolved. Politicians could draw upon different politeness strategies to employ appropriate speech, save the face of others, gain their trust, and resolve problems. Considering the significance of this issue, this corpus based descriptive research investigated the politeness strategies employed in the editorials of Iranian and American newspapers. Fifty news articles from the Tehran Times and New York Times published from May 2019 to June 2022 were investigated according to Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness strategies. These news articles were relevant to Iran s nuclear deal. The findings indicated that the most frequent politeness strategy in the Tehran Times news was the positive politeness strategy and the most frequent politeness strategy in the New York Times news was the negative politeness strategy. Finally, the results of the chi-square test revealed that there is a significant difference in the frequency of politeness strategies use in both newspaper articles. The findings highlight the sociocultural dependency of the politeness concept and imply that cultural differences affect preference for the choice of types of politeness strategies.