Face and politeness theories and the place of Persian language and culture

The conjoined twins of face and politeness have undergone myriad of fluctuations since their introduction into Linguistic Pragmatics research by the seminal work of Brown and Levinson (1978 [1987]). The shift from speaker intention to hearer evaluation, from imposing analysts’ interpretings to what participants achieve, and from utterance level analysis to discourse level analysis with particular attention to relationships, along with the distinction between first and second order understanding (i. e. lay understanding vis-à-vis theorist/analyst understanding) are among the most important turning points in the history of both face and politeness research (Eelen, 2001). Face has recently been conceptualized as relational and interactional (Arundale, 2009, 2010), defined as one’s interpreting of his/her relational connection and separation, which is conjointly co-constituted in interactions (Arundale, 2010). And politeness has shifted focus from concern for face and strategic conflict avoidance to subjective evaluations which are discursively constructed (Locher and Watts, 2005; Haugh, 2007) and to a form of social practice having its root in the moral order (Haugh, 2013). In line with my research streamline on face and politeness (Don and Izadi, 2011, 2013; Izadi, 2015, 2016, 2017a, b), in this keynote presentation, I review the key theories of face and politeness from the pragmatics perspective with special reference to data from Persian language and culture. Throughout the talk, I analyze excerpts of both first-hand and published data to show how the Persian emic cultural practices of interpersonal relationship can or cannot be accommodated in the west-originated scientific theories. The Persian concepts of adab, taarof, ehteram, shaxsiat and aberu are at the focus in the talk. It is hoped that while providing some insights into our understanding of the topic, this presentation will open up some windows for further research in the Pragmatics of Persian language or EFL in Iran.