SOURCE:

Faculty: Arts
Department: English Language & Literature

CONTRIBUTORS:

Uche, G. O;
Eyisi, J;
Ifechelobi, J;

ABSTRACT:

Face, an aspect of politeness, is fundamental in human relationship. Face as conceived in this study is the self image which everyone has and which he/she wants the other person to acknowledge. The need to maintain one’s face in interpersonal communication is the major reason for politeness in language use. The paucity of work on students’ conversational discourse in Anambra State and the need to identify the politeness and impoliteness strategies that undergraduates employ in their interactions informed the researcher’s choice of the topic. The purpose of the study is to identify and examine the dominant politeness, impoliteness, face management and face threatening strategies employed in the conversations of undergraduates; the sociolinguistic phenomena and functions of the strategies in realizing the overall pragmatic functions of maintaining harmony (or otherwise) in their interactions; to determine the socio-cultural features that influence polite or impolite behaviour in students’ interactions; finally, to find out whether or not there are differences and similarities in the strategies employed by students of the universities selected for the study. The sample size of the study comprises 200 undergraduate students admitted to Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka and 200 undergraduate students admitted to Madonna University, Okija during the 2013/14 academic session in both universities. Unobstrusive observation method and unstructured interview were used to collect data for the study. The observation and recording was done for a period of six months from November 2014 to April 2015 at various locations of the students selected for the study. Similarly, the unstructured interview was used to further confirm what the researcher has observed in the course of observing the students and to answer the question posed in research question 3. The unstructured interview was randomly done across 100 respondents (50 respondents from each of the two universities selected for the study) which comprise lecturers, non-academic staff, food vendors, bus drivers, tricycle operators and small scale business operators. The main theory for analysis is Brown and Levinson’s theory of Face and Politeness. The theory is complemented by Grice’s theory of Cooperative Principle and Leech’s theory of Politeness Principle. The study establishes that students employ indirectness, hedging, use of apology to indicate politeness and use sarcasm, insults, verbal aggression, interruption of turns and animal metaphors to indicate impoliteness. It also reveals that disapprovals, impositions, insults, direct requests, accusations and intrusions were the face threatening strategies they employ. Besides, it observes that code switching, code mixing, Pidgin and slang are the sociolinguistic phenomena reflected in their language use in a bid to indicate politeness, impoliteness, face management and face threatening strategies. In addition, it shows that gender, ethnicity and levels of study were among the sociolinguistic features that influence polite or impolite behaviour in students’ linguistic interactions. Finally, it reveals that although some students are polite and try to use politeness strategies, the majority of the students are not as polite as the lecturers and other people who work in the selected universities had expected them to be. It concludes that if politeness study is introduced into the university curriculum, it will enable students to learn about others’ face wants and avoid face threatening acts (FTAs) in everyday language use in the university system.