AN INTERLANGUAGE PRAGMATIC STUDY OF POLITENESS STRATEGIES IN TURKISH AND ENGLISH

Politeness models are based on the notion of “face”. “Face” is “something that is emotionally invested, and can be lost, maintained, or enhanced, and must be constantly attended to in interaction” (Brown & Levinson, 1987: 66). “Face” refers to two basic wants: to be approved and acknowledged by the others (positive face) and to have one’s own actions unhindered by the others (negative face). Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Model regards apologies as “negative politeness strategies in that they convey respect, deference, and distance rather than friendliness and involvement. Negative politeness is an avoidance-based, on-record strategy of self-effacement and restraint” (Wagner, 2004:23). On the other hand, requests are seen as a positive politeness strategy as every speaker has the necessity to be appreciated by others and to feel that nobody is interfering with him (Renkema, 1999). But do non-native speakers know and apply those strategies when speaking? How aware are non- native speakers of linguistic realizations in requests and apologies? To discover whether apology and request patterns have the same face in the mother tongue and foreign language of the speakers, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 60 teacher trainees whose L1 is Turkish. Based upon the theoretical framework of politeness and face-threatening acts by Brown and Levinson (1987), an ethnographic investigation of naturally occurring apologies and requests was conducted where the participants were asked to respond to the situations where they have to apologize or make a request both in Turkish, their mother tongue and English, their foreign language. Then, the politeness strategies used in Turkish and English by the university students were listed and the items were analysed to see primarily whether there was a transfer from the participants’ L1 to L2