Zur sprachlichen Höflichkeit im Persischen und im Deutschen. Am Beispiel der Anrede durch Verwandtschaftsbezeichnungen

This study sheds light on addressing practice through kinship terms in Persian, one strategy to express linguistic politeness as required by tæ’arof. The analysis is based on a big and self-collected corpus of chat conversations by Persian speakers and on the Dortmunder chat corpus, release version (Plauder part), for the comparison with German. The data investigated in the present paper show evidence that, in a pro-drop language such as Persian, addressing the interlocutor explicitly in 1:1 conversations goes along with specific pragmatic goals (to demonstrate respect and esteem, to introduce the topic after small-talk, to thank or ask for something, to mitigate face threatening acts). Moreover, emotional expressions are found to be frequently used, even by and among men as opposed to what stated in the literature, as well as kinship terms to address non-relatives. As for the analysed issue, German speakers clearly differ in their linguistic behaviour from Persian ones. In particular, kinship terms occur seldom as addressing strategy and together with not mitigated criticism. Indeed, German speakers are expected to prefer other politeness strategies (negative ones, which go along with German culture of distance).