Politeness Strategies Used in Text Messaging

One aspect of short message service (SMS) communication through acell phone is use of politeness strategies. As it is extensively argued that females aremore polite language users, the present study sought to describe the strategies used bythese two groups and to find out whether there is any significant difference betweenmale and female English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in the use of positive andnegative politeness strategies in sending SMS to their professors, considering thatthere is an asymmetric power relation and social distance between them. To this end, acorpus of 300 L1 (Persian) and L2 (English) request messages was compiled. Results ofqualitative and quantitative data analysis showed no significant difference between thetwo groups. Results of the study have implication in politeness research