Politeness and the Language of Pakistani Politicians

Communication is determined by external factors like status social distance, social values, age, power and by the internal factors like degree of imposition and friendliness. Both these factors directly affect the conversational implicatures by distinguishing between what is said and what is interpreted and thus are resulted in certain types of evaluations regarding the participants of communication as being rude, polite, arrogant, humble and friendly, this evaluation enhance the impact of what is said, which is discussed under the term of politeness. It is a social behavior related to culture; context and norms or values existed in any society. In a society, informal and formal conversations give an idea of their culture. The polite expressions are mostly used in highly formal context by sophisticated speakers in different political institutions like Punjab assembly senate and parliament by politicians. The study examines politeness used by Pakistani politicians during the session of Privileged Motives (violations against the privileges given to the parliamentarians). Although according to the rules of conversation in Punjab provincial assembly, politicians are required to use polite language yet Pakistani politicians use language impolitely paying little attentions to the hearer’s face, a public self-image. Thus the researcher, by applying the politeness model given by Brown and Levinson (1978), wants to analyze politeness strategies used by Pakistani politicians. For this purpose, the data have been collected in the form of documented debates of the Punjab Assembly from 2008 to 2013. The findings will help the linguists, politicians, sociologists, and educationalists to understand the real nature of the phenomenon .i.e. politeness.