Category of politeness in Indo-European languages: comparative aspect (based on English, German, Russian, and Urdu)

Abstract

The article discusses the functioning of the category of politeness in Russian, English, German, and Urdu. The relevance of the research topic is stipulated by the need to explore similarities and differences of Western and Eastern linguacultures in terms of forms of politeness and speech etiquette in the context of globalization and intercultural communication. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that it represents an original attempt to compare the means of expressing the category of politeness with regard to European and Urdu content. The article studies grammatical, lexical, and orthographical means of expressing politeness which demonstrate a certain social hierarchy revealed in speech acts. Descriptive, structural, and comparative methods are used in the research. The objective of the study is to establish the major similarities and differences in the usage of the means of expressing politeness in the languages under analysis. The study examines the concepts of speech etiquette, сommunication postulates and social factors determining the choice of a particular verbal means of expressing politeness in a certain communication context as well as the means of expressing politeness as such. The results of the study show that lexical means of expressing politeness tend to be universal for all of the chosen languages and they are represented by lexical units added to the sentence specifically with the aim of making it sound more polite. Conversely, grammatical means of expressing politeness are peculiar to every language and are expressed mainly by the usage of a certain verb form or a modal verb. Orthographical means of expressing politeness are found to be characteristic of the analysed European languages only.