POLITENESS STRATEGIES AND PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE IN PUNJABI SPEECH COMMUNITIES: A COMMUNITY-BASED STUDY OF EVERYDAY INTERACTIONS IN CENTRAL PUNJAB, PAKISTAN

Abstract

The article documents a sociopragmatic community-based study of politeness strategies and pragmatic competence of Punjabi speakers in Central Punjab in Pakistan. The study examines the performance of request, refusal, apologizing, and address practices, based on a natural occurrence of data on a family, market, and neighborhood context, as outlined in participant observation, audio-recorded conversations, and semi-structured interviews. It relies on politeness and social pragmatic strategies (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Spencer-Oatey, 2008), and puts more emphasis on native cultural values, including izzat (honor), kinship indexing, and community solidarity. It has been found that the Punjabi politeness is achieved through the complex interaction of indirectness, address to honorifics and kinships, mitigation and downgrading, humor and topic-shift as face-saving strategies, and formula routines of a certain culture. Pragmatic decisions are determined by the age, gender, social distance, and context; pragmatic competence, thus, requires linguistic knowledge and social-cultural sensitivity. Consequences to the pragmatics theory, language teaching and intercultural communication are debated. The paper ends with limitations and recommendations of additional comparative and quantitative studies.