Verbal Impoliteness Patterns in Iranian Television Series with Culpeper Discourse Theory FrameworkCase study: Madaraneh

Prestige is the general self-image and a kind of respect that a person considers for him/herself. Paying attention to somebody during the conversation is considered politeness and on the other hand, impoliteness is an attack to one’s prestige. In fact, all efforts made by a person to observe politeness to others, are considered prevention of his/her prestige from threatening (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Culpeper (2011) in his discourse theory points to different strategies of impoliteness based on quality/ relational/ social prestige and equities such as, social rights and association rights and also close relations between these concepts. Since Culpeper’s approach is based on factors like context, social norms and feelings and also contains collectivism aspect of prestige, so it could be employed to analyze verbal impoliteness in the Iranian TV family serials. This study is aimed to answer the question of which aspects of this theory can be discussed in “Madarane” TV serial and which patterns of verbal impoliteness it follows. For this purpose, based on purposive sampling, 30 samples of dialogues including relations between kinds of prestige and social rights were selected and analyzed by descriptive-analytical method. The results showed that all the verbal impoliteness patterns including attack to the personal prestige, relational and social, were used in this serial and among them the relational prestige attack, by 86/6 percent, were at the highest rate.