Conversational Maxim View of Politeness: Focus on Politeness Implicatures Raised in Performing Persian Offers and Invitations

Abstract

This study reviewed the criticisms against Brown and Levinson’s (1987) claim about necessity of violation of cooperative principles (CP) in giving rise to politeness implicatures. To support these critiques, evidences from Persian offers and invitations were provided from the texts of 10 Iranian movies. As no alternative framework for analysing the content of these implicatures has been proposed so far, the researchers adopted two politeness principles namely ‘tact’ and ‘generosity’ maxims as well as the cost-benefit and directness-indirectness scales proposed by Leech (1983) to fill this gap in the area of Persian pragmatics. The results of this study showed that both generosity and tact maxims are the main reasons behind both direct and indirect offers and invitations. Besides, the results showed that cost-benefit scale can explain the politeness implicatures raised in performing these speech acts better than directness-indirectness scale.