Gender Differences in the Application of Linguistic Politeness Marker (Please) in Request: A Sociolinguistic Study Egyptians' Request to Microbus Drivers

Abstract

Linguistic politeness is considered a vexed question amid scholars and researchers alike which still, up to the date, a disputed phenomenon in the discipline of linguistics. This paper reports on a study that examined the gender differences in the stereotypical assumption that women are more polite than men in the use of request by the application of the Linguistic politeness marker (please) by Egyptians (Egypt, Mansours city). In the literature of linguistic politeness, the are many pioneers in the area as Culpeper et al. (2019) says that Maria Sifianou has enriched politeness research and pragmatics, viz. the inspection of the relationship amid universality and politeness. Furthermore, Leech (2014, p. 162) ,in The Pragmatics of Politeness, points out three different degrees of politeness from semantic sight in the account of the linguistic politeness marker "please" (a) Politeness marker (b) Illocutionary marker and (c) Information question marker. However, the linguistic politeness marker "please" is used to be uttered in requests as a general term to mitigate or soften the directive force of the speech event to addressee. Researchers and scholars who address the speech event request have spent considerable effort in classifying the variety of strategies for requesting in Anglophone. Moreover, Brown and Levinson’s model (1987, p. 68–9) proposed five “superstrategies” for doing FTAs, of which requests were a paradigm case. In this study, the data were collected from the Egyptians riders who were going to their destinations in Mansoura city, Egypt. There are two groups (a) women (100) and (b) men (100). The participants are speaking in the local vernacular Arabic (Egyptian dialect). They came from random social background. Further, there are a table and a chart to illustrate the gender differences amid the two groups of women and men.