Testing Major Linguistic Politeness Theories against the Marital Relationships of Bilingual (Urdu and Punjabi Speaking) Pakistani Couples

Abstract

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The study aims to investigate the first order account of (im)politeness in the intimate relationships of married couples in the context of urban Pakistani society and with respect to four competing (face-saving, discursive, frame-based and rapport management) models of politeness. The study participants comprised 21 of those urban Pakistani bilingual (Urdu and Punjabi speaking) couples who sought psychological marital counselling from the researcher after being affected mainly by linguistic impoliteness and their training in linguistic politeness helped them out. Placed within the constructivist qualitative research paradigm and grounded in ethnography and phenomenology, findings of the study reveal that the phenomena under investigation should be studied within a more general framework, the discursive model emerges to be the most robust in its applicability though.