ABSTRACT
The aim of the study was to examine the politeness strategies utilised by couples during interactions in four selected prose texts, namely, Cook Robin’s (1991) Vital Signs, Tayari Jones’ (2018) An American Marriage, Elechi Amadi’s (1966) The Concubine, and Flora Nwampa’s (1966) Efuru; and how gender ideology influences the selection of the politeness strategies. The objectives were to identify the linguistic choices used by couples to represent gender ideologies, explain how language serves as a tool of dominance in marriage, examine the strategies of politeness employed by couples during interactions, and show the frequency of occurrence of the various politeness strategies found in the interactions of couples.
The data for the study comprised excerpts from four prose texts. All couples’ conversations from the selected texts were marked (one hundred and twenty-seven). From these conversations, eighty-six couples’ conversations which contain politeness strategies and gender ideologies were selected for data analysis. The study employed the Critical Discourse Analysis of Van Dijk and Politeness Strategies of Brown and Levinson to analyse the data, and percentages were derived by calculating the frequency of occurrence of the specific linguistic strategies in the data.
The findings were that couples are aware that their partners require freedom from imposition; therefore, they select the negative politeness strategies (39.53%) more than the other strategies during conversations. It was also discovered that couples made use of the bald-on record (29.07%) in two occasions: firstly, when the need to state the Face threatening Acts efficiently or urgently supersedes their partner’s face needs, and secondly, when they want to show or question power relations and dominance. Also, positive politeness (18.60%) was selected by couples to create rapport and solidarity in their relationships. Women selected this strategy to present their husbands as superior members of the family. This is a reflection of gender ideology in language use. Finally, the off-record strategy (12.8%) was sparingly utilized by couples because they do not want their utterances to be misinterpreted by their partners. Gender ideology influences couples’ choice and selection of politeness strategies (especially the positive and bald-on record) during interactions.
