Politeness and Conversational Patterns in Cross-Gender Political Media Discourse: An Application to Cairene Colloquial Arabic of the Educated

Abstract

the study aimed at investigating politeness strategies and conversational patterns used by men and women in political media discourse in Cairene colloquial Arabic of the educated. The review of literature provided an overview of Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness (1987) as well as the conversational gender differences related to politeness and turntaking model in both English and Arabic studies, which formed the theoretical framework of the study. It also tackled media discourse, focusing mainly on the characteristics of media interviews, and specifically on political media discourse. The theoretical framework was applied to four political media interviews. The data were collected according to some specific criteria set by the researcher. They represented the same linguistic level, namely, the colloquial of the educated in Cairo, according to Al-Said Badawi's (1973) taxonomy. They also took place during the same period in 2012, and they discussed the political affairs back then. In each of them, there were three participants: a host, a male guest, and a female guest. Two hosts of the four were males and the other two were females. Accordingly, the participants were divided as follows: 4 hosts and 8 guests, half of which were males, and the