A Study of Condolences in Iraqi Arabic with Reference to English

Abstract

Politeness is an interdisciplinary phenomenon. Recent years have witnessed a "mammoth-like" increase in the number of publications dealing with this phenomenon (Mazid, 2006: 76). There is a vast literature on politeness in almost every culture now; Watts says that "he has a bibliography [on politeness] that contains roughly 1.200 titles, and it is growing week by week" (Watts, 2003: XI cited in Leech, 2005: 2). However, all these studies emphasized that the notion of politeness is hard to capture. People seem to be able to judge whether an act or an utterance is polite or not, but to define "politeness" as Kallia (2004: 146) observes, is a complicated matter; especially when we consider that perception of politeness changes through time and varies from culture to culture, then the complexity of the matter starts to become obvious.