The research at hand maintains an emic approach to understanding (im)politeness1 (i.e. in its folk sense) within the meaning making processes involved in Turkish. With the intention of reaching an ethnopragmatic theoretical account of (im)politeness, this study investigates tacit knowledge native speakers of Turkish have on (im)politeness and their related perceptions and evaluations. The thesis explores the cultural-conceptual system of (im)politeness in Turkish utilizing three sources: (a) data from an open-ended metapragmatic conceptualization questionnaire probing Turkish native speakers&rsquo / politeness encounter narratives through seven key metapragmatic politeness terms (i.e. KiBAR, iNCE, NAZiK, D&Uuml / S&Uuml / NCELi, SAYGILI, G&Ouml / RG&Uuml / L&Uuml / , TERBiYELi) and eight key impoliteness terms (i.e. KABA, NEZAKETSiZ, D&Uuml / S&Uuml / NCESiZ, SAYGISIZ, G&Ouml / RG&Uuml / S&Uuml / Z, TERBiYESiZ, PATAVATSIZ, K&Uuml / STAH), and (b) corpus analyses for the lexical items KiBAR and KABA, (c) (im)politeness encounter narrative interviews with native speakers of Turkish. This research study has been designed mainly as an exploration of what Turkish people consider to be (im)polite, how they express they become (im)polite, and how (linguistic) (im)politeness is interpreted by others in everyday communication, as well as how Turkish native speakers evaluate (im)politeness through the key (im)politeness lexemes available in the language, what their &lsquo / bases of evaluation&rsquo / are and what views they hold concerning motivations underlying the want to be (im)polite in Turkish. The qualitative thematic analysis conducted on the questionnaire data yielded six bases of evaluation for (the total of 1211) politeness narratives, and eight bases of evaluation for (the 1306) impoliteness narratives. It was revealed that the bases of evaluation for a polite act in Turkish were primarily &lsquo / attentiveness to other&rsquo / s emotions, needs and goals&rsquo / and abidance by &lsquo / custom&rsquo / , whereas they were &lsquo / (quality) face-attack&rsquo / and &lsquo / (equity) rights violations&rsquo / for impoliteness. The corpus analysis and interview data also corroborated these findings. The quantitative cross-mapping of (im)politeness lexemes to (im)politeness themes suggested biases of lexemes for certain themes and themes for lexemes. The motivational and strategic uses of (im)politeness were related more to egocentric tendencies with politeness being motivated predominantly for self-promotion and image management, and goal attainment, and impoliteness motivated mainly by the desire to establish power and project power on to other, to perform an emotive reaction, to hurt other and to reciprocate others&rsquo / impolite acts to self. The relationship between (im)politeness and the concepts of sincerity, intentionality, historicity, reciprocity and public versus private domain influences are worth pursuing further research on for the Turkish culture. All in all, this study provides Turkish baseline data for later cross-cultural (im)politeness research and suggests that (im)politeness1 (lay) conceptualizations can aid the (scientific) theorizing of (im)politeness2 to a great degree.

This study investigates refusals of requests and offers utilised by speakers of Iraqi Arabic and British English, as well as by Iraqi learners of English. It aims to identify the strategies of refusal employed by these three groups of speakers, as well as any differences between them. 60 subjects participated in this study. 20 Iraqi Arabic Speakers (IAs), 20 Iraqi Learners of English (ILEs), and 20 British English Speakers (BEs). The elicitation method adopted for the data collection consisted of a discourse completion test (DCT) and a series of open-ended role plays. In both cases, the scenarios employed varied systematically along the following parameters: social status, social distance, rank of imposition and gender. The data obtained by both methods were categorised into a number of strategies. An attempt was made to provide a comprehensive description of the nature of refusal strategies used by the subjects. The strategies identified were categorised following the Beebe et al (1990) scheme of refusals. In addition, they were classified according to the (im)politeness superstrategies posited by Brown and Levinson (1987) and Culpeper (1996). The results indicate that the choice of refusal strategies reflects characteristics of Iraqi versus British English culture. These results are as follows: 1. Although both groups of subjects displayed sensitivity to the social factors referred to above, the relative influence of each factor differed from one group to another. Thus, Iraqi Arabic Speakers (IAs) and Iraqi Learners of English (ILEs) varied their refusal strategies mainly according to status and distance, while British English Speakers (BEs) did so mainly according to status and gender. Besides, the responses of the three groups were influenced by the degree of imposition.2. The application of refusals employed by the three groups differed according to the eliciting method, namely, the DCT and the Role-Play. Consequently, various refusal strategies collected via the Role Play did not appear in the data collected by the DCT and vice versa. 3. Certain strategies employed by Iraqi speakers of Arabic were nonexistent in the data of British English speakers and vice versa. 4. The study of the interlanguage of Iraqi learners of English as a foreign language also confirmed the hypothesis that there is evidence for pragmatic transfer in the order, the frequency and the content of semantic formulae used.