Pragmatics and Politeness Strategies in Some Shi a Supplications

Differences in people’s social, religious, and political status make them tend towards a specific way of speaking. As a result, speakers always try not to threaten the status and face of the person to whom they are speaking. Accordingly, believing that the Almighty Allah enjoys the highest status in the universe, Muslims, too, resort to specific strategies in speech to maintain His exalted status. Therefore, the question this paper is to deal with is what these strategies are and how they are applied when Muslims are praying. Thus, using an analytical-descriptive approach based on Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, the paper explores some of the strategies used in Shi’a supplications to maintain Allah’s face and status. The results show that, when making a request of Allah, people make use of “self-lowering” and “other-raising” strategies and try to praise Allah by mentioning His good qualities, and despise themselves by mentioning their negative qualities at the same time.