Investigating the linguistic functions of verbal impoliteness in the 1st part of Abu-Muslim Nameh of Tartoosi based on Culpeper's theoretical model

Linguistic politeness/impoliteness is one of the topics in the theory of pragmatics, through which the hidden layers of language can be revealed. Politeness and impoliteness approaches can be divided into classical and postmodern. In the classical approach, the concept of politeness is mostly fixed and is defined in terms of social behavior as politely. Austin's theory of speech acts and Grice's Conversational Principles are the basis of classical approaches. But in the postmodern approach, the concept of politeness is dynamic and changeable, and is explained by factors such as context and social norms. Since this theory is accounted as one of the new methods of literary text analysis that has not yet been seriously considered in the study of the language of Persian folk tales, this paper is committed to examining its function in the first part of Abu Muslim Nameh.

The main purpose of this paper is to explain in which positions in the text and for what reasons are the strategies of impoliteness used and what kinds of triggers are embedded in each case to indicate the appointed strategy.

This research has been done by descriptive-analytical method and presents the types of verbal impoliteness in the first part of Abu-Muslim Nameh (i.e. Junaid Nameh) based on Culpeper's proposed strategies which combines his earlier and later patterns and is overshadowed by the Spencer-Oatey's theory of "rapport management".

Regarding the strategies used, the results show that out of a total of five Culpeper 'strategies, three strategies of positive impoliteness, negative impoliteness and off-record impoliteness can be seen in the text. Direct positive impoliteness is the most widely used while off-record impoliteness is the least commonly used, which leads to linguistic prominence by creating the different types of irony in the text. Insulting is one of the most prominent forms of the positive impoliteness in Abu-Muslim Nameh. Insults are in categories as moral, religious, national and sexual. Negative impoliteness is usually characterized by signs of intimidation, ridicule, and threat. The threat, in addition to being the result of glorifying and heroics features in epic texts, becomes a factor in hindering and damaging the audience's private face. Off-record impoliteness is less widely used than the other two strategies, and it has mostly appeared ironically. In addition, in the theory of politeness in the sense of power, attention is paid to the interaction of verbal relations. Positions of weakness and strength shape people's verbal behaviors. However, in Abu-Muslim Nameh, the weakness and strength has little effect on verbal actions as inferiors and superiors use verbal behaviors alike.