Discourse and power in the daily interactions of the Lebanese Internal Security Force -

Abstract

The study examines politeness in the discourse of the Internal Security Force in Lebanon to look into how social distance, rank, setting and imposition will act as contextual influencers and drive the participants to go beyond what is required of them linguistically and, thus, be polite. It aims to investigate how politeness will be a marked excess from the politic behavior that is conventionalized as the expected way for communication by the institution and is based on rank. Moreover, the study targets to inspect address terms, directives, compliments, advice, criticism, and their replies, along with jokes, refusals and interruptions in the Lebanese dialect, which is the vernacular language because few studies target these specific acts (outside the ESL scope) in the Arab world. Therefore, culture is considered with its correlation to politeness since the latter carries distinct work in distinct cultures. I interviewed 42 personnel from various ranks to collect data on how they address each other and what form of directives, advice, and criticism they would use with their subordinate, peer and superior. I simultaneously conducted field observations for different settings as trainings and offices and of different contexts. The results show that there is a polite code, the politic behavior, which is prescribed as the normative way of speaking in the institution, and there are informal communications among personnel of different ranks and low social distance. Social distance is shown to be the most influential factor, where it outweighed the rank-based polite code at times and drove those with more symbolic power (rank) to reproduce and challenge the politic behavior and set a different discourse type that could stand in opposition to the expected behavior. Thus, low social distance was the main contextual factor behind the reestablishment of the polite code and the enactment of politeness. Furthermore, the nature of the setting was shown at times to be more powerful than social distance, especially in strict