Politeness, Power, and Morality: A Linguistic Inquiry into Teachers’ Ethical Language in Pakistani Secondary Schools at Tehsil Hazro

Abstract

Present study explores the way secondary-school teachers in Pakistan linguistically encode authority, affection, and moral values during teacher student interaction in the classroom linking to Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). It is the most effective frameworks in pragmatics, specifically in analyzing the face expression of the speaker in bothd positive as well as negative interactions. The theory explores four basic strategies: bald-on-record (unambiguous speech), positive politeness, negative politeness, and off-record (hinting).  Social variables are responsible in framing of Power (P), Distance (D), and Rank of Imposition (R), making the framework especially relevant in formal classroom setting where authority and hierarchy play a key role. A mixed-methods for research design combining qualitative discourse analysis as well as quantitative will be adopted by the researcher to meet the target   of the research. In prior classroom observation, population questionnaire and interview will be carried on to collect achieve empirical outcomes.  In former method corpus techniques will be used to measure lexical patterns, like as  moral lexis and auxiliaries verbs of modality and frequencies of code switching. In this regard data in the form of audio/video recordings of 20 lessons across public institutions in Punjab will be recorded and transcribed for corpus analysis. The study will demonstrate how teachers negotiate face-threatening directives alongside strategies of solidarity, how code-switching signals moral positioning, and how institutional authority influences the pragmatics of ethical instruction. The findings will have implications for linguistics, classroom discourse studies, and teacher language training, extending further to policy-making, intercultural communication research, and the refinement of pragmatic competence models in second-language education.

Keywords: politeness strategies; moral discourse; teacher talk; Pakistan; code-switching; appraisal; speech acts