Sexual Harassment at Workplace: A Pragmatic Study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1604.02Keywords:
harassment, sexual, pragmatics, strategies, workplaceAbstract
Sexual harassment is a phenomenon that has been prevailing in everyday workplace. It refers to undesirable sex-oriented conduct usually carried out by a powerful male employer towards a female employee. Sexual harassment may result in humiliation, degradation and loss of reputation on the part of the target. Despite the fact that sexual harassment is pervasive in workplace interactions, it has remained relatively linguistically, particularly pragmatically, unexplored. Therefore, the present study endeavours to investigate this phenomenon at workplace from a pragmatic point of view in selected medical TV shows as represented examples of the genre investigated. It is hypothesized that harassers in medical TV shows employ some pragmatic strategies more than others to harass their victims and achieve their goals. Precisely, this study attempts to answer the following questions: What are the types, forms and elements of sexual harassment employed in the data under scrutiny? What are the pragmatic aspects of workplace sexual harassment? And what are the pragmatic strategies used to manifest the pragmatic aspects of workplace sexual harassment? The findings of the study have demonstrated that different pragmatic aspects are utilized by harassers in the TV shows analyzed. These comprise impoliteness strategies and speech acts. However, statistical analysis has revealed that impoliteness strategies occur with a higher frequency than speech act strategies.
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