Syntactic Approach to Politeness Terms in Nawdm

Abstract: A good choice of forms of address leads to peace and development. Besides, peace and development go hand in hand. Thus, the way we address people is important in the search of peace and development. The younger generation disrespect elders through their use of certain expressions in Nawdm community. The elders do not appreciate the expressions used by this younger generation. This leads to conflicts. Meanwhile, there are specific polite address forms in that community. In this article, I analyze and compare the expressions used by the elders and those of the younger generation in Nawdm community. Transformational Generative Approach is adopted to account for these terms. In addition, sociolinguistics approach is used to show the difference of age between young and old native speakers of Nawdm. The qualitative method is also used. The data are collected during some meetings at Koukou in the district of Siou (P/Doufelgou) and from some personal communication situations. The results show that there are specific politeness expressions in Nawdm that young people drop in their speech. Besides, these terms appear in sentence initial position. In addition, the deletion of politeness terms implies impoliteness.  Keywords: Nawdm, culture, peace, polite term, Transformational Generative Grammar.