Linguistic Politeness Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This contribution focuses on one particular politeness formula for requests, fare la carità di 'be so good as to (give)'. The aim of the paper was to reconstruct the meanings and contexts for the usage of fare la carità di in nineteenth-century Italy. The following sources were used: conduct books, dictionaries, novels and diachronic corpora. The essay first looked at politeness metadiscourse and examined the available language advice for requests in CGIO, a corpus of 51 nineteenth-century Italian conduct books. However, as there is none available for fare la carità di, three nineteenth-century dictionaries were consulted. These findings from the metadiscourse were then read against those from a qualitative analysis covering all the examples found in two of the most influential novels of that period, Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi, 'The Betrothed', 1840, and Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, 1883. Finally, quantitative data from the historical corpora DiaCORIS and MIDIA were provided. This combined analysis (using metadiscourse alongside qualitative discourse analysis and quantitative data) produced the following results: the formula is used in two contexts, to make a (sometimes forceful) request and to beg for a handout. Both appear in roughly equal proportions until the end of World War II. After that, fare la carità di disappears from DiaCORIS. The paper tentatively concludes that the absence of the formula from the advice on requests in conduct books may be partly explained by its use as a specialised marker for alms-seeking, given that conduct books fiercely criticise almsgiving to the undeserving poor.

- by carlos pazos-justo
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- Linguistic Politeness

Genesis 18.17-33, Abraham’s dialogue with Yhwh over the number of righteous people in Sodom, is a difficulty in exegesis and interpretation. What the passage means has long been debated. At a literary level, there has also been no agreement on the nature of Abraham’s language. It is common to interpret Abraham as bargaining with God in similar fashion to haggling over the price of goods in a bazaar; but proposals have been made that Abraham uses legal-like language, ‘socratic dialogue’ and midrash. There is also no agreement on the purpose of Abraham’s dialogue. An analysis of Gen 18.17-33 using politeness theory proposes that Abraham, as portrayed in the narrative, wants to reduce the number of people as the basis for God’s forgiveness of Sodom and Gomorrah. This is an audacious request and so considerable forms of polite language are used to assist the request. However, this request is not Abraham’s real intention. His intention is to have Lot spared from Yhwh’s destruction of the cities. This request is ‘off-record’; that is, the politest strategy that could be used.

- by Edward Bridge
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- Linguistic Politeness, Hebrew Bible, Book of Genesis, Politeness theory

Comments section on YouTube is one of the most characteristic features of the platform. In fact, users share reactions of all nature in this section, and there is even space for conflicts among commentators. When conflicts emerge, comments allow comprehending the relationship between video-bloggers and their audience by means of linguistic supportive resources such as compliments. Complimenting enhances the value of the video-blogger and of the community as well. Thus, this case study examines explicit and implicit compliments produced by YouTube commentators on a specific video. It focuses on the analysis of the different syntactic formulae which are commonly utilised in a conflict. As a result, the study demonstrates the strategic use of formulae in compliments to show support. Also, it explains the variability of the functions of compliments according to the formulae and topic.

- by Ester Iyanga-Mambo
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- Linguistic Politeness, Online Communities, Syntax, Conflict Management

This paper tests previous findings for polite speech of low pitch, low intensity, higher number of hesitation markers and filled pauses against those parameters in a different socio-cultural background. Two similar groups of (19+13) participants, from Austria and from Germany, were recorded. The adopted ex-perimental approach used 16 tasks aiming at different speech acts in situations that evoke either polite or informal speech. The analyzed acoustic and electroglottographic signals reveal main effects for lower pitch, lower intensity and HNR only for the German group. Open quotient values differ only for female speakers. In both groups significantly lower word rate and lower speaking rate as well as higher rates of filled pauses and hesita-tion markers are found in formal (polite) conditions. However individual speakers can show indifferent or opposing behavior for a given parameter with compensatory utilisation of other pa-rameters in order to express politeness (formality).

- by Cordula Schwarze and +2
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- Linguistic Politeness, Politeness strategies
- by Ibolya Maricic
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- Pragmatics, Linguistic Politeness, CMD

Jang, J. (2018). Descubriendo las imágenes predominantes en el grupo sociocultural de Medellín (Colombia): Hacia la construcción de un modelo teórico y metodológico para estudios de cortesía sociocultural, atenuación e intensificación. En Castañeda, L. et ál. (Eds.), Investigación lingüística en Colombia. Interacción, escritura académica y lexicografía (pp. 51-68). Peter Lang: Frankfurt.

- by Ji Son Jang
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- Pragmatics, Linguistic Politeness, Spanish Linguistics, Politeness
- by Marta Albelda Marco
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- Pragmatics, Linguistic Politeness, Corpus Linguistics, Politeness theory

El objetivo principal de esta investigación es conocer las actitudes lingüísticas de los hombres y las mujeres anglohablantes hacia el agradecimiento en español. Para ello, dado que trabajamos en el marco de la Lingüística Aplicada a la Enseñanza de ELE, se extrajeron las situaciones en las que aparece el agradecimiento más frecuentes de manuales de ELE y se elaboró un cuestionario de recogida de material que permitiera comparar las percepciones y actitudes de los hombres y mujeres anglohablantes (británicos y estadounidenses) ante la ausencia o la presencia del acto de habla que nos ocupa de forman contrastiva con un grupo de informantes españoles. El cuestionario fue aplicado a una muestra de 300 estudiantes, divididos en tres grupos de acuerdo con las nacionalidades que forman parte de la investigación. Sobre el material recogido se realizaron análisis cualitativos y cuantitativos. Los resultados de los análisis realizados indican diferencias en los grupos de informantes hombres y mujeres anglohablantes, probadas estadísticamente, en la actitud ante la falta de agradecimiento que muestra la cultura española.

- by Carlos de Pablos Ortega
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- Linguistic Politeness, Applied Linguistics
- by Rita Gardosi
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- Linguistic Politeness
- by Alexandra Alvarez Muro
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- Linguistic Politeness, Political communication

This chapter investigates social positioning through the use (or non-use) of address pronouns in Finland-Swedish and Sweden-Swedish service encounters recorded at theatre and event booking venues in Finland and Sweden. The results demonstrate some compelling variation in address practices which can be attributed to participant roles (customer or staff), national variety (Finland-Swedish or Sweden-Swedish), age (younger or older speaker and addressee) and situational circumstances, such as type of venue and type of transaction, as well as micro-situational aspects which occur during the course of the interaction (complications, problems or topics treated as sensitive). The study highlights that different forms of address cannot be associated a priori with a certain level of formality, but should be interpreted in their micro and macro contexts in order to understand existing cultural norms for appropriate address.

- by Camilla Wide and +1
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- Intercultural Communication, Languages and Linguistics, Pragmatics, Linguistic Politeness

Researchers have pursued interest in how the mimetic practice types of convention and ritual
influence the ways in which people build up and maintain interpersonal relationships.
Arguably, mimetic interactional acts that animate conventional and ritual practices are key to
capturing fundamental aspects of interpersonal phenomena such as politeness, impoliteness,
and humour, since language users tend to produce and interpret interpersonal behaviour
through normative and repetitive moves, which may develop into routines. Despite the
importance of mimetic acts in language use, little research has been done on mimesis itself
in the realm of interpersonal pragmatics even though memes themselves have received
attention. In this paper, we consider how mimetic chunks of interaction may develop into
localised convention and possibly ritual by examining a corpus of 955 business emails between
a British sole trader and her international clients, specifically focussing on mimetic practices
present in greeting, signing-off and conversation topic. In particular, we attempt to show that
by looking into habitual and everyday communication, the origins of conventional and ritual
practices may be uncovered. A marked convergence towards using the same greeting or signoff
convention is noticeable in our quantitative data analysis and when examining the data
qualitatively. The data also show that participants occasionally engage in relational practices
that involve repeated and consistent responses to the same stimuli. The results indicate a
tendency for accommodative communicative practices to be used, although there is no point
at which mimesis can be interpreted as permanently “switched on”.

- by Daniel Kadar and +1
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- Discourse Analysis, Intercultural Communication, Pragmatics, Mimesis
- by Gunther Martin and +2
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- Greek Tragedy, Greek Comedy, Aristophanes, Menander

The present paper provides a comparative survey of historical and contemporary Chinese politeness, hence contributing to postcolonial pragmatics and linguistic politeness research. There is a unique gulf between historical and contemporary Chinese politeness, which is largely due to the influence of the 19th century colonization of China. While China was in fact partially colonized only, the invasion by foreign imperialist powers had a strong impact on the development of Chinese sociopragmatic norms. By demonstrating the gulf between ‘historical’ and ‘contemporary’, this paper provides an unprecedented case study for the influence of colonization on native language use. The analysis is divided into two parts. The first, section 2 of the paper, analyzes the ideologies, norms and practices of historical Chinese politeness, and demonstrate that historical Chinese politeness had some features that made it vulnerable to large scale socio-historical changes that led to the birth of contemporary Chinese politeness. Section 3, after reviewing politeness norms and ideologies in contemporary China, examine the similarities and differences between historical and contemporary practices of polite communication.

- by Daniel Kadar
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- Chinese Studies, Pragmatics, Linguistic Politeness, Intercultural Pragmatics

his study is a first approximation to the acoustic description of polite phrases in the Spanish spoken in Mérida. The pragmatic difference between a question and a polite phrase, (a mitigated order), can also be observed in the prosodic level. Our variables were i) type of phrase, with it's variants: polite and question; ii) fundamental frequency and iii) syllable duration. We taped and analysed, with Speech Analyzer 1.3., the production of a polite phrase and a question, by eight women from the city of Mérida, Venezuela. Our data show that the coding of politeness is given, by a larger variability of the fundamental frequency and a higher tone and also through a more regular and longer syllable duration. In order to validate our results it will be necessary to determine in a larger corpus, the tonal and rhythmic pattern of politeness in Venezuelan Spanish, in a larger corpus.

- by Alexandra Alvarez Muro
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- Speech Prosody, Pragmatics, Linguistic Politeness

Presentación de la ponencia realizada el 19 de mayo de 2021.

- by Nacho Esteban
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- Discourse Analysis, Queer Studies, Linguistic Politeness, Sexuality

The present paper explores the phenomenon of 'public ritual apology'. In our definition, this phenomenon covers an apology performed in front of public, and which is ritual in the sense that it is symbolic and expected to restore the moral order of the public, rather than grant actual reconciliation between the apologiser and the offended party. Thus, 'public ritual apology' usually occurs in contexts when someone apologises for acts that are deemed as grave and in the case of which apology is seemingly dysfunctional in the sense that it cannot usually grant forgiveness. Public ritual apology is a regretfully neglected area, in spite of the fact that such apologies are not only frequent but also generate significant public attention in media – thus, this paper fills an important knowledge gap. In our paper we focus on Chinese public ritual apologies, which are noteworthy to explore as Chinese is stereotypically referred to as a culture which disprefers apologising behaviour. Our methodology is predominantly interactional and metaprag-matic, and it combines qualitative research with quantitative elements.

- by Daniel Kadar
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- Pragmatics, Linguistic Politeness, Ritual, Chinese Language and Culture

语言是交流沟通的工具，是维系人与人之间关系的桥梁和纽带。在世界经济快速发展的今天，语言交流变得越来越重要，它已经成为经济交流发展的助推剂和润滑剂。为了保证语言交流的顺利进行，使用某些方法和手段对语言进行调节就成了必然。这种调节手段在语言范畴中可以称之为礼貌用语。礼貌，作为人类社会一种普遍存在的现象，其主要功能就是运用礼貌的语言行为来避免交际中不必要的误会与冲突，达到交际的目的。作为一个异国他乡的学者来到中国，最重要和必须首先面对的问题就是语言沟通。而要学会语言沟通的前提就是要... more

- by Ana HADZIPOPOVSKA
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- Asian Studies, Linguistic Politeness, Chinese Language and Culture, Politeness
- by Hala T S Maklad
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- Pragmatics, Linguistic Politeness
- by Klaus Zimmermann
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- Linguistic Politeness, Spanish Language, Youth Language, Identity Construction

Life in the modern age is dominated by social media. What used to be very much a private affair, like birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, etc., is now celebrated in front of oftentimes the whole world, and not infrequently, through the medium of the language that is not our own. The object of investigation in the present paper is the speech act of birthday wish sent to someone via Facebook. The analysis demonstrates that although the speech act has a universal aim – to show interest in another person and make them feel good, and although in many cases the language of conveying wishes, beside the native tongues, is the same, this notably being English, the lingua franca of contemporary world, the way the wish is expressed may differ markedly from culture to culture, thereby showing the underlying cultural values and norms of the users and of their native language use. The socio-pragmatic analysis presented here focuses on posts collected from personal profiles of British, Polish, Ind...

- by Marta Dąbrowska
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- Intercultural Communication, Pragmatics, Linguistic Politeness, Sociolinguistics
- by Jean Pierre van Noppen
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- Pragmatics, Linguistic Politeness, Politeness, Belgium

The present paper deals with the discursive construction of persuasiveness in media language. Based on eighty reviews of two French comedies Intouchables (2011) and Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu ? (2014), different components of the genre 'film review' – relatively little explored until recently – are established in the light of two operations of metonymy exploring the rhetorical argument from community. As the operations mentioned contribute to influencing the addressees' will and decisions, they perform the phatic function linked to the rhetoric principle of movere and delectare. Accordingly, it is important to notice that the persuasive strategies reflect some methods used in advertising discourse, especially with regard to indirect means of interpretation, values and emotions, which become starting points for the deliberative dimension of the film review. These parameters permit to reduce the information verification process by applying colloquial expressions, directive speech acts, collocative pronouns and generic quantifiers, since they stem from the trustworthiness relation connected with the peripheral route of persuasive influence. Keywords: discursive strategies of persuasion, film review, phatic function, metonymy, deliberative dimension of the film review, trustworthiness relation.

- by Dominika Topa-Bryniarska
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- Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Linguistic Politeness, Argumentation

Facebook forms one of the most widely used online social networks, through which people manage their
communication with diverse contacts or 'friends', ranging from members of the family and schoolmates to
work colleagues and popular cultural idols or other people, whom they admire. Hence, it can be seen as
an integral part of people’s digital presence. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is to investigate
the ways politeness is constructed in a context, in which it is not very typical to find politeness in the
Western world: The reception of birthday wishes. The focus is on the (para)linguistic reception of
birthday wishes on behalf of 400 native Greek users of Facebook, aged between 25–35 years old, as
evidenced in the ways they respond to birthday wishes posted on their walls.
By using a combination of interactional sociolinguistics, discourse-centered online ethnography
and offline ethnographic interviews, I argue that native speakers of Greek do not just stick to the politic
behavior found in other languages, like English, of personally thanking their friends for their birthday
wishes; rather, they employ contextualization cues, such as shifts in spelling, emoticons and punctuation
markers, in order to construct frames and footings of politeness by actually reciprocating the wishes they
received from their friends. The value of this study lies not only in being, to my knowledge, the first
description and interpretation of an important cultural phenomenon for Greeks, which is the exchange of
birthday wishes, but also it contributes towards understanding politeness in online environments, such as
Facebook, which in turn is used for establishment and maintenance of interpersonal relationships, hence it
can lead to smooth communication.

- by Irene Theodoropoulou
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- Discourse Analysis, Linguistic Politeness, Sociolinguistics, Modern Greece
- by Eva Casanova Lorenzo
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- Pragmatics, Linguistic Politeness, Publicity, Publicidad

From their very beginning, politeness theories have been interested in the ways speakers refer to (and manipulate) common ground with their addressees, in order to achieve prosocial behaviour. Taking into account the “emergent” nature of politeness as well as the negotiated building of common ground, this paper explores positive politeness strategies based on common ground management in the comedies of Plautus, paying special attention to the stock characters that make use of them, and the kind of social relationships in which such strategies are preferentially deployed. This study also claims that the verbal form scis has undergone pragmaticalization and serves as a grounding device which allows the use of mutual knowledge as a positive politeness strategy.

- by Luis Unceta Gómez
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- Linguistic Politeness, Plautus, Common Ground, Pragmatic and discourse markers
- by Michael Betsch
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- Pragmatics, Linguistic Politeness, Slavic Languages, Address Terms
- by Marta Albelda Marco
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- Pragmatics, Linguistic Politeness, Corpus Linguistics, Politeness theory
- by Alexandra Alvarez Muro and +1
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- Linguistic Politeness
- by Jeremy King
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- Linguistic Politeness, Politeness theory, Spanish Golden Age, Forms of address

This paper reports preliminary observations on (im)politeness inIndian TV advertisements. Advertisements target a multicultural mostly urban and semi-urban audience and are, therefore, expected to reflect a linguistic and societal picture of that society.
Our primary observations reveal that the advertisements which are made primarily of children and youngsters depict a comparatively intolerant culture and more negative impoliteness output strategies. The paper seeks to address the questions related to impoliteness strategies taken by different age groups and in different social situations and strata as depicted through advertisements aired on TV.
Keywords-TV advertisements, (im)politeness strategies,
social groups, age, social situations

Presentación de la ponencia realizada del 26 al 29 de mayo de 2021.

- by Nacho Esteban
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- Discourse Analysis, Queer Studies, Linguistic Politeness, Sexuality

The current study set out to assess the sociopragmatic appropriacy of
compliment response (CR) knowledge of Iranian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) through data elicited by means of a written discourse completion task (DCT). The participants were comprised of 29 university students, aged 19–28, who were randomly selected and asked to respond to compliments received from either equal-status (=P) or higher-status (−P) interlocutors. Subsequently, Yu’s (2004) coding scheme of CRs and previous research on politeness were used with the aim of coding and analyzing the participants’ CRs as well as assessing their appropriacy in terms of (im)politeness in the intended sociocultural context. The results demonstrated a strong tendency among the participants to accept, rather than decline or question, compliments. The findings also suggest that the participants were reliant on both negative and positive politeness in unequal-status interactions (i.e., −P) and on positive politeness in equal-status situations (i.e., =P) by utilizing various strategies and linguistic devices to achieve sociopragmatic appropriacy. Furthermore, the participants proved to be relatively aware of the significance of the role of interlocutors’ power and social status in harmonizing interaction. However, the responses also included features that might be interpreted as partly inappropriate, particularly for interacting with higher-status interlocutors. This is interpreted as indicative of a need for instructional intervention in the pragmatics of CRs.

The “impoliteness strategy”, a kind of parallel to the “politeness strategy”, has dominated research for decades and is still current. However, the notion of a “strategy” is poorly understood and rarely defined. This paper begins by critically examining this notion, as it is used in linguistics. It argues that in politeness studies it has been overly focused on the idea of a rational linguistic means of achieving certain ends or goals. That a strategy might also involve the coordination of communication through routine and shared linguistic means that are recognised within particular communities seems to have been largely overlooked. The next part of this paper outlines Culpeper’s (1996) taxonomy of impoliteness strategies, and follows with a critical review. It notes that most problems and controversies lie at the more abstract level of the "superstrategy". Two particularly controversial areas are discussed. One is the relationship between directness and impoliteness strategies, and especially whether there is some correlation with the degree of offence caused. The other is the relationship between impoliteness strategies and context. The final part of the paper outlines a more recent bottom-up framework of impoliteness strategies or triggers, and one that, echoing Terkorafi’s (e.g. 2001) work on politeness, places impoliteness conventionalized for particular contexts of use at the centre.

- by Nabila LA
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- Languages and Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Pragmatics, Semantics

This study is about the presence of linguistic politeness in Brazilian and Spanish corporate e-mails. Applying a quantitative research technique in a corpus composed by electronic mails in Brazilian Portuguese and Peninsular Spanish, we searched for differences and/or similarities between both languages and cultures in the way of communicating via e-mails. Firstly, we discussed basic concepts about the discursive genre we used as our corpus. Following, we compared both languages regarding those concepts. Based, mainly, on sociocultural pragmatics, autonomy/affiliation (Bravo, 1999), and attenuation (Briz, 1998) studies, we analyzed Brazilian and Spanish requests. We tried to identify linguistic and sociocultural contrasts and similarities in the way of communicating written requests. We also verified the frequency and role of attenuation marks within these e-mails. Our results demonstrated some variation and resemblance in how both languages communicate requests. It seems that there is an over appreciation from the Brazilian Portuguese side, for using attenuators, in order to diminish the degree of imposition of a request, and therefore avoiding a possible instability between the interlocutors. This preference does not occur among the Spanish e-mail group. We found out that, although they are similar languages, their pragmatic choices in e-mail interaction do not seem to coincide.

Extensive research has been conducted on the diversity in the relationship between language and gender. Differences in the ways women and men speak or use language have been of interest for a long time, specifically in the field of linguistics. Studies tend to revolve around matters concerning whether men and women speak a 'particular' language in different ways. From childhood, boys and girls learn different approaches to language and communication, where Tannen calls them genderlects. According to Tannen, females engage in rapport-talk, or a communication style meant to promote social affiliation and emotional connection, while men engage in report-talk — a style that is more focused on exchanging information with little emotional import. Eventually, this is what results in misunderstandings between men and women, Tannen claims. In this paper, I am interested in exploring why men and women use language differently and how. I intend to find out how culture has an influence on the relationship between language and gender through a field work on Lebanese university students at AUB with discussions on formal and informal topics to observe different aspects of language use.

- by Rayan Jaber
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- Sociology, Linguistic Politeness, Language and Gender, Gender