16.2998, Review: Pragmatics/European Lang: Hickey & Stewart (2005)

[LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2998. Mon Oct 17 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2998, Review: Pragmatics/European Lang: Hickey & Stewart (2005)

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org) 
        Sheila Dooley, U of Arizona  
        Terry Langendoen, U of Arizona  

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Lindsay Butler <lindsay at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

What follows is a review or discussion note contributed to our 
Book Discussion Forum. We expect discussions to be informal and 
interactive; and the author of the book discussed is cordially 
invited to join in. If you are interested in leading a book 
discussion, look for books announced on LINGUIST as "available 
for review." Then contact Sheila Dooley at dooley at linguistlist.org. 

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 16-Oct-2005
From: Susan Burt < smburt at ilstu.edu >
Subject: Politeness in Europe 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 03:59:53
From: Susan Burt < smburt at ilstu.edu >
Subject: Politeness in Europe 
 

EDITORS: Hickey, Leo; Stewart, Miranda 
TITLE: Politeness in Europe
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1932.html 

Susan Meredith Burt, Department of English, Illinois State University

OVERVIEW

The goal of this volume is to provide "an empirical snapshot of issues of 
politeness in their respective societies" (p. 1) in Europe.  The 
Introduction, by the editors, makes clear that in addition to providing 
these snapshots, they hope that the individual chapters will address 
issues raised by current theoretical frameworks of politeness, several of 
which they outline briefly, while noting the explosion of recent work in 
the field.  The brief critiques of these politeness theories make clear 
that one of the goals is to allow readers to compare politeness practices 
both between and within chapters; the editors re-iterate some of the 
criticisms of the theoretical framework of Brown and Levinson (1987), 
noting that key notions of that framework (power, distance and the weight 
of imposition) are hard to "calculate," even before attempting comparison 
across cultures. 

Twenty-two chapters follow, each focused on a separate country in Europe, 
grouped into four rough geographical sections, Western Europe, Northern 
Europe, Eastern Europe and Southern Europe.  

CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER SUMMARY

Western Europe
The section on Western Europe is the largest, containing nine chapters.   
Juliane House's chapter (which sports the catchiest chapter title of the 
volume, "Politeness in Germany: Politeness in GERMANY?") sets the bar 
high for the other contributions.  House makes clear that while individual 
speakers can be polite (or not), linguistic forms or structures cannot be 
polite in and of themselves.  Rather, "behavior that is adequate in 
context" (p. 16) meets an underlying politeness norm. House notes that it 
is unrealistic to attempt to collect data only from everyday conversation, 
and so, relies on a variety of data types; open role-play, notes on and 
reports of "critical incidents," audiotaped narratives by English-
speakers  in Germany, and audiotaped authentic interactions.  Based on 
these data, House asserts that Germans are direct, particularly in 
comparison with English speakers; following Blum-Kulka (1987), however, 
she argues that indirectness is not necessarily polite, as it requires a 
lot of processing on the part of the hearer.  House gives both cultural 
and historical explanations for the German preference for directness, and 
notes that Germans are beginning to add certain politeness routines to 
their discourse nonetheless.

In "Politeness in France: How to Buy Bread Politely,"  Catherine Kerbrat-
Orecchioni, shows from her data on interactions in a bakery in Lyon, that 
both customers and shop-keepers employ, in Brown and Levinson's terms, 
both positive and negative politeness strategies in the interactions.  
Interestingly, she introduces the notion of a "face-flattering act" (or 
FFA), as a complement to the "face-threatening act" (FTA) of Brown and 
Levinson's theory; this is useful for her ultimate conclusion that French 
politeness seems to be situated between the more "northern" systems of 
restraint and negative politeness and "southern" conversational qualities 
of warmth and involvement.

Service interactions are also the focus of the chapter on Belgium by 
Emmanuelle Danblon, Bernard de Clerck and Jean-Pierre Van Noppen.  
The two languages of Belgium, Dutch and French, are in "a relationship of 
interaction and interference" (p. 45).  The authors note that choice of 
language is in itself a politeness issue, and recognize the sociopragmatic 
ambiguity inherent in any choice a speaker may make, if compelled to 
choose between her first language and that of her equally bilingual 
interlocutor (see also Burt 1994).  Nevertheless, Dutch speakers are more 
likely to speak French than the reverse, and so, Dutch becomes a source 
for the transfer of pragmatic markers into French.   But the main focus of 
the article is on service encounters in small shops; 100 of these were 
recorded in each of three regions, Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels.  
Politeness routines were  recorded in all parts of interactions, the 
initial requests, the delivery of the requested item, the request for 
payment, change-giving, and the farewells (not every interaction had all 
these parts, obviously).  Interestingly, in Flanders and Wallonia, where 
the shopkeepers and customers were socially closer than those in Brussels 
were,  there were up to one and half times the number of politeness 
markers than in Brussels; the authors note that contrary to the politeness 
formula of Brown and Levinson (1987:76), here, social closeness seems to 
lead to increased politeness.  Nevertheless, these markers were not evenly 
distributed; there were far more politeness formulae spoken by 
salespersons than by customers.  The authors further suggest that contrary 
to Brown and Levinson, the high level of politeness usage does not seem to 
arise because buying and selling are such threatening activities, but 
because a ritualized confirming of relationship seems to be a part of 
cooperating in these activities. 

Johannes Kramer's chapter on Luxemburg presents the country as a 
linguistic and cultural crossroad, with its multilingual and multiliterate 
citizens learning different politeness strategies as they learn 
languages.  French is the prestige language, Luxemburgish  the in-group 
language, and German "a necessary evil" (p. 61).  Politeness routines show 
the results of this linguistic layering.  Kramer cites the formula "wann 
iech glift," used when handing something to someone, and gives the history 
of this unique expression, which involves influences from German, French 
and Dutch.  Such calques are not unusual in Luxemburg.

Rob Le Pair's chapter on "Politeness in the Netherlands" is explicitly 
comparative.  Using a Discourse Completion Task, he elicits requests from 
native speakers of Dutch, native speakers of Spanish and Dutch learners of 
Spanish.  The native speakers of Spanish are far more direct, using the 
imperative more than twice as often as the Dutch learners of Spanish do.  
Although differences in the configuration of power, social distance and 
context can complicate the relationship, the Dutch speakers out-do the 
Spanish speakers in their use of conventionally indirect requests.

The chapter on Austria, by Silvia Haumann, Ursula Koch and Karl Sornig, 
ranges over a broad expanse of politeness phenomena, from the unique 
Austrian greeting formula (Grüss Gott and its variants), to taboo topics, 
to the regional variation in preferred  address pronouns. There are lists 
of devices (such as indirectness or impersonalization) speakers  can use 
for politeness purposes.  Certainly this is useful material, but this 
chapter seemed to me to offer somewhat fewer connections to recent 
theoretical frameworks, and I was disappointed that the work of A.J. Meier 
(1996, 1997) on Austrian politeness was not consulted.

Giuseppe Manno's chapter on Switzerland briefly discusses the well-known  
regional model of multilingualism of the country and its classic 
diglossia, but focuses on politeness features that are shared across the 
regions and languages.  Harkening back to Kerbrat-Orecchioni's chapter, 
Manno characterizes Swiss politeness as involving both the avoidance of 
FTAs and the production of FFAs.  Second person pronoun usage is 
revealing: in both German and French, use of "du" and "tu" is gaining 
ground.  Speakers for whom reciprocal "vous" (or "Sie") is the default 
tend to be over 50, while non-reciprocal address pronoun usage is 
restricted to adult-child interactions.  Similarly, the use of elaborate 
titles (Frau Professor Doktor)  is not favored.  Despite a preference for 
a consensual over a conflictual style, there is nonetheless a reluctance 
to disturb others; in other words, negative face is highly valued, leading 
to a preference for conventionally indirect politeness strategies.

Miranda Stewart's chapter on Britain also stresses the multi-ethnic nature 
of the country.  Here, too, negative politeness is valued, although 
address forms are likely to reflect social stratification (the tu/vous 
distinction remains only in Quaker speech).  Using data from feedback from 
supervisors to Spanish tutors,  Stewart shows that the British prefer 
negative politeness and non-conventional indirect strategies.  In these 
written feedback texts, face-enhancing comments typically precede more 
critical comments, and non-conventional criticism serves to protect the 
face of both reader and writer.  There is a great deal of hedging, as in 
"I felt your marking was slightly generous," an example that also shows the 
use of the past tense to distance writer from the critique.  Stewart 
concludes her comparison of both British and Spanish feedback writers 
with "to be British a healthy degree of paranoia can help" (p. 128), 
although I wonder whether data drawn from outside the academic world might 
have provided a lower paranoia rating.  Stewart's analysis of the data is 
sensitive and revealing, but her choice of data prevents her from being 
able to say much about class variation in British politeness, which would 
surely be of interest.

The section on Western Europe closes with the westernmost county, Ireland, 
as focus of Jeffrey L. Kallen's chapter.  In Ireland, negative politeness 
strategies are "elaborated and developed" (p. 130).  Silence, Kallen 
maintains, is a part of face needs, although hospitality and reciprocity 
are also strongly valued.  Politeness characteristics of Irish 
conversational style include "conversational understatement, hedges, 
minimization, conventional pessimism, reciprocity, reference to common 
ground, in-group identity markers and conventional optimism" (p. 139).  
Kallen illustrates each of these features with examples, such as the 
example of clause-initial "sure" used to elicit agreement in the 
conventionally optimistic attempt (to get a guest to stay longer, one 
assumes), "You won't go just yet, sure you won't" (p. 142).   

Northern Europe
The section on Northern Europe opens with Thorstein Fretheim's 
chapter, "Politeness in Norway: How Can You Be Polite and Sincere?" 
Norway is stereotypically conceived of as very egalitarian, and thus 
Norwegian is "remarkably short on conventional markers of positive 
politeness" (p. 145).  Besides the lack of the tu/vous distinction, items 
that would seem to convey positive politeness are felt to be insincere.  
However, Norwegians "thank profusely" (p. 146), with thanks serving 
even as a greeting ("thanks for yesterday").  Requests are made polite 
with conventional indirectness, using a question with "kan" or "kunne": 
"Can you send me the butter?"  Attempting an extra dollop of politeness, 
as in "would you be so nice as to send the butter?"  signals impatience, 
and indeed the formula which translates as "be so nice as to"  is often used 
by children simply as a request marker as in "Can I be so nice as to get 
one more cookie?" (p. 154).  For the requester to shift the request to 
past tense is the safest politeness strategy, since "too much linguistic 
embroidery for the sake of mitigating requests is normally counterproductive" 
(p. 157).

Similarly, the chapter on Danish, by Elin Fredsted, portrays Danish as 
largely informal, where "hierarchies are largely invisible or hidden" (p. 
158).  Fredsted focuses on address forms, conversation openers and 
closers, and politeness markers in her analysis of 120 conversations at 
Danish and German tourist information offices.  Choosing appropriate 
address forms is complex, with age, gender and regional dialect variation 
leading to uncertainty, and thus, avoidance, on the part of Danes 
themselves. In getting into and out of conversations, Danes seem to be 
more direct than Germans; a Danish tourist would open the conversation by 
asking "What can I see here?" (p. 162) while a German tourist is more 
likely to begin with a greeting.  In fact Fredsted finds "a remarkable 
frequency of verbal politeness markers in the German, with the obvious 
conclusion that the German speakers express somewhat more verbal negative 
politeness and much more positive politeness compared to the Danes" (p. 
168).  Nonetheless, the Danes, like the Norwegians, 
employ "tak," 'thanks,'  a great deal and with a variety of functions.

Cornelia Ilie's chapter on Sweden focuses on personal pronouns and 
politeness strategies in parliamentary talk, and the comparison she 
chooses to make is with British English, using as data transcripts from 
the Riksdag and the House of Commons.  In both institutions, speakers may 
use both second person and third person to refer to an addressee; if the 
third person use conveys distance (and thus, deference) in both cases, 
second person use by the same speaker can come to sound confrontational, 
even though members of the Swedish parliament use only the vous 
equivalent, "ni," with each other.  In both Swedish and English, the use 
of the first person plural can be employed to increase the speaker's own 
authoritativeness, but only in the Swedish transcripts is the same form 
used to have an "inclusive and mobilizing" tone (p. 184) in attempts to 
move the members towards consensus. 

Valma Yli-Vakkuri's chapter on Finland closes the Northern Europe 
section.  Because Finland was annexed to Sweden for much of its history,  
there are similarities in speech and behavior, and "standards of 
politeness are, in principle, pan-European" (p. 189).  But there are also 
pressures from a colloquial variety of Finnish which lead to somewhat less 
formality.  Thus, although Finland shared in the use of the second person 
plural pronoun as a formal address term, it also allows the omission of  
personal pronouns in first and second persons; Finns may bring into any 
interaction a variety of preferences on this issue, and so "reference to 
the addressee is avoided at all costs" (p. 191).   The chapter describes 
several avoidance strategies, such as the reminder on the door of a 
changing room, which translates, "Was anything forgotten?"  while the 
Swedish version of the sign translates, "Did you forget anything?"  Rather 
than using particles or phrases for such strategies as mitigating, Finnish 
has grammatical devices for these functions, such as suffixes or case 
changes; the partitive case can serve as a polite substitute for the 
nominative or accusative.  The fact that "politeness norms in standard 
Finnish are largely based on loans from other languages" (p. 201) means 
that many Finns may find the use of this style uncomfortable at best.

Eastern Europe 
The four societies representing Eastern Europe have in common relatively 
recent transformations of government and economy, and thus there is reason 
to look for changes in politeness practices.  Leelo Keevallik's chapter on 
Estonia, for example, notes that while the change to a market economy has 
led to changes in service encounters, a simultaneous move towards 
informality has left older speakers less than pleased with the politeness 
practices of younger speakers.  Estonian maintains the tu/vous 
distinction, and the analysis of Brown and Gilman (1968) shows up as 
remarkably robust here, in that a solidarity semantic seems to prevail in 
Estonia, with symmetric second person pronoun usage the norm.  Otherwise, 
there is a certain amount of "reference avoidance" (p. 208) as in Finland, 
greeting routines are not elaborate, compliments are rare, silence is not 
threatening, and directness is not offensive.

Romuald Huszcza's chapter on Poland postulates, in addition to the tu and 
vous forms, "a regular grammatical category of honorifics within certain 
verbal forms" (p. 218); these are compared with the honorific system of 
Japanese.  These honorifics, many of them elaborate developments of the 
noun "pan," 'gentleman,' do not necessarily reflect social categories or 
social stratification, but are strategically bestowed; " the speaker 
decides what rank, higher or lower, to confer on the person spoken to or 
about" (p. 223).  As in Japanese, terms like 'wife' or 'husband' have 
different forms, depending on whether the referent in questions belongs to 
the speaker or the addressee.  The result is a highly elaborated category 
of second person.

Lorant Bencze claims that there is a split in Hungarian society between a 
traditional cultural paradigm and a new one; adherents of each paradigm 
have different conceptions of what politeness is, and thus, of how to 
evaluate verbal practices.  The result of this split is that politeness 
practices may serve to maximize rather than minimize conflict.  Bencze 
outlines the numerous variants of both address and reference, and places 
these within a system of solidarity and hierarchy, although factors such 
as authority, relationship and the presence or absence of the referent 
from the speaking situation also play a role.  In Hungary, too, the 
tu/vous pronoun system is moving in the direction of increased use of  
symmetric tu, although older paradigm adherents find this impolite.

The chapter on "Politeness in the Czech Republic," by Jiri Nekvapil and J. 
V. Neustupny also reflects the Brown and Gilman analysis, in that here, 
too, the "management of honorifics" (p. 248) is an issue.  A new economy 
has also changed the power relationship between customers and service 
personnel; a mutual use of the ty (= tu) pronoun, however, is the default 
case with increasing numbers of younger speakers.  Yet the vy (=vous) 
honorific use remains, perhaps because of the long contact with Austria. 

Southern Europe
The chapter on politeness in Greece, by Maria Sifianou and Eleni 
Antonopoulou, is based on a fairly large number of previous research 
projects on Greek language politeness.  The authors argue that 
the "positive politeness orientation" (p. 264) of Greek offers motivation 
for analyzing speech acts in terms of their enhancement of positive face 
as well as possible threats to negative face, as the Brown and Levinson 
framework considers.  Furthermore, speech acts (for a number of reasons) 
should be analyzed in the natural sequence of conversations, rather than 
as isolated acts.  Thus, apologies and thanks seem to be less frequent in 
Greek than in English-indeed, to socially close interlocutors, thanking 
might be offensive, given the positive politeness orientation of Greek 
society.  Directive announcements in airplanes in Greek are more 
personalized than those in English, which include passives and other de-
personalizing strategies.  While Greek telephone callers do not self-
identify (expecting to be recognized by their voices), in comparison to 
German telephone users, Greeks prefer to have "how-are-you" sequences 
as a part of call openings.  In panel discussions, participants may on occasion 
break into another speaker's turn with a supportive contribution-all of 
these practices are evidence of the Greek preference for positive 
politeness.

Marina Terkourafi's chapter on Cypriot Greek acknowledges a diglossic 
relationship of this language with Standard Modern Greek; not 
surprisingly, the local koine is used "to foreground sincerity and 
friendliness" (p. 279).  Using 115 hours of taped conversations, 
Terkourafi notes that certain features serve to identify speakers as 
middle class, such as the "nonliteral use of the second person plural" (p. 
283).  On the other hand, Cypriot Greeks tend to dislike non-literal 
diminutives ("a small coffee"), which they also associate with the 
standard.  Direct expressions are not perceived as impolite.

In "Politeness in Italy: The Art of Self-Representation in Requests," 
Gudrun Held takes a historical approach.  Arguing that urbanity and 
courtesy were part of an early ideal of self-representation, Held 
describes how in various periods Italian politeness forms were "exposed to 
continuous overstatement and semantic reshaping" (p. 295).  She cites 
passages from a rhetoric manual dating from 1240, where requests  are 
embedded in compliment sequences, and passages from the eighteenth century 
plays of Goldoni, showing politeness forms "undergoing a semantic loss 
which has to be countered by further hyperbolisation" (p. 298).  Thus, it 
comes as no surprise that from a 1995 questionnaire to young adults 
designed to elicit requests, Held is able to cite an elaborate request 
sequence, with greetings, minimizers, supportive acts, and even an offer.  
In Italian, "Being verbally polite requires high effort, informed by 
social competence and psychological pressure in order to maintain 
harmonious efficient interaction" (p. 303).

Maria Helena Araujo Carreira  ("Politeness in Portugal:  How to Address 
Others") describes Portuguese culture: "gregarious relationships, 
consensus and tact are favored over confrontation, frankness or the 
protection of an individual's territory" (p. 308).   With this particular 
combination of traits, there seems to be an elaboration of politeness 
routines for numerous situations, such as routines for the deferral of 
leave-taking, some of which may seem too over-the-top to non-Portuguese.   
There are similarly numerous options for address terms; Carreira finds the 
Brown and Gilman (1968) model somewhat inadequate, and lists the variety 
of  address forms that can replace "voce" or the zero-pronoun and combine 
with a third-person verb as a polite form of address.  This variety of 
options, and the "fuzziness" that results, the author argues, helps render 
all of these options more polite than the tu form of address.

The final chapter, "Politeness in Spain: Thanks but no 'Thanks'," by Leo 
Hickey, describes Spaniards as admiring negative politeness but rarely 
engaging in it.  Kindness and friendliness are highly valued, and Hickey's 
observations lead him to conclude that Spaniards prefer a high involvement 
style (Tannen 1984).  Part of a positive politeness style are "lavish 
compliments and expressions of praise and appreciation," which are not 
perceived as flattery, but as "cornerstones of friendship and solidarity" 
(p. 320).  Interestingly, however, Hickey shows that in gift-giving 
scenarios, explicit thanking seems to be rare, though expressions of 
appreciation are not, yielding  what Hickey labels "non-formulaic, non-
self-humbling, non-deferential thanking" (p. 329).

CRITICAL EVALUATION

The editors, in speaking of these chapters as "snapshots,"  are candid 
about their goal.  Reading these chapters is indeed like looking at a 
friend's travel photographs: the viewer is somewhat frustrated at not 
being able to see more, or to experience the pictured space first-hand, 
yet happy at the opportunity to see at least this much vicariously.  Thus, 
while each chapter is necessarily short, there is a great deal of 
information in this volume.  The breadth of territory covered does come at 
the expense of some depth: little is said, for example, about minority 
languages in some of the countries surveyed here, such as Frisian in the 
Netherlands, one case where politeness issues might be important.  

Nevertheless, the goal of offering material for comparative purposes is 
clearly met.  Thus, Spanish is explicitly compared with English and with 
Dutch, German with Danish and with English, and so on.  But in addition, 
there are certain kinds of politeness issues that recur across these 
chapters, such as request-making and address forms, hardy perennials of 
politeness research, so that a certain amount of comparison between, say, 
address terms in Polish and in Portuguese is possible, should a reader be 
so inclined.  Ultimately, however, each chapter relies on its own type of 
data; there was no uniform assignment for data-collection passed out to 
the authors. But the uniqueness of focus of each chapter increases rather 
than decreases the interest of the volume, which should appeal to scholars 
in cross-cultural pragmatics, anthropology, second-language acquisition 
and language teaching, as well as to scholars of politeness. 

REFERENCES

Blum-Kulka, Shoshana.  1987.  Indirectness and politeness in requests: 
Same or different? Journal of Pragmatics 11: 131-146,

Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson.  1987.  Politeness.  Cambridge: CUP.

Brown, Roger and Albert Gilman.  1968 [1960].  The Pronouns of Power and 
Solidarity.  In Joshua A. Fishman (ed): Readings in the Sociology of 
Language.  The Hague: Mouton.

Burt, Susan Meredith. 1994. "Code Choice in Intercultural Conversation: 
Speech Accommodation Theory and Pragmatics."  Pragmatics 4,4:  535-559.

Meier, A. J.  1996.  Two cultures mirrored in repair work.  Multilingua 
15,2:  149-169.  

Meier, A. J.  1997.  What's the Excuse?  Image Repair in Austrian German.  
The Modern Language Journal,  81, ii,: 197-208.

Tannen, Deborah.  1984.  Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among 
Friends.  Norwood NJ: Ablex. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Susan Meredith Burt is Associate Professor at Illinois State University in 
Normal, Illinois.  She is currently researching changes in politeness 
practices in the language of the immigrant Hmong community in Wisconsin.  
Her most recent publication is "How to Get Rid of Unwanted Suitors" in 
volume 1, number 2 of the Journal of Politeness Research.





-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2998