19.2711, Diss: Pragmatics: Isik-Guler: 'Metapragmatics of (Im)politeness in ...'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-19-2711. Sun Sep 07 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.2711, Diss: Pragmatics: Isik-Guler: 'Metapragmatics of (Im)politeness in ...'

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1)
Date: 05-Sep-2008
From: Hale Isik-Guler < hisik at metu.edu.tr >
Subject: Metapragmatics of (Im)politeness in Turkish: An exploratory emic investigation

 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:21:26
From: Hale Isik-Guler [hisik at metu.edu.tr]
Subject: Metapragmatics of (Im)politeness in Turkish: An exploratory emic investigation
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Institution: Middle East Technical University 
Program: Foreign Language Education 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2008 

Author: Hale Isik-Guler

Dissertation Title: Metapragmatics of (Im)politeness in Turkish: An exploratory 
emic investigation 

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics

Subject Language(s): Turkish (tur)


Dissertation Director(s):
Prof.Dr. ?ükriye Ruhi

Dissertation Abstract:

The research at hand maintains an emic approach to understanding
(im)politeness1 (i.e. in its folk sense) within the meaning making
processes involved in Turkish. With the intention of reaching an
ethnopragmatic theoretical account of (im)politeness, this study
investigates tacit knowledge native speakers of Turkish have on
(im)politeness and their related perceptions and evaluations. The thesis
explores the cultural-conceptual system of (im)politeness in Turkish
utilizing three sources: (a) data from an open-ended metapragmatic
conceptualization questionnaire probing Turkish native speakers' politeness
encounter narratives through seven key metapragmatic politeness terms (i.e.
K?BAR, ?NCE, NAZ?K, DÜ?ÜNCEL?, SAYGILI, GÖRGÜLÜ, TERB?YEL?) and eight key
impoliteness terms (i.e. KABA, NEZAKETS?Z, DÜ?ÜNCES?Z, SAYGISIZ, GÖRGÜSÜZ,
TERB?YES?Z, PATAVATSIZ, KÜSTAH), and (b) corpus analyses for the lexical
items K?BAR and KABA, (c) (im)politeness encounter narrative interviews
with native speakers of Turkish. This research study has been designed
mainly as an exploration of what Turkish people consider to be (im)polite,
how they express they become (im)polite, and how (linguistic)
(im)politeness is interpreted by others in everyday communication, as well
as how Turkish native speakers evaluate (im)politeness through the key
(im)politeness lexemes available in the language, what their 'bases of
evaluation' are and what views they hold concerning motivations underlying
the want to be (im)polite in Turkish. The qualitative thematic analysis
conducted on the questionnaire data yielded six bases of evaluation for
(the total of 1211) politeness narratives, and eight bases of evaluation
for (the 1306) impoliteness narratives. It was revealed that the bases of
evaluation for a polite act in Turkish were primarily 'attentiveness to
other's emotions, needs and goals' and abidance by 'custom', whereas they
were '(quality) face-attack' and '(equity) rights violations' for
impoliteness. The corpus analysis and interview data also corroborated
these findings. The quantitative cross-mapping of (im)politeness lexemes to
(im)politeness themes suggested biases of lexemes for certain themes and
themes for lexemes. The motivational and strategic uses of (im)politeness
were related more to egocentric tendencies with politeness being motivated
predominantly for self-promotion and image management, and goal attainment,
and impoliteness motivated mainly by the desire to establish power and
project power on to other, to perform an emotive reaction, to hurt other
and to reciprocate others' impolite acts to self. The relationship between
(im)politeness and the concepts of sincerity, intentionality, historicity,
reciprocity and public versus private domain influences are worth pursuing
further research on for the Turkish culture. All in all, this study
provides Turkish baseline data for later cross-cultural (im)politeness
research and suggests that (im)politeness1 (lay) conceptualizations can aid
the (scientific) theorizing of (im)politeness2 to a great degree. 






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