25.165, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Jautz (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-165. Sat Jan 11 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.165, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics:  Jautz (2013)

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Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2014 10:06:49
From: Wei Ren [renweixz at yahoo.com]
Subject: Thanking Formulae in English

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-1986.html

AUTHOR: Sabine  Jautz
TITLE: Thanking Formulae in English
SUBTITLE: Explorations across varieties and genres
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 230
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Wei Ren, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

SUMMARY

This monograph by Sabine Jautz is rooted in variational pragmatics (Schneider
& Barron 2008) and investigates the use of thanking formulae in spoken British
and New Zealand English. As explained by the author, quite a few studies have
examined the use of expressions of gratitude in one language (particularly in
English), or compared it in different languages, or investigated non-native
speakers’ use against native speakers’. On the contrary, little research has
been carried out to explore thanking formulae in different varieties of one
language. Thus, Jautz’s study contributes to the existing literature on
variational pragmatics. The introduction (Chapter 1) briefly sets up the
background of the study and introduces the data for the present research:
parts of the spoken component of the British National Corpus (BNC) and the
Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English (WSC).

In Chapter 2, the author firstly introduces linguistic research on thanking
formulae, including the definition of thanking formulae and their forms and
functions. As the author notes: “Classically, thanking formulae are used to
express a speaker’s psychological state towards some state of affairs or some
person” (p. 6). Pragmatic aspects of the use of thanking formulae and
cross-cultural variation are also reviewed. The chapter then focuses on three
theories of politeness, viz. the framework proposed by Brown and Levinson
(1987), Leech (1983) and Watts (2003), before it presents a linguistic
characterization of British and New Zealand English. Finally, the chapter
provides information on the development and characteristics of radio talk.

Chapter 3 begins with a very brief review of data collection methods typically
used in pragmatics research, including Discourse Completion Tasks and
role-plays, and the advantages of using corpus data to investigate pragmatic
phenomena. It then presents the research design of the present study and the
corpora under investigation, followed by an explanation of how the search
terms are determined. Finally, Jautz illustrates the aspects under
investigation in the present study: how the form of thanking formulae is
examined, how the functions of thanking formulae are determined, and how the
three models of politeness are operationalized.

Chapter 4 is the major body of the book, which presents findings related to
the complete data set. However, it is rather long in that it represents 44% of
the book and contains 128 pages. Firstly, the chapter focuses on aspects
concerning the formal realizations of expressions of gratitude from British
and New Zealand English: overall frequencies, common syntactic realizations,
the use of optional elements (including naming of a benefactor, reasons for
the expression of gratitude, and intensifiers), and the position of thanking
formulae in conversations as a whole. Compared to the data from New Zealand,
the British data contained more (and more different) expressions of gratitude.
The British also use optional elements more frequently than New Zealanders.
Secondly, it explores the functions of the thanking formulae, such as
organizing the ongoing discourse, serving the phatic communion, responding to
material goods and services, responding to immaterial goods and interpersonal
support, and joking/ironic use of thanking formulae. It has been observed that
organizing the ongoing discourse is of paramount importance in British English
whereas New Zealanders pay more attention to interpersonal relations.
Furthermore, the chapter examines whether claims regarding (the illocution of)
thanking in the politeness theories proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987),
Leech (1983), and Watts (2003) can be verified by the thanking formulae under
investigation in the present study. Finally, the social status between the
speakers and the addressees are focused on to shed light on who (high status
or low status) expresses their gratitude to whom in which social position. In
the British data, superiors employ thanking formulae more frequently than
inferiors. By contrast, New Zealanders address their expression of gratitude
similarly to superiors, inferiors and equals. The author also applies the
cultural dimensions of workplace values proposed by Hofstede (2001) to the
linguistic data in the present study. The chapter concludes with a summary of
the similarities and differences found between British and New Zealand
English.

Chapter 5 investigates the subcorpora of radio texts comprised in the data
sets from the BNC and the WSC on their own in order to check whether genre has
an influence on the use of thanking formulae. The chapter is presented in a
similar way to Chapter 4 in terms of content and structure. It firstly
examines the form of thanking formulae in radio texts. Secondly, the functions
served by the thanking formulae are focused on. Next, the status of thanking
formulae in the three politeness frameworks is discussed. Furthermore, the
roles of host/interviewer and caller/interviewee are examined to check whether
the relative power of the interlocutors has a special influence on the use of
thanking formulae in interviews or phone-ins. Finally the chapter concludes
with a summary of findings in this particular genre analysis.

Chapter 6 concludes the study by summarizing the most important findings
(under variational and genre analysis) and providing suggestions for further
research. The author calls for more variational pragmatic studies on other
national and/or subnational varieties of English and other languages, and more
studies on the influence of other macro- and micro-factors.

EVALUATION

In cross-cultural or intercultural pragmatics research, the focus has been
predominantly on pragmatic variation between or across different languages
under the influence of micro-social factors (i.e., social status, social
distance and degree of imposition). Relatively little attention has been paid
to the effect of macro-social factors, such as region, gender, ethnicity, age
and social class, on different varieties of a language, either at the national
or the subnational level (Barron & Schneider 2009). In light of this research
gap, Schneider and Barron (2008) have established a new sub-field of
pragmatics, variational pragmatics. As Barron and Schneider indicate,
“pragmatic similarities may occur across languages, while pragmatic
differences may occur across varieties of the same language” (2009: 425).
Jautz’s investigation into thanking formulae in British and New Zealand
English has provided further evidence for the rationale and necessity of
variational pragmatics research. It contributes to the field of variational
pragmatics by exploring the use of thanking formulae in British and New
Zealand English. As pointed out by the author, more pragmatic studies are
needed to examine the varieties of pluricentric languages, particularly non
Indo-European languages (e.g., Lin et al. 2012; Ren et al. 2013).

This book has many strong points. Firstly, the present study combines
pragmatic approaches and corpus linguistic methodology to offer several
perspectives on the forms and functions of thanking formulae. It showcases how
corpus linguistic data can be employed in pragmatics research by adopting a
form-based or lexical approach. Secondly, it not only illustrates similarities
and differences of thanking formulae between British and New Zealand English,
but also highlights the genre-specific characteristics of radio phone-ins or
interviews. Thirdly, it explores comprehensively the functions of thanking
formulae and checks the status of thanking formulae against the claims
proposed by different models of politeness. Fourthly, it not only offers
quantitative data but also provides many pertinent qualitative analyses.

However, there are also some weaknesses in the present study. Firstly, the
author states that the present study examines one genre in detail (i.e., radio
phone-ins) and compares it to thanking formulae in other genres. However, it
only compares the radio phone-ins against the complete data set. It would be
insightful if the author also compares the radio phone-ins against other
genres. Secondly, a number of thanking formulae cannot be assigned to any
macro-functions analyzed in the present study: 10.43% in BNC and 20.14% in
WSC. The large proportion of ‘unclear cases’ may influence the comparisons of
other categories. As acknowledged by the author, the reasons for such problems
are manifold: incomplete transcripts of conversations, insufficient context,
doubtful assignments of speaker codes, and no access to audio files for
disambiguation (p. 140). These are not only problems in the present study, but
a general disadvantage of employing corpus linguistic data in pragmatics
research. Thirdly, when there is no statistical difference, at times it is not
very clear when the author argues that two figures are “almost equal” or when
a usage is “more frequent” in one variety than in the other. For example,
“46.94% vs. 51.85%” is analyzed as “almost equally often” (p. 95), whereas
“46.52%” is argued as “more frequent” than “42.77%” (p. 96). In addition, it
is confusing when the author states “There are comparatively more polite cases
in the New Zealand data set” (p. 189) while the data of New Zealand is 1.68%
but that of British English is 1.70%. Fourthly, it appears that coding of the
functions of thanking formulae has not been verified by a second coder to
check the inter-rater reliability. It might be helpful to to estimate
inter-rater reliability for checking the consistency and accuracy of coding.
Finally, Chapter 4 is unusually long (128 pages consisting of 44% of the whole
book). It is clear that the book presents variational analysis in Chapter 4
and genre analysis in Chapter 5. However, it might be better to present
findings in other ways to have a more balanced structure.

To sum up, despite the few weaknesses indicated above, the book makes
important contributions to the field of variational pragmatics. It adds to the
rather limited body of studies on varieties of English other than British and
American English, in this case New Zealand English. It demonstrates a way to
combine pragmatics research and corpus linguistics. In addition, it
comprehensively explores thanking formulae and verifies the models of
politeness against its findings, which makes the study unique in the field of
pragmatics research. This book is recommended for researchers and students at
the graduate level who are interested in pragmatics, sociolinguistics and
politeness theories.

REFERENCES

Barron, Anne and Schneider, Klaus P. (2009). Variational pragmatics: Studying
the impact of social factors on language use in interaction. Intercultural
Pragmatics 6(4): 425-552.

Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals
in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hofstede, Geert. (2001). Culture's consequences: International differences in
work-related values. (2nd ed.). London: SAGE.

Leech, Geoffrey. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman.

Lin, Chih-Ying, Woodfield, Helen, and Ren, Wei. (2012). Compliments in Taiwan
and mainland Chinese: The influence of region and compliment topic. Journal of
Pragmatics 44: 1486-1502.

Ren, Wei, Lin, Chih-Ying, and Woodfield, Helen. (2013). Variational pragmatics
in Chinese: Some insights from an empirical study. In Istvan Kecskes & Jesus
Romero-Trillo (Eds.), Research trends in intercultural pragmatics. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 283-314.

Schneider, Klaus P. and Barron, Anne. (2008). Variational pragmatics : A focus
on regional varieties in pluricentric languages. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.

Watts, Richard. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Wei Ren is currently a postdoc researcher at the National Key Research Center
for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics at Guangdong University of Foreign
Studies and a lecturer at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. His
research interests include L2 Pragmatics and Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. His
recent publications include papers in Applied Linguistics, Journal of
Pragmatics and Research Trends in Intercultural Pragmatics (Mouton de
Gruyter).








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