29.1627, Review: Discourse Analysis: Kádár (2017)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-1627. Mon Apr 16 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.1627, Review: Discourse Analysis: Kádár (2017)

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Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2018 14:13:55
From: Nicolas Ruytenbeek [nruytenb at ulb.ac.be]
Subject: Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-2439.html

AUTHOR: Dániel Z.  Kádár
TITLE: Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual
SUBTITLE: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Nicolas Ruytenbeek, Université Libre de Bruxelles

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

With Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual (PIR), Dániel Kádár (DK) elaborates
an original interactional model of perceived im/politeness in ritual actions.
The book is of special interest to politeness scholars unfamiliar with ritual
theory, and to ritual specialists who want to familiarize themselves with
im/politeness-based approaches to pragmatics.

In a substantial preface, DK situates his book in the field of im/politeness
research. He shows that studying rituals from the perspective of im/politeness
is important for at least three reasons: rituals allow the capture of
im/politeness at the macro level, they maintain/restore moral orders and they
are perceived in terms of morality by the participants.

In Chapter 1, “Introduction”, DK develops a complex definition of ritual and
puts into a single framework three aspects of rituals: they are a communal
practice, have a close relationship with im/politeness, and have a moral
nature. On the basis of two anecdotes (a farewell gathering for a retiring
colleague and the ritual of passage as an academic), he dissociates
im/politeness and de/constructive ritual actions. The rituals of countering
the heckler and bystander intervention, which are the case studies of PIR, are
introduced and defined at this stage. Finally, DK provides an overview of the
data used in the other chapters, which mainly consist of recorded spoken
interactions and messages from online discussion boards.

The first part (Chapters 2 to 4) deals with the basic relationship that exists
between ritual actions and im/politeness.

In Chapter 2, “Ritual: Its definition, typology, and relational role(s)”, DK
describes the central features of ritual from an interactional perspective.
Using a new definition of rituals, he analyses their constructive (e.g.,
conveying a positive attitude, reinforcing social/group cohesion as in a
welcome party for new colleagues) and destructive (e.g., triggering negative
feelings for the recipient, as in a letter of dismissal) functions with a
simple model of im/politeness in ritual behaviour. This chapter includes a
discussion of covert and personal rituals. One example of a covert ritual is a
conversation involving an individual with obsessive-compulsive disorder, who
over-performs rituals of blessing.

The place of ritual within the field of im/politeness research is the topic of
Chapter 3, “Ritual and politeness research”. In this chapter, DK reviews
politeness approaches that are directly relevant to his purposes and, building
on recent joint work with Marina Terkourafi (Terkourafi & Kádár 2017),
addresses the interface between ritual and convention. He also provides corpus
evidence concerning the ritualization of heckling in Britain and in
Sino-British intercultural contact.

In Chapter 4, “Ritual action and (im)polite evaluation: The basic
relationship”, DK discusses fringing, a form of creative--and somewhat
effortful--behavior that helps strengthen or weaken the
destructive/constructive component of a ritual practice. He distinguishes
im/polite fringing behaviour from strategic im/politeness à la Brown &
Levinson (1987), illustrating the former with examples from workplace
dismissals (e.g., a manager being kind and helpful to the employee he has to
fire) and promotion/hiring (e.g., a HR secretary’s impoliteness in a job
offer).

In Part 2, “Ritual, (im)politeness, and moral aggression” (Chapters 5 to 7),
DK applies his model of im/politeness evaluations introduced in Part 1 to
cases of moral aggression. He focuses on the rituals of bystander intervention
and countering the heckler (heckling is a form of “public aggressive behavior”
in which a person interrupts a speaker).

Chapter 5, “Rites of moral aggression”, proposes a comparison between a
speaker countering a heckling action and a bystander responding to a situation
of abuse. The data discussed by the author is taken from video recordings of
political speeches, stand-up comedies, and sport events. DK briefly reviews
past work on these two ritual actions, stressing their shared interactional
features. The chapter ends with a discussion of social pressure to perform
these rituals so as to re-establish moral order.

Chapter 6, “Ritual, aggression, and voicing the moral order” concerns how
performers and recipients of the rituals of countering the heckler and
bystander intervention voice their perceptions of morality in these rituals. A
metapragmatic analysis of conversational interactions reveals the importance
of the (often competing) principles of altruism and politeness. This inquiry
results in a model of metapragmatic behaviour about im/politeness in rituals.

In Chapter 7, “Ritual, responsibility, and the moral order(s)”, DK addresses
the ritual performer’s individual agency in terms of moral responsibility.
Four different choices of interactional styles are proposed and illustrated
with examples from stand-up comedies. The chapter includes a summary of Part
2.

Finally, the conclusion, Chapter 8, consists in an overview of the research
covered in PIR. DK shows that the framework adopted in his book can be applied
to other interpersonal phenomena, and he outlines perspectives for further
work on im/politeness in rituals.

EVALUATION

DK perfectly achieves the goal set out in PIR. He fills a gap in the
literature by offering an original model of perceived im/politeness in
rituals, and he validates this model with corpus data. From a methodological
point of view, the book makes a balanced combination between theoretical
background and references to empirical literature. It is written in an
accessible, jargon-avoiding language. The considerable length of the
introduction and the early presentation of the full model facilitate the
reader’s gaining new information. Instead of multiplying the examples, DK uses
a limited number of them to illustrate different claims, which indicates a
true pedagogical concern. The key notions (ritual, heckling, fringing, moral
order) are explained together in the introduction. This enables
self-appropriation of the content by the reader.

A remarkable aspect of PIR is that it does not limit its scope to
im/politeness in ritual actions, but, rather, opens up new directions for
research that accord very well with current developments in experimental
pragmatics. For instance, DK makes interesting remarks concerning the
production efforts entailed by im/polite fringing and the identification of a
speaker’s noticeable effort to go beyond the expected level of politeness
(Chapter 2, p.57, “it is difficult to tell what counts as an extra ‘situated’
effort). Considerations of costs for the speaker and costs/effects for the
recipient of a message, which is central to Sperber & Wilson’s (1995)
relevance theory, is also important for processing-based models of utterance
interpretation (cf. Ruytenbeek 2017). These questions are further addressed in
the section devoted to “excess” and “creative” fringing behaviour (Chapter 4,
pp.117-122).

This book also raises further questions, calling for answers the author does
not provide. One such question concerns bystander intervention (Chapter 5,
p.158). The author proposes three ways in which bystanders may intervene in a
situation of abuse, corresponding to direct or indirect “disalignment” with
the wrongdoer and/or with the victim of the abuse (he does not use the phrase
“misalignment”). A possible type of case would involve “indirect disalignment”
with the wrongdoer and indirect disalignment with the victim(s), but the
author does not consider such a possibility. It is not made explicit either
whether such cases are not predicted to occur at all by the model, or whether
they are not discussed in PIR simply because they have not observed in the
collected data.

The author proposes insightful analyses of authentic data from different
genres and languages, which indicates the high impact potential of the book.
Two particularly convincing examples examined in some detail are a discussion
about a member’s pseudonym in an online thread (Chapter 4, pp.132-135) and an
exchange involving stand-up comedian Jamie Kennedy (Chapter 5, pp.150-151 and
Chapter 7, pp.205-207). For other examples, however, parts of the explanation
are missing and/or evidence for the claims made is not completely conclusive.
Relevant examples include the interpretation of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
data (Chapter 2, p.67), the negative vs. positive morality conveyed with the
words “qihong” and “zhiwen” in Chinese, respectively (p.106-107), the
wrongdoer’s physical superiority (Chapter 5, p.165) and the view that
bystanders tend to reconstruct their own identities in their metapragmatic
comments (p.171). In addition, while the author sometimes acknowledges the
role of prosody in his model (see, e.g., p.157 “her tone is friendly” and
p.236, footnote 5, “the prosody of the utterance seems to indicate that […]”),
he seems to take for granted the sort of emotions conveyed with prosody and
does not indicate the nature of the prosodic contours he has in mind.

PIR provides the reader with an original framework at the interface of ritual
and im/politeness studies. Even though the author is consistent in his
methodological choices, his handling of quantitative data from corpus-based
inquiries proves at times problematic. Admittedly, the scope of PIR is
primarily qualitative (as DK himself recognizes, “this research is qualitative
in scope”, p.205), but the reporting of the results is not always rigorous.
First, basic quantitative information is missing in Chapters 5 and 7. For
instance, the data presented on page 169 (Chapter 5) are difficult to
interpret (and a fortiori to be taken as evidence) due to the absence of
descriptive statistics such as arithmetic means and standard deviations. In
addition, from a methodological perspective, it is unclear whether the total
duration of the conversational exchanges has been controlled for and, if so,
how this should affect the results reported on page 169. Second, DK mistakenly
calls his measures of camera focus durations an “experiment”. In the absence
of statistical analysis of these durations, and in view of the fact that,
strictly speaking, DK did not manipulate a variable of interest, one cannot
conclude that the reported information supports his “model of the
participants’ anticipatory expectations”. Third, the captions of the tables in
Chapter 3 involve some interpretation of the data instead of describing them
with accuracy (p.97, p.102).

Furthermore, the reader may have concerns with forward and backward
references, as in the case of example (2.5) that is given on page 57 but also
referred to on page 110, and Figure (1.4) from page 23 (referred to but not
repeated on page 149). Such effortful back-and-forth switching occurs several
times and it is likely to cause interruptions in the reading process. One will
also notice a few inaccuracies, as in the French example containing spelling
mistakes (Chapter 2, p.56): “je na serai”, read “je NE serai”; “en joingnant”,
read “en JOIGNANT”. Moreover, the fact that the pronoun “te” is singular
should be mentioned. The dialogue entitled “Lesbian parents verbally abused”
(Chapter 5, p.158-159) contains inconsistent references to the waitress (W),
who is the same person as the server (S).

Concerning the availability of the data covered in PIR, one will perhaps
regret that only for some “famous” examples the recordings can be directly
accessed by visiting the Youtube website using the individual links indicated
in the book. To be sure, the video recordings of rituals performed in the
context of the US hidden camera show What Would You Do? will be of interest to
many researchers concerned with im/politeness in interaction.

Summing up, PIR presents the results of a very interesting, interdisciplinary
work and a stimulating framework. As a pioneering monograph that opens new
research avenues, I warmly recommend it to any linguist interested in
im/politeness questions.

REFERENCES

Brown, Penelope & Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in
language usage. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ruytenbeek, Nicolas. 2017. “The comprehension of indirect requests: Previous
work and future directions”. In Depraetere, Ilse & Raf Salkie (Eds.),
Semantics and pragmatics: Drawing a line. Amsterdam: Springer, 293-322.

Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and cognition,
2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Terkourafi, Marina & Dániel Kádár. 2017. Convention and Ritual (Im)politeness.
In Culpeper, Jonathan, Michael Haugh & Dániel Kádár (Eds), The Palgrave
handbook of linguistic (im)politeness. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 171-195.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Nicolas Ruytenbeek completed a PhD in Linguistics at the Université libre de
Bruxelles (2017). In his doctoral dissertation, he addresses the mechanics of
indirect directive speech acts, both from a theoretical and experimental
perspective. His main research interests are linguistic approaches to
politeness, speech act comprehension and production and, more generally,
issues bearing on the semantics/pragmatics interface.





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