26.541, Review: Applied Ling; Lang Acq; Pragmatics; Socioling: Savić (2014)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-541. Mon Jan 26 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.541, Review: Applied Ling; Lang Acq; Pragmatics; Socioling: Savić (2014)

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Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 15:15:35
From: Leila Khabbazi-Oskouei [leilakhabbazi_o at yahoo.co.uk]
Subject: Politeness through the Prism of Requests, Apologies and Refusals

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-2262.html

AUTHOR: Milica  Savić
TITLE: Politeness through the Prism of Requests, Apologies and Refusals
SUBTITLE: A Case of Advanced Serbian EFL Learners
PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Leila Khabbazi-Oskouei, University of East Anglia

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The book “Politeness through the Prism of Requests, Apologies and Refusals: a
Case of Advanced Serbian EFL Learners” by Milica Savić is based on the
author’s PhD thesis. The aim of the study is to examine advanced Serbian EFL
learners’ pragmalinguistic awareness by exploring their perception and
production of the three speech acts of requests, apologies and refusals by
focusing on the participants’ pragmatic comprehension, sociopragmatic
knowledge, metapragmatic awareness and their use of intonation in realizing
speech acts. Savić emphasizes the necessity of learning L2 pragmatics for
students majoring in English and studying to be language professionals. In
this volume, Savić explores the linguistic means that future teachers have at
their disposal to cope with different social situations and their awareness of
the various contextual factors that influence language use.

The book consists of seven chapters. In the first chapter, “Introduction”, the
author lays out the purpose and structure of the book. Savić cites the aim of
the book as to examine several aspects of advanced Serbian EFL learners’
pragmatic competence in order to highlight specific challenging areas that
need to be addressed more adequately in university-level instruction. 

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the major Anglo-Saxon politeness theories,
including the traditional as well as the postmodern discursive approaches. The
author first discusses the traditional theories of Lakoff’s (1973) Politeness
Rule, Leech’s (1983, 2005) Politeness Principle, Brown and Levinson’s (1978)
Universal Model of Politeness, Fraser and Nolen’s (1981) Conversational
Contract, Janney and Arndt’s (1992/2005) Interpersonal Supportiveness and
Spencer-Oatey’s (2000, 2008) Rapport Management. Eelen’s (2001) criticism of
these theories is then presented. In sum, Eelen argues that these theories are
biased towards one end of the politeness-impoliteness, speaker-hearer and
production-perception continua and suggests that an evaluation-centred model
would solve the problems. Eelen’s critical review of the politeness theories
has been a starting point for some postmodern approaches. Watt’s (2003)
Politic Behaviour is one of the postmodern theories that uses a new discursive
approach to politeness.  Savić believes that although postmodern theories
challenge all the tenets of the traditional theories, they still need to be
elaborated in order to provide a solid support for politeness research.

Chapter 3 focuses on the three speech acts of requests, apologies and
refusals. First, a brief overview of early research on speech acts is
presented. Then, a preview of the general characteristics and the most
commonly used classification systems of requests, apologies and refusals is
presented with a focus on EFL learners and English native speaker speech act
perception. Towards the end of the chapter, intonation and its interface with
pragmatics in L2 speech acts are addressed. In this regard, the
Autosegmental-metrical (AM) approach which the author employs as the
theoretical model for studying intonation in the study is discussed.  

In Chapter 4, the methodology of the study is set out.  Savić uses a “mixed
method” approach, employing both qualitative and quantitative procedures in
order to address several aspects of Serbian EFL learners’ pragmatic
competence. She uses two frameworks for the study: Brown and Levinson’s
politeness theory for the quantitative part of the study and constructivism
for the qualitative part. The quantitative part of the study is carried out
employing a contextual rating questionnaire accompanied by a listening task
and the oral discourse completion task (DCT) or closed role-play. The
qualitative component is carried out employing the semistructured interview
format, or the general interview guide approach, and the verbal protocol. The
participants in this study include 10 native speakers of American English
(NS), 15 advanced Serbian EFL learners and 118 Year 3 and 4 students at the
English Department, University of Niš.    

The results of the research are presented in Chapter 5.  The chapter opens
with the speech act production data: the choice of the speech act, the
language strategies and the influence of the P (social power) and D (social
distance) variables on language strategy choice for each of the three speech
acts. Following is a summary of the findings:

Requests:
There are points of similarity and difference between learner and NS requests.
NS and learners opted for the same repertoire of request strategies except for
the two Supportive moves of Imposition minimizer (e.g. Would you give me a
lift, but only if you’re going my way?) and Getting a precommitment (e.g.
Could you do me a favour?) which were used only by the learners. There were
also significant differences in the frequency of use of Head act subtype (e.g.
I’d like to borrow your notes), Syntactic modification (e.g. Might be better
if you were to leave now) and Lexical/phrasal downgraders (e.g. I’m afraid
you’re going to have to move your car). 

Apologies:
Both groups of NS and learners used the same range of ‘major’ apology
strategies and there were few differences in the frequency of their use.
However, the learners used the following less commonly employed strategies
more frequently: Denial of responsibility (e.g. It wasn’t my fault), ‘Please’
in IFIDs (Illocutionary force indicating device), Humour (e.g. If you think
that’s a mistake, you ought to see our fried chicken!) and Offer of repair
(e.g. I’ll pay for the damage). 

Refusals:
The researcher finds refusals to be a source of considerable difficulties on
the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic levels. The occurrence of refusals in
–P scenarios in the NS data was significantly higher than in the learners’
responses. Savić relates this to the sociopragmatic difference between the
American and Serbian perceptions of friendship. The researcher also finds out
that NS use the negative form of the modal ‘can’ (a more mitigated form of
refusal) in –P –D scenarios, but in the learners’ group the Direct refusal
form did not seem to be influenced by contextual variables. She maintains that
many of the utterances of the learners were pragmatically inappropriate in
terms of form or content or both.  

The second part of Chapter 5 addresses the issue of intonation in the NS’s and
learners’ speech acts. NS’s and learners’ use of the three intonational
features of pitch range, pitch accent tone choice and boundary tone choice is
examined. The learners’ pitch range in requests was found to be narrower than
the NSs’ in whole turns, Head acts and two Head act substrategies. In the case
of apologies, the learners’ performance with respect to the pitch range, pitch
mean, pitch accent tone and boundary tone choice in IFILs was similar to the
NS. As for refusals, the researcher finds the amount of data insufficient to
reach a definite conclusion.  

Towards the end of the chapter the results of the perception part of the study
which focuses on advanced Serbian EFL learners’ metapragmatic assessment is
presented. It examines their ability to assess the P and D contextual
variables in the three speech acts, based on the linguistic form of the speech
acts. It also looks at the linguistic devices the participants considered
relevant when drawing inferences about the context. 

Chapter 6 focuses on the analysis and discussion of the data. In this chapter
each research question is discussed followed by a comparison of the present
study with the results of the previous studies. The research questions are
grouped into two categories: speech act production and speech act perception.
The production data are discussed in relation to the learners’ choice of
speech acts, the language strategies used by the NSs and learners, and the
influence of the P and D contextual variables on the choice of strategies.
Some aspects of the learners’ intonation-pitch range, pitch mean, pitch accent
and boundary tone choice are analyzed and compared in both groups. The
perception part of the research focuses on the ability to assess the P and D
contextual variables based on the linguistic form of the message, as well as
on the linguistic cues they relied on in the metapragmatic assessment task.  

Chapter 7 includes the conclusion, pedagogical implications and limitations of
the study. 

EVALUATION

The volume provides a very comprehensive preview of the research carried out
on (im)politeness and speech acts. In this regard, both traditional and
postmodern approaches to (im)politeness, including their strengths and
drawbacks, are fully discussed. However, the need for  more examples is
apparent in  Chapter 2.  The literature review on speech acts also provides an
excellent summary of the general characteristics and classification systems of
requests, apologies and refusals. Both of these discussions can be very
informative for postgraduates and researchers interested in this area. 

The book could be of interest to researchers, English language teachers and
teacher trainers involved in the field of interlanguage pragmatics. The
results of the research can particularly be of interest to teachers of English
who teach to Slavic-speaking learners. 

One of the interesting points regarding this volume is the researcher’s
attempt to explore learners’ use of intonation in speech acts, an aspect which
is rarely looked into in interlanguage pragmatics studies. Although the writer
does not claim to have conducted a thorough examination of prosody, she points
out the significance of prosodic features as aspects of the speech acts
affected by contextual features.   

REFERENCES

Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. 1987. Politeness. Some universals in language
usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1978)

Eelen, G. 2001. A Critique of politeness theories. Manchester, Northampton MA:
St. Jerome Publishing.

Fraser, B. and Nolen, W. 1981. “The Association of deference with linguistic
form”. International journal of the Sociology of language 27: 93-111.

Janney, R. and Arndt, H. 2005. “Intracultural tact versus intercultural tact”.
In Politeness in language: Studies in its history, theory and practice.
(Second revised and expanded edition), edited by R. Watts, S. Ide and K.
Ehlich, 21-41. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. (Original book
published 1992)

Lakoff, R. 1973. “The logic of politeness; Or, minding your P’s and Q’s”. In
Papers from the ninth regional meeting of the Chicago linguistic society,
edited by C. Corum, T. C. Smith-Stark, A. Weiser. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic
Society.

Leech, G. 1983. Explorations in semantics and pragmatics. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
Leech, G. 2005. “Politeness: Is there an East-West divide?” Language learning
39(3): 397-413.

Spencer-Oatey, H. 2008. “Face, (im)politeness and Rapport”. In culturally
speaking: Culture, communication and politeness theory (Second edition),
edited by H. Spencer-Oatey, 11-47. London, New York: Continuum. (Original work
published 2000)


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I finished my PhD in language and linguistics at the University of East
Anglia/UK. The title of my thesis is 'Interactional Variation in English and
Persian: A Comparative Analysis of Metadsicourse Features in Magazine
Editorials'. It focuses on comparing and contrasting the use of interactional
devices in English and Persian, and discussing the similarities and
differences in the light of the cultural expectations and political settings
in some British and Iranian news magazine editorials. My first thesis-driven
paper ‘Propositional or Non-propositional, That is the Question: A New
Approach to Analyzing Interpersonal Metadiscourse in Editorials’ was published
in the Journal of Pragmatics in 2013. I am interested in the following subject
areas: intercultural pragmatics, the expression of interactional metadiscourse
in the media, particularly the press, patterns of cross-cultural variation in
British and Iranian discourse.








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