32.1348, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Ogiermann, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2019)
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Subject: 32.1348, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Ogiermann, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2019)
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Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2021 21:19:27
From: Nicolas Ruytenbeek [nicolasruytenbeek at gmail.com]
Subject: From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-1886.html
EDITOR: Eva Ogiermann
EDITOR: Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
TITLE: From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness
SUBTITLE: Multilingual and Multicultural Perspectives
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2019
REVIEWER: Nicolas Ruytenbeek, Ghent University
SUMMARY
In the introductory chapter of “From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of
Politeness” (FSALUP), “Im/politeness between the analyst and participant
perspective: An overview of the field”, Eva Ogiermann and Pilar Garcés-Conejos
Blitvich, the book editors, propose a brief historical overview of politeness
research, with a focus on the third wave characterized by the development of
metapragmatic approaches and the shift towards lay people’s conceptualizations
of politeness phenomena. The individual contributions in the chapters that
constitute the second part of the volume clearly illustrate the third-wave
perspective, insofar as they all discuss metapragmatic aspects of
(im)politeness-related notions. In the first part of the volume, the
contributions also display an interest in third-wave approaches, and they
address different types of speech acts (SAs), either as individual units, as
“speech act sets”, or as part of larger sequences of speech.
This introduction includes summaries of each chapter, with information about
the theoretical framework or type of approach taken, the SA or lay concept
explored, the method used for data collection, and the language investigated.
The overall aim of the FSALUP, which the editors dedicate to Maria Sifianou,
is to reflect the latter’s diverse and ground-breaking contribution to
politeness research and, specifically, her impact on the development of
multicultural approaches. The editors also hope to consolidate and advance the
research avenues in the footsteps of Sifianou’s work. The volume ends with an
epilogue, in which Peter Trudgill recalls his personal experience with
politeness research through his exchanges with Maria Sifianou’s.
In Chapter 1, “Offers in Greek revisited”, Spyridoula Bella follows up on
Sifianou’s (1992) work on the SA of offer in Greek. Offers pose a threat to
the negative face of the speaker, who is committed towards a certain course of
action that will benefit the addressee, whose positive face is thus
stimulated. Assuming a Brown & Levinsonian framework, Bella addresses the role
of the situational context of the form of Greek offers. She manipulates, in
open role plays, relative power and distance. A key result is that impositives
(e.g., imperatives, stating a future action of the speaker/addressee) are
preferred in symmetrical relationships (low and equal power, low distance) and
conventional indirectness in asymmetrical ones (asymmetric power, high
distance). The verbal reports collected by Bella indicate that insistence is
frequent in symmetrical situations, and it is not perceived as
face-threatening, which challenges Brown & Levinson’s (1987) theory. Rather,
insisting in making an offer displays concern for the interlocutor’s needs and
it reinforces intimacy.
The second Chapter, “Politeness, Praising, and Identity Construction in a
Greek Food Blog”, written by Angeliki Tzanne, deals with the co-construction
of face and identity on a cooking blog, “Recipes from/for a group of friends”
(RFGF). Tzanne administered a questionnaire to young adult informants to probe
into the concept of a “group of friends”, and finds that the two most
important features are liking each other and enjoying one’s company. Using a
data set of 137 recipes for a total of 1746 comments, she confirms the
tendency for Greek people to orient towards positive face. In particular, she
shows that users employ positive politeness strategies to construct their
identity as in-group members. More than 86% of the comments include praise for
the recipe/writer, and 38% of them refer to the common ground of the blog
users, e.g., “I’ve been doing the same recipe for years”. Other positive
politeness strategies include exaggeration (e.g., “Its flavour is out of this
world!!!”), thanking, and congratulations.
In Chapter 3, “Online Compliments of Iranian Facebook Users”, Zohreh R.
Eslami, Nasser Jabbari, and Li-Jen Kuo focus on the realization of compliments
and the use of linguistic modification in Persian in a dataset comprising more
than 4000 compliments about the appearance-related profile pictures of 44
Facebook users. They show that almost 90% of the comments give rise to
“likes”, a positive politeness strategy enabled by Facebook’s functional
content affordances. Only a minority of the comments are verbal (7%), either
explicit (e.g., “What a beauty you are”) or implicit (e.g., comparing a male
user to Johnny Depp), and the remaining 3% are mixed, combining verbal
compliments with emoticons. Concerning linguistic modifiers, they are found in
93% of all comments, mainly as intensifiers and exaggeration. The authors
suggest that “likes” could actually be considered as implicit compliments,
because it is not always clear what is “liked”. In these data, explicit
formulaic realizations are outnumbered by implicit and more creative
compliments; the data also reveal the multimodal nature of implicit
compliments, which were quasi-systematically combined with emoticons.
Chapter 4, by María Elena Placencia, is entitled “Qué perfección :-O:
Complimenting Behavior among Ecuadorian Teenage Girls on Instagram”. She
explores the rapport-enhancement function of compliments (Spencer-Oatey 2008)
by focusing on self-images posted on Instagram. Her data comprise comments by
one user and her circle of close friends, complemented by an interview with
some informants to clarify the interpretation of a few comments. The results
show that more than 80% of all comments are compliments, with a small number
of comments expressing emotions, requesting some action from the user, or
requesting information about a picture. Verbal compliments include
conventional expressions, e.g., “Que guapa!”, and non-conventional ones, e.g.,
the ironic “U r pretty ugly”. The general pattern that emerges is a
combination of brevity and creativity best exemplified in the use of hashtags.
In Chapter 5, “Not All Positive: On the Landscape of Thanking Items in Cypriot
Greek”, Spyros Armostis and Marina Terkourafi address the interplay between
standard modern Greek, Cypriot Greek, and English in thanking strategies in
Cypriot Greek. In particular, they investigate the role of the phonetic
realization of two thanking items (rising pitch and the elision of
consonants), speaker gender, and the degree of imposition, on the perception
of these thanking items as genuine instances of thanking or as mere discourse
markers. Using audio-recorded descriptions of thanking speech events combined
with a pictorial representation of a situation with low vs. high imposition,
Armostis and Terkourafi asked their participants to associate thanking
utterances with the imposition condition that it best matches. The results of
their first experiment reveal no effect of the phonetic manipulation, but a
main effect of intonation: rising pitch is more often associated with the
discourse marker interpretation and it is a more reliable cue for interpreting
female speakers’ utterances. Discourse marker interpretations are also more
frequently associated with male speakers. In their second study, a language
attitude experiment in which participants had to evaluate speakers according
to several dimensions, they find that, in low imposition contexts, both
expressions are positively evaluated. However, in high imposition contexts,
the Greek counterpart of “thank you” can be perceived negatively, while it is
the low imposition that makes other thanking items less appropriate. All in
all, these results indicate that the role of intonation in politeness
assessments is highly context dependent.
In Chapter 6, “Researching Im/politeness in Face-to-Face Interactions: On
Disagreements in Polish Homes”, Eva Ogiermann analyses video recordings of
family interactions. With these recordings, she emphasizes the multimodality
of the data, including prosodic features and gestures, which she complements
by interviews with some of the informants to validate her interpretation of
the findings. In the context of everyday conversations, disagreements need not
be perceived negatively; rather, they can be considered as a form of
sociability with the aim of solving problems in cooperative behaviour. The
results of Ogiermann’s analysis indicate that, while participants’ actions are
guided by concerns for the family, individual face needs also play a key role
in their reactions to disagreements. Contrary to expectations, disagreements
generally give rise to negative emotions, and there is no evidence that they
have a face management function in this corpus.
Chapter 7, “Notions of Politeness in Britain and North America”, written by
Jonathan Culpeper, Jim O’Driscoll, and Claire Hardaker, offers a comparative
analysis of British and North American people’s understandings of politeness.
Despite the prevalence of stereotypes about the British culture and
(im)politeness, few studies have directly explored lay people’s metalanguage
of politeness in English speaking communities. To overcome this knowledge gap,
the authors examine the Oxford English Corpus, in which they identify
different clusters of collocations associated with “polite” in the UK vs. the
US. For instance, “respectful” is more strongly related to positive emotions
in the US, while in the UK it connotates well-mannered behaviour. The authors
also collected 36 hours of live stream on Twitter, resulting in a corpus of
1.400.000 tweets, of which they selected the messages containing
politeness-related terms classified in five groups: involvement (e.g.,
“amiable”), non-imposition, (e.g., “considerate”), social standing (e.g.,
“mannerly”), deference (e.g., “respectful”), and historical (e.g.,
“courteous”). While keywords about (non-)imposition, social standing, and,
somewhat surprisingly, involvement, were more frequent in the UK tweets, in
the US tweets more references were made to deference-related words. The
interpretation of these results, however, is complex because some of these
positive terms are used in sarcastic comments.
In Chapter 8, “The Metapragmatics of Consideration in (Australian and New
Zealand) English”, Michael Haugh addresses the politeness metalanguage as a
semantic field with a focus on consideration, which is a relatively innovative
approach. To do this, he uses corpus-based techniques. First, he investigates
the collocational profiles of the words bearing a high degree of similarity
with “considerate”. This search reveals four clusters: respectful, attentive,
open-minded, and accommodating. Then he considers locally situated
understandings of the notion of “consideration”, showing that the informants’
references to consideration vary in their degree of granularity. Another
finding is that (non)imposition and (non)attentiveness are two key meanings
that play a role in people’s understandings of “considerate”. Finally, the
Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE) (Davies 2015) enables him to
compare the use of (in)considerate by Australian and New-Zealand speakers of
English. The findings point to cross-varietal differences, with “considerate”
being more frequent in the Australian data, where criticisms are also more
oriented towards others in interpersonal (vs. public) spaces.
In Chapter 9, “A Metapragmatic Aspect of Politeness: With a Special Emphasis
on Attentiveness in Japanese”, Saeko Fukushima investigates attentiveness
(“kikubari”) and its relationship with the notions of consideration, empathy,
altruism, and helping behaviour in Japanese. Attentiveness is best illustrated
in responses to off-record indirect requests such as “Are you going to the
university tomorrow?” followed by the offer “Yes. What time shall I pick you
up?”. Using questionnaires administered to university students and data from
focus groups, Fukushima’s analysis highlights similarities and divergences
between the politeness-related notions. For instance, consideration and
empathy are the notions most closely connected with attentiveness, and, unlike
“consideration”, “attentiveness” suggests the performance of a voluntary
rather than obligatory action.
Chapter 10, “Discussions on Swiss and German Politeness in Online Sources”, by
Miriam A. Locher and Martin Luginbühl, deals with the status of dialects of
the German language as they are perceived in Switzerland and Germany. This
chapter assumes that national ideologies about (im)politeness are part of
cultural and societal norms, and specifies the status of the dialectal
variants of German in Switzerland, where they are more positively evaluated
than in Germany. The authors analyse online comments elicited by “trigger
texts” and coded in terms of politeness-related categories. Some comments, for
example, focus on the absence of politeness markers (“please”, “thank you”)
and on the level of modification required in SA expressions, such as “I get +
noun phrase” to make orders in service encounters. Other emic discussions
concern differences in language skills and in mentalities among the two
communities. Taken together, the data presented by Locher and Luginbühl
indicate that lay people’s discussions about politeness can enact, and even
reinforce, local cultural identities, while revealing processes of
homogenisation and generalisation.
In Chapter 11, entitled “Globalisation and Politeness: A Chinese Perspective”,
Dániel Kádár and Yongping Ran are interested in the influence of
globalisation, conceived of as a large-scale appropriation process, on
politeness metadiscourse in China. They show, on the basis of Chinese informal
news articles and blogs, that, even though “globalisation” and “politeness”
occur in different contexts, “globalisation” has been associated with a
growing concern for polite behaviour, reflected by the development of manuals
of etiquette in China after the Cultural Revolution. Another interesting
finding is the confirmation that, unlike in Western cultures where it is
negatively connotated, globalisation as internationalisation is viewed as a
positive phenomenon in the Chinese culture.
In the final chapter of FSALUP, Chapter 12 “Emic Conceptualization of Face
(Imagen) in Peninsular Spanish”, Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Patricia
Bou-Franch aim at disentangling face and (im)politeness in exploring the
co-constitution of face and identity and the emic foundations of face. They
ask whether the meanings lay people associate with “imagen” in Spanish relate
to the etic definitions of the notions of “imagen” and “identity”. To reach
these objectives, the authors present an analysis of “imagen” in dictionaries
and newspapers complemented with a corpus-based study of the keyword “gender
violence” in the GEN-TEXT corpus (University of Valencia) and focus group
discussions in which informants share their personal experiences with the
notion of “imagen”. The main finding for the lexicographic study is the
non-equivalence between imagen1 and face1 in Peninsular Spanish in
dictionaries, which demonstrates the need to triangulate these findings with
data collected using other methodologies. Concerning the collocations of
“imagen” in GEN-TEXT, none of the collocations of “imagen” can be translated
into second order face. In addition, focus group interactions reveal that
“imagen” goes beyond physical appearance, referring both to face and identity
(e.g., the public image of a politician and their ideological position,
respectively).
EVALUATION
One of the goals of FSALUP was to give more attention to lay people’s
understandings of politeness phenomena in examining how they are expressed at
the metapragmatics level. This volume can be considered as a milestone,
acknowledging a growing interest emerging with the third wave of politeness
research, where scholars’ analyses combine with participants’ assessments of
what is (im)polite. According to this change in mentality, polite and impolite
no longer refer to decontextualized linguistic expressions, but, rather, they
reflect how different people perceive utterance acts in locally situated
interactions. Another interesting element of the volume is that it
acknowledges the connection between polite and impolite behavior and positive
vs. negative emotions, especially in Ogiermann’s Chapter 6, which points to
the importance of combining subjective judgments about (im)politeness and
objective measures about how (im)polite utterances make one feel. This view is
well in line with recent experimental studies that resort to
psychophysiological tools to investigate the processing of, for example,
swearing and taboo words (Raizen et al. 2015).
While most chapters either address SA realization or the metapragmatic of
politeness and face-related concepts, none of them actually explores the
metalanguage of SAs. Two or three chapters on this topic would have reinforced
the unity of the volume, connecting the two axes of research proposed with
experimental pragmatic approaches to SA recognition (e.g., Holtgraves 2008).
It is somewhat unfortunate that, with the exceptions of Chinese (Chapter 11),
Japanese (Chapter 9) and Persian (Chapter 3), the languages investigated in
FSALUP consist in a selection of European languages such as English (Chapters
7 and 8), Spanish (Chapters 4 and 12), German (Chapter 10), Polish (Chapter 6)
and Greek (Chapters 1, 2, and 5). Despite their scientific relevance, European
languages are not representative of the variety of politeness strategies and
metapragmatic discussions taking place all over the world, as they reflect a
Western point of view on face-threat and language. Of course, the sort of
analyses proposed in these individual contributions could equally be applied
to less well described languages. I also believe it was a sound decision of
the editors to devote three chapters to the Greek language, as this makes the
connection with Sifianou’s work explicit.
Despite these few minor shortcomings, FSALUP stands out as a sample of
pioneering research at the interface of politeness research and the pragmatics
of speech actions. Even if this volume does not constitute a radical departure
from previous work on (im)politeness, it complements and goes beyond past
studies, as it gives more attention than has been done before to emic
understandings of politeness and does justice to the metalanguage used by lay
people, and not only by specialists. It contains corpus-based research,
experimental studies, and verbal report analyses taking into account
informants’ impressions to achieve a rich picture of politeness phenomena, a
good illustration of method triangulation. Moreover, it invites follow-up
research on cross-cultural SA strategies with relation to the social
variables, and comparisons between the lay concepts of (im)politeness and SAs
in different cultures-languages.
Summing up, “From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness” is a
completely coherent volume that provides new insights into SA realization and
the metapragmatics of face-threat and (im)politeness. Adopting a
cross-cultural and cross-varietal perspective, it will appeal to politeness
scholars, of course, but also to researchers interested in empirical and
corpus-based pragmatics and willing to privilege data triangulation in their
investigations.
REFERENCES
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in
Language Usage. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Davies 2015. Introducing the 1.9 billion word Global Web-based English Corpus
(GloWbE). 21st Century Text 5. Available at
https://21centurytext.wordpress.com/.
Holtgraves, Thomas R. 2008. Automatic Intention Recognition in Conversation
Processing. Journal of Memory and Language 58 (3): 627-645.
Raizen, Adina, Nikos Vergis, and Kiel Christianson. 2015. Using eye-tracking
to examine the reading of texts containing taboo words. In Interdisciplinary
Perspectives on Im/politeness, edited by Marina Terkourafi and Staci Defibaugh
(pp. 213-238). John Benjamins.
Sifianou, Maria. 1992. Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece: A
Cross-Cultural Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen. 2008. Face, (im)politeness and rapport. In Culturally
Speaking. Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory, edited by Helen
Spencer-Oatey (pp. 11-47). London: Continuum.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Nicolas Ruytenbeek is Postdoctoral researcher in Linguistics at the Department
for Translation, Interpreting and Communication at Ghent University. He is a
member of the research group MULTIPLES – Research Centre for Multilingual
Practices and Language Learning in Society. His main research interests are
experimental approaches to politeness, speech act comprehension and production
and, more generally, issues bearing on the semantics/pragmatics interface.
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