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As a sociolinguistic phenomenon that connects language and its users to the social world that surrounds them, politeness can provide insights into the very structure of social reality and the process by which it is established and maintained. And through its focus on ethical aspects of social interaction, it can expose the fundamental nature and the inner workings of morality in our everyday lives. Although a highly specific subject matter, politeness therefore touches on issues far beyond its immediate borders. In a critical state-of-the-art review of the field, this book examines the extent to which the potential impact of politeness has been explored so far. Through a metatheoretical analysis of epistemological, methodological, social and psychological ideologies prevalent in mainstream politeness theory, it offers an overview of sociolinguistic thinking about language and social reality during the past quarter of a century. Eelen's analysis of the literature reveals a coherent and consistent ideology underlying the entire field, but also shows how this ideology has caused scientific theory to miss out on many important aspects of the reality of everyday life. His examination of the relationship between science and commonsense thinking, between scientific and everyday notions of politeness, draws attention to issues which remain untouched by current theoretical models and opens up avenues of research hitherto left unexplored.
This book studies the principles for constructing polite speeches, based on the detailed study of three unrelated languages and cultures.
This handbook focuses on the interpersonal aspects of language in use, exploring key concepts such as face, im/politeness, identity, or gender, as well as mitigation, respect/deference, and humour in a variety of settings. The volume includes theoretical overviews as well as empirical studies from experts in a range of disciplines within linguistics and communication studies and provides a multifaceted perspective on both theoretical and applied approaches to the role of language in relational work.
Mouton Series in Pragmatics (MSP) is a timely response to the growing demand for innovative and authoritative monographs and edited volumes from all angles of pragmatics. Recent theoretical work on the semantics/pragmatics interface, applications of evolutionary biology to the study of language, and empirical work within cognitive and developmental psychology and intercultural communication has directed attention to issues that warrant reexamination, as well as revision of some of the central tenets and claims of the field of pragmatics. The series welcomes proposals that reflect this endeavour and exploration within the discipline and neighboring fields such as language philosophy, communication, information science, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition and cognitive science. MSP will provide a forum for authors who represent different subfields of pragmatics including the linguistic, cognitive, social, and intercultural paradigms, and have important and intriguing ideas and research findings to share with scholars who are interested in linguistics in general and pragmatics in particular.
The volume addresses the enormous imbalance that exists between academic interest in politeness phenomena when compared to impoliteness phenomena. Researchers working with Brown and Levinson's ([1978] 1987) seminal work on politeness rarely focused explicitly on impoliteness. As a result, only one aspect of facework/relational work has been studied in detail. Next to this research desideratum, politeness research is on the move again, with alternative conceptions of politeness to those of Brown and Levinson being further developed. In this volume researchers present, discuss and explore the concept of linguistic impoliteness, the crucial differences and interconnectedness between lay understandings of impoliteness and the academic concept within a theory of facework/relational work, as well as the exercise of power that is involved when impoliteness occurs. The authors offer solid discussions of the theoretical issues involved and draw on data from political interaction, interaction with legally constituted authorities, workplace interaction in the factory and the office, code-switching and Internet practices. The collection offers inspiration for research on impoliteness in many different research fields, such as (critical) discourse analysis, conversation analysis, pragmatics and stylistics, as well as linguistic approaches to studies in conflict and conflict resolution.
The second edition of this collection of 13 original papers contains an updated introductory section detailing the significance that the original articles published in 1992 have for the further development of research into linguistic politeness into the 21st century. The original articles focus on the phenomenon of politeness in language. They present the most important problems in developing a theory of linguistic politeness, which must deal with the crucial differences between lay notions of politeness in different cultures and the term 'politeness' as a concept within a theory of linguistic politeness. The universal validity of the term itself is called into question, as are models such as those developed by Brown and Levinson, Lakoff, and Leech. New approaches are suggested. In addition to this theoretical discussion, an empirical section presents a number of case studies and research projects in linguistic politeness. These show what has been achieved within current models and what still remains to be done, in particular with reference to cross-cultural studies in politeness and differences between a Western and a non-Western approach to the subject. The publication of this second edition demonstrates that the significance of the collection is just as salient in the first decade of the new millennium as it was at the beginning of the 1990s.
Essay from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Birmingham (School of English), course: Language and Communication, language: English, abstract: The notion of face as the public self-image plays a major role in every culture. It shapes the character of a speaker as well as how he or she is perceived by others. Therefore, the cross-cultural analysis of face is a crucial field of study in every social science. In this essay, the importance of face in Politeness Theory will be discussed. It aims to show the development of the concept first defined by Goffman in 1967 to the further analysis by Brown and Levinson in 1978, which is influenced by Grice's Cooperative Principle and Austin's Speech Act Theory, as well as recent criticism and re-evaluation in post-modernism. Furthermore, the two concepts of positive and negative face will be discussed, which then leads to the devision of negative and positive politeness strategies. These negative and positive face-threatening acts (FTAs) are further subdivided into acts which damage the hearer's and acts which damage the speaker's face. In the next chapter, five strategies for doing face-threatening acts are closely analysed: positive politeness, negative politeness, off-record, bald-on-record and redressive on-record acts. A fifth category – do not do a FTA – is also included in this section as not communicating may also minimise or increase the danger for doing a face-threatening act. In the last chapter of this paper, the development of Politeness Theory and face over the last twenty-five years will be critically discussed and compared to Brown and Levinson's 'traditional' theory.
LC number: 2005048400
This study investigates the interface of power and politeness in the realization of disagreements in naturalistic language data. Power and politeness are important phenomena in face-to-face interaction. Disagreement is an arena in which these two key concepts are likely to be observed together: both disagreement and the exercise of power entail a conflict, and, at the same time, conflict will often be softened by the display of politeness (defined as marked relational work). The concept of power is of special interest to the field of linguistics in that language is one of the primary means to exercise power. Often correlated with status and regarded as an influential aspect of situated speech, the workings of the exercise of power, however, have rarely been formally articulated. This study provides a theoretical framework within which to analyze the observed instances of disagreement and their co-occurrence with the exercise of power and display of politeness. In this framework, a checklist of propositions that allow us to operationalize the concept of power and identify its exercise in naturalistic linguistic data is combined with a view of language as socially constructed. A qualitative approach is used to analyze the concepts of power and politeness. The material for analysis comes from three different contexts: (1) a sociable argument in an informal, supportive and interactive family setting, (2) a business meeting among colleagues within a research institution, and (3) examples from public discourse collected during the US Election 2000.