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Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Rostock (Institut f r Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Contrastive Linguistics - German and English, 18 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Social interaction, especially in the form of verbal communication, constitutes one of the most important parts of human life by influencing conversations between individuals and shaping their interpersonal relationships. During the development of civilized societies people have established norms and values describing socially appropriate behaviour as well as specific conversational strategies and linguistic formulae which are generally considered to be 'polite' in a particular culture and context. When being asked to judge a person as 'polite' almost everyone has his own concept of politeness in mind, ranging from showing good manners, such as allowing women to go ahead, to politely asking other people for a favour such as lending lecture notes, by using specific linguistic formulae. Therefore, politeness cannot only be shown in people's way of behaviour towards each other but particularly in the use of language and specific linguistic devices in speech acts like requests, refusals, apologies, thanking as well as greeting and parting. On the basis of a general understanding of polite behaviour people consider their fellow-beings as being either well-behaved and respectful or rude and ill-mannered in social interactions. However, people do not assess other people's behaviour in the same way since their individual understanding of politeness varies quite considerably. Depending on factors like the situation and their relationship with the conversational partner people evaluate polite behaviour differently from being socially appropriate, considerate, and respectful to even hypocritical and insincere when they feel that some people overdo their friendliness.
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Rostock (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Contrastive Linguistics - German and English, 18 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Social interaction, especially in the form of verbal communication, constitutes one of the most important parts of human life by influencing conversations between individuals and shaping their interpersonal relationships. During the development of civilized societies people have established norms and values describing socially appropriate behaviour as well as specific conversational strategies and linguistic formulae which are generally considered to be ‘polite’ in a particular culture and context. When being asked to judge a person as ‘polite’ almost everyone has his own concept of politeness in mind, ranging from showing good manners, such as allowing women to go ahead, to politely asking other people for a favour such as lending lecture notes, by using specific linguistic formulae. Therefore, politeness cannot only be shown in people’s way of behaviour towards each other but particularly in the use of language and specific linguistic devices in speech acts like requests, refusals, apologies, thanking as well as greeting and parting. On the basis of a general understanding of polite behaviour people consider their fellow-beings as being either well-behaved and respectful or rude and ill-mannered in social interactions. However, people do not assess other people’s behaviour in the same way since their individual understanding of politeness varies quite considerably. Depending on factors like the situation and their relationship with the conversational partner people evaluate polite behaviour differently from being socially appropriate, considerate, and respectful to even hypocritical and insincere when they feel that some people overdo their friendliness.
Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1.7 (A-), University of Bayreuth (UB Bayreuth), course: Contrastive Linguistics, language: English, abstract: Almo st all linguistic research views politeness as a universal feature of civilized societies, regardless of their background culture, or their language. Politeness is thus seen as an important social or ‘urbane’ value, inherent to successful communication, although its realization may vary across the different speech communities. Politeness offers a good way of emotional control of the individual (House and Kasper, 1981: 158), and is typically means of preserving and maintaining good social relationship between the speakers of one or more cultures. Polite behaviour generally protects the individual, as well as their addressee, and often becomes subject matter of self- help books on etiquette, especially in cases when people belong to a specific hierarchy (roya l court, business company etc). The verbal realization of politeness poses even greater problems when the interlocutors belong to different cultures and try to communicate, transferring their pragmatic knowledge of polite behaviour into the foreign langua ge. Lack of practice and the learners’ concern with rendering correctly the foreign language’s grammatical structures in the first place often lead to misunderstandings, or the so-called ‘socio-pragmatic failures’ (Thomas, 1983)- ‘ errors resulting from no n- native speakers not knowing what to say or not saying the appropriate things as a result of transferring incongruent social rules, values and belief systems from their native languages and cultures’. These types of errors are likely to cause a downright insult for both the non- native and the native speakers of a certain language, the native speakers misunderstanding and misinterpreting the intentions of the non- native speaker, and the nonnative speakers being over-sensitive to ‘distinctions of grammatical form’ (Brown and Levinson 1996: 35), in a way the native speakers are not. In any case, being polite is essential to maintaining healthy social relations within a specific culture, and even more so, for the communication across cultures. Cross-cultural communication offers a wide field for research, as the socio-pragmatic failure of one speaker of a certain community tends to be stereotyped for the whole community (Knapp-Potthoff 1992: 203), consequently labeling a nation as rude, over-polite, insincere etc. [...]
The first well-researched contrastive pragmatic analysis of requests and apologies in British English and Uruguayan Spanish. It takes the form of a cross-cultural corpus-based analysis using male and female native speakers of each language and systematically alternating the same social variables in both cultures. The data are elicited from a non-prescriptive open role-play yielding requests and apologies. The analysis of the speech acts is based on an adaptation of the categorical scheme developed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). The results show that speakers of English and Spanish differ in their choice of (in)directness levels, head-act modifications, and the politeness types of males and females in both cultures. Reference to an extensive bibliography and the thorough discussion of methodological issues concerning speech act studies deserve the attention of students of pragmatics as well as readers interested in cultural matters.
This book explores the issue of politeness phenomena and socially appropriate behavior in two societies, Mexico and the United States, in three different contexts: refusing invitations, requests, and suggestions. In addition to a state-of-the-art review of the speech act of refusals in numerous languages, the book provides a rigorous analysis of data collection methods utilized to examine speech act behavior at the production and perception levels. Many examples of native speaker interactions illustrate the similarities and differences observed in the realization patterns and the perception of refusals by Mexicans and Americans in formal and informal situations. The data are analyzed in terms of refusal sequences and pragmatic strategies which are strategically used to carry out relational work during the negotiation of face. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses are interpreted in light of the notions of face, politeness, and relational work in Mexico and the United States. This publication will be of interest to researchers and students in pragmatics and discourse analysis, cross-cultural communication, and sociology.
This book presents a number of solutions to the problems of studying variability in second language acquisition. It makes important contributions to methodological and theoretical issues in SLA, as well as to the role of these issues in general linguistics.
We have recently seen a broadening of pragmatics to new areas and to the study of more than one language. This is illustrated by the present volume on Contrastive Pragmatics which brings together a number of articles originally presented at the 10th International Pragmatics Conference in Göteborg in 2007. The contributions deal with pragmatic phenomena such as speech acts, discourse markers and modality in different language pairs using theoretical approaches such as politeness theory, Conversation Analysis, Appraisal Theory, grammaticalization and cultural textology. Also discourse practices and genres may differ across cultures as illustrated by the study of TV news shows in different countries. Contrastive pragmatics also includes the comparative study of pragmatic phenomena from a foreign language perspective, a new area with implications for language teaching and intercultural communication. The contributions to this volume were originally published in Languages in Contrast 9:1 (2009).
This book investigates how speakers of English, Polish and Russian deal with offensive situations. It reveals culture-specific perceptions of what counts as an apology and what constitutes politeness. It offers a critical discussion of Brown and Levinson's theory and provides counterevidence to the correlation between indirectness and politeness underlying their theory. Their theory is applied to two languages that rely less heavily on indirectness in conveying politeness than does English, and to a speech act that does not become more polite through indirectness. An analysis of the face considerations involved in apologising shows that in contrast to disarming apologies, remedial apologies are mainly directed towards positive face needs, which are crucial for the restoration of social equilibrium and maintenance of relationships. The data show that while English apologies are characterised by a relatively strong focus on both interlocutors negative face, Polish apologies display a particular concern for positive face. For Russian speakers, in contrast, apologies seem to involve a lower degree of face threat than they do in the other two languages."
We have recently seen a broadening of pragmatics to new areas and to the study of more than one language. This is illustrated by the present volume on Contrastive Pragmatics which brings together a number of articles originally presented at the 10th International Pragmatics Conference in Göteborg in 2007. The contributions deal with pragmatic phenomena such as speech acts, discourse markers and modality in different language pairs using theoretical approaches such as politeness theory, Conversation Analysis, Appraisal Theory, grammaticalization and cultural textology. Also discourse practices and genres may differ across cultures as illustrated by the study of TV news shows in different countries. Contrastive pragmatics also includes the comparative study of pragmatic phenomena from a foreign language perspective, a new area with implications for language teaching and intercultural communication. The contributions to this volume were originally published in Languages in Contrast 9:1 (2009).
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, University of Wuppertal (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: As a way of establishing a general framework of the development of politeness research, I will give an overview of different theories: the first being the conversationalist maxim view, including the work of Grice, Lakoff and Leech; and the second being the face- saving view of politeness, including Brown and Levinson's model. Then, I will investigate how politeness is realised in German and English. For this purpose, I will firstly consider cultural specificities that determine linguistic politeness, examining dimensions of cross- cultural difference as proposed by Juliane House and critically evaluate these dimensions. Secondly, I will look at how politeness is reflected in the realisation of the speech act of request, drawing on results from a contrastive study on politeness markers by Juliane House and Gabriele Kasper. These will subsequently be compared to findings gained in other empirical works. Following the critical evaluation, I will also take a closer look at the significant role of modal particles in the modification of requests in order to account for some of the prevalent linguistic choices observed in the contrastive study. Finally, the paper ends with a summarising conclusion.