Masruddin Masruddin; Faisal Amir; Abbas Langaji; Rusdiansyah Rusdiansyah
Abstract
The role of age in determining speakers’ politeness strategy is a crucial aspect of language use, and this paper examines the politeness phenomena in the Luwu Tae’ language.This study used a descriptive quantitative approach and a newly developed social relation symmetry model to collect ...
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The role of age in determining speakers’ politeness strategy is a crucial aspect of language use, and this paper examines the politeness phenomena in the Luwu Tae’ language.This study used a descriptive quantitative approach and a newly developed social relation symmetry model to collect data from 15 respondents and investigate how age influences the use of politeness strategies. The study found that when interacting with older interlocutors, speakers tend to use a more deferential variety and employ a negative politeness strategy. However, when speaking with people of their own age, speakers tend to use a more informal style and employ a positive politeness technique. These findings suggest that age is a significant factor in determining politeness strategies among the Luwu Tae’ language ethnic groups, with the local wisdom of treating everyone with respect and behaving nicely being a key factor passed down from generation to generation. Age has become an important social variable of power influencing politeness techniques in the region.
Israa Qari
Volume 7, Issue 1 , March 2019, , Pages 83-95
Abstract
This paper was set out to investigate the main cultural differences between Saudi and British participants making apologies with a focus on the role of the gender of the addressee in the selection of apology strategies in gender-segregated vs. coed societies. Written questionnaires were used to collect ...
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This paper was set out to investigate the main cultural differences between Saudi and British participants making apologies with a focus on the role of the gender of the addressee in the selection of apology strategies in gender-segregated vs. coed societies. Written questionnaires were used to collect data from 80 participants: 20 Saudi males, 20 Saudi females, 20 British males and 20 British females. Three apology situations were presented; in the first two situations the hearer (H) was a male, in the third, the H was a female. Data was analyzed based on Brown and Levinson’s (B & L) politeness theory and according to the Cross Cultural Speech Act Research Project (CCSARP) apology strategy coding system. Generally, the results of this study indicated differences between the Saudi and the British apology strategy selections. Moreover, in particular, there were significant differences between the mean scores of apology situations where the gender of the addressee was a male.
Chin-Hui Chen
Volume 5, Issue 2 , September 2017, , Pages 91-104
Abstract
Outside of Western contexts, natural-conversation-based research on intergenerational communication is relatively rare. To help redress this imbalance, this paper explores the conversational styles of first-encounter talks between five pairs of college students and older adults in Taiwan, and infers ...
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Outside of Western contexts, natural-conversation-based research on intergenerational communication is relatively rare. To help redress this imbalance, this paper explores the conversational styles of first-encounter talks between five pairs of college students and older adults in Taiwan, and infers the interactional norms that underlie them. It is found that younger Taiwanese adults tend to exhibit great formality in their conversational styles, manifested as frequent appeals to older people’s positive face, and a preference for quick question-asking especially at the opening of the talks. Older adults, in contrast, exhibited lower levels of commitment to eliciting information from their interlocutors and were more likely to interrupt them. Younger adults appeared uneasy when hearing older adults’ painful self-disclosures, as reflected in the former’s minimal responses or quick shifts to other topics. The conversational styles pinpointed by this research are discussed in terms of how the observed intergenerational communication could be problematic.
Shazia Kousar
Volume 3, Issue 2 , September 2015, , Pages 85-96
Abstract
The present research is aimed at investigating how the politeness of the speakers of Urdu is influenced by their relative social status in society. The researcher took politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) as a model. To observe politeness of Urdu speakers, speech act of apology with different ...
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The present research is aimed at investigating how the politeness of the speakers of Urdu is influenced by their relative social status in society. The researcher took politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) as a model. To observe politeness of Urdu speakers, speech act of apology with different strategies was selected. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was used as an instrument to collect data from a sample of 152 participants from different institutes. The analysis of data indicated that the speakers of Urdu employed negative politeness strategies mostly for the addressee of high social status and low social status. The addressee of equal social status was apologized by positive politeness strategies. The results showed that Pakistani society is non-egalitarian. Moreover, this study supports Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) claim for universality of politeness in preferring negative politeness to positive politeness; though, this preference for negative politeness is the outcome of the unequal social status of the addressee.
Shuan Wei-Hong Ko; Zohreh R. Eslami; Lynn M. Burlbaw
Volume 3, Issue 1 , March 2015, , Pages 1-15
Abstract
The present study investigated learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development through analysis of 99 requestive emails addressed to a faculty member over a period of up to two years. Most previous studies mainly investigated how non-native English speaking students’ (NNESs) pragmalinguistic ...
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The present study investigated learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development through analysis of 99 requestive emails addressed to a faculty member over a period of up to two years. Most previous studies mainly investigated how non-native English speaking students’ (NNESs) pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence differed from native English speaking students (NESs) and compared learners with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds with NESs. In addition, most of the existing literature on developmental pragmatics has used elicited data. Naturally occurring data, in the form of emails, offer a more valid reflection of learners’ pragmatic competence. This study adopted speech event analysis approach, which seeks to account for all parts of requestive emails and recognizes the “work” each part does in the production of the speech event. Results indicated that, although NNES students did not show much pragmatic development in the frequency and type of strategies they used, the NNES students used a more deferential style in the opening and closing of their emails compared to native speakers. Additionally, the findings revealed the merits of analyzing natural data in interlanguage pragmatics and offered the benefit of recognizing email requests as a situated event.
Milene Mendes de Oliveira
Volume 3, Issue 1 , March 2015, , Pages 76-90
Abstract
This paper showed the results of a qualitative investigation that looked into intracultural communication between Brazilian teachers and students of English, and intercultural communication between American teachers and Brazilian students of English. The aims were to identify and describe contextualization ...
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This paper showed the results of a qualitative investigation that looked into intracultural communication between Brazilian teachers and students of English, and intercultural communication between American teachers and Brazilian students of English. The aims were to identify and describe contextualization cues used by both Brazilian and American speakers of English, and to connect these cues with sociocultural differences. Data was collected through footage of English classes in Brazil and through interviews with American English teachers. The analyses of the footage and the interviews have shown that, while assertiveness could be related to the sociological dimension of individualism in the American culture, compliance, as perceived in verbal interactions, could be connected with the collectivist orientation of the Brazilian culture. Moreover, the higher-context communication style in the Brazilian culture and the lower-context communication style in the American culture (when contrasted with each other) were found to be able to account for differences in the use of politeness strategies. The results showed the importance of making English students aware of contextualization conventions.
Amani Lusekelo; Daudi Isaac Kapufi
Volume 2, Issue 1 , March 2014, , Pages 106-118
Abstract
This paper focused on the way names of body parts are artistically used to convey meanings and messages in Kifipa, a Bantu language spoken in Tanzania. Since the body parts metaphors are used by people to portray meanings in their daily conversations (Kovecses, 2004; Vierke, 2012), the paper investigated ...
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This paper focused on the way names of body parts are artistically used to convey meanings and messages in Kifipa, a Bantu language spoken in Tanzania. Since the body parts metaphors are used by people to portray meanings in their daily conversations (Kovecses, 2004; Vierke, 2012), the paper investigated such linguistic richness in the language. Methodologically, the study identified names of body parts expressed in Kifipa and analysed their metaphoric use. Results showed that metaphoric use of names of body parts in Kifipa relies on politeness (Watts, 2003), stylistic, and cognitive hypotheses (Jilala, 2012) as well as helping in word economy. It was argued herein that, before interpreting metaphors related to names of body parts, the context of use must be taken into account so as to arrive at the intended meanings. Thus, meanings and functions of the metaphors originating from names of body parts in Kifipa do not create universal terms that can be applied everywhere, at every time in every socio-cultural group, rather they are context-based.
Akinola Odebunmi
Volume 1, Issue 1 , March 2013, , Pages 101-117
Abstract
Doctors and clients sometimes experience interactive clashes during hospital meetings in South-western Nigerian hospitals because of their divergent culture-constrained orientation to politeness cues. The goal of this paper is to unpack the discursive elements that characterize interactive confluence ...
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Doctors and clients sometimes experience interactive clashes during hospital meetings in South-western Nigerian hospitals because of their divergent culture-constrained orientation to politeness cues. The goal of this paper is to unpack the discursive elements that characterize interactive confluence and divergence in selected consultative encounters in the hospitals. The findings indicate that institutional and cultural (dis)alignments occur in respect of adjacency and non-adjacency pair greetings. In both greeting types, face support, threat and stasis are conjointly co-constituted by doctors and Yoruba clients within the affordances of the cultural, institutional and situational context of the Southwestern Nigerian hospital setting. Adjacency pair greetings attract mutual interpretings between the parties; interactive disalignments are differentially pragmatically accommodated by doctors and clients. In non-adjacency pair greeting, doctors’ threats are co-constituted as appropriate by both parties, the institutional power of doctor and shared Western cultural orientation playing significant roles.
Saeedeh Shafiee Nahrkhalaji; Mahboubeh Khorasani; Morteza Rashidi Ashjerdi
Volume 1, Issue 1 , March 2013, , Pages 118-130
Abstract
This study examined naturally-occurring university classroom interactions at Iranian universities and provided an analysis of silence patterns as politeness strategies used by male and female students. Since empirical studies of silence in classroom settings are scarce, this paper aimed to explain such ...
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This study examined naturally-occurring university classroom interactions at Iranian universities and provided an analysis of silence patterns as politeness strategies used by male and female students. Since empirical studies of silence in classroom settings are scarce, this paper aimed to explain such phenomena using participant interviews, classroom observation and detailed discourse analysis of classroom interaction. Silence patterns and their interpretations were scrutinized in these observations and were discussed in relation to specific conceptualization of politeness and devices employed to exercise it. The study found that females seem to be the most silent in the cross-sex classrooms, while the distribution of silence is more nearly equal in the same-sex classrooms. Based on the comments from follow-up interviews, reasons for intentional silence as a politeness strategy were categorized into four groups: silence as a face-saving strategy, silence as a ‘don’t do the FTA’ strategy, silence as a power strategy, and silence as an off-record strategy.