Search

This paper examines the Italian folk concept of bella figura in the framework of politeness-theories and the various binary conceptions it provides for explaining the nature of human communication. BF is a culture-specific understanding of self-projection in everyday discourse: It is both, a cognitive concept concerning the "beautiful" embodiment of self, and a performative concept concerning the active "figuring out" of a bella figura in order to avoid its contrary, the brutta figura. Thus, the figura-concept represents a pragmatic principle for acting in line with socially accepted norms setting out a reference frame for judging social endeavours according to a culture-inherent value system. Accordingly, affinities can be assumed between the figura-concept and the sociopragmatic core notions 'face' and 'politeness'. A comparison of the figura-concept with the respective first- and second-order conceptions of the two, reflects a cultural version of 'impression management' conceiving an image of self which coincides with Goffman's, but not at all with Brown and Levinson's face-concept. This makes it difficult to identify figura in relation to politeness. Connections and disconnections are discussed alongside the paradigmatic binary scales and the positive/negative value-attributes. Finally, the findings are verified by comparing the use of the respective expressions as evaluation tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explain the development of European politeness as a result of courtly behaviour where "complaisance" played an important role. As traces left in the so-called "language of politeness" of numerous European linguacultures show, mutual "pleasing" determined social performance in hierarchically organised societies by merging aesthetic concepts of form and order with ethical values of benevolence and charity. An analysis of the lexical item placere ('to please') in Early Modern Italian and French documents highlights the existence of six different formulaic usages, characterised by a high consistency in frequency, evolution and diffusion all over Europe. Appearing mainly in connection with interactive moves where will is at stake, placere-formulae represent co-operative means, which ease social relationships by conditioning and "embellishing" directives with different elements of social decorum. As acts of submission originating in the Medieval ars dictandi, they became integrated over time into the French dogma of "polished" conversation as an elitist "art de plaire" (Faret 1665). From France they spread into the European courts establishing a conception of politeness that has been underestimated in pragmatics so far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Destinationswerbung ist gezielte Image-Werbung. Die Konstruktion eines touristischen Images basiert – unter anderem – auf einer möglichst anschaulichen Verarbeitung von sog. Identitätsmarkern, welche den beworbenen Raum im Werbetext gleichsam ‚ikonisch' repräsentieren sollen. Aus dem Blickwinkel der Linguistik und Semiotik wird an ausgewählten Beispielen untersucht, wie solche Identitätsmarker im multimodalen Text schlagkräftig in Szene gesetzt werden und welche Rolle Sprach-Bild-Kombinationen zur werbestrategischen Errichtung eines identitätsbezogenen ‚tourist gaze' spielen. Schlüsselwörter: Destinationswerbung, Printwerbung, Raum-Marketing, Imagekonstruktion, Identität/Identitätsmarker, Textlinguistik, Sprach-Bild-Texte, Multimodalität, Visualisierungsmethoden. Destination advertising is above all a skillful image promotion. The construction of a specific place image is supposed to bear basically on a heterogenous group of symbolic signs I define as 'identity-markers'. Due to their inherent iconic force they turn out to be strikingly perceptive representants of the promoted space and as such their features can widely be exploited in the multimodal design of the advertising texture. In a linguistic analysis of selected print-ads is shown how identity markers are textually staged and how different strategies of relating semiotic modes constitute to match an identity-bound 'tourist gaze'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the topic of language use and adaptation strategies in tourist communication, discussing its common aspects with the book "The Tourist Gaze" by John Urry. It states that tourism being the worldwide cultural industry is communicated through the media channels. The concept of adaptability plays an important role in the tourist communication. Also, presents introduction to the topics including international campaign, sustainable tourism and tourist communication.

This paper studies the public communication act of petitions made in the Middle Ages by subjects to their governors in situations of high personal need. Analysing an edited corpus of correspondence in Anglo-Norman and Italian chancelleries of the early thirteenth to the late fifteenth century, I attempt to identify verbal means that are related to what is today defined as “face” and “facework”, and to discuss this evidence in the tension modern pragmatics establishes between common “politic” and marked “polite” behaviour. Parting from the three-fold conception where all speech events have to be considered in their whole as social, discursive and textual practices, I briefly retrace the social and legal conditions of petitions and describe their particular discursive character on the threshold of two transitions: from orality to literacy and from Latin to vernacular. The data analysis is concerned with the textual cues bound to structural, syntactic and semantic constraints. Pointing out the most striking features of these three aspects and listing the most frequent forms that are cross-culturally congruent, I identify medieval facework as a ritual, but consciously iconic shaping of a power ideal at the intersection of political, juristic and religious implications. As formality is a shared value based on social position and role, no sign of reflexive politeness behaviour can be verified in this early period. Variations are simply attributed to the habits of the different chancelleries and their scribes. Though identified as unmarked politic behaviour, the common procedures in the medieval petition letters can nevertheless be seen as general face-saving strategies in response to the threatening character of requests. Thus the historical data shed light on the conception of linguistic politeness in the first-order and the second-order senses of the term and are useful to advance new hypotheses in the pragmatic discussion since Brown and Levinson’s classical study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the great scientific interest that linguists have recently shown in the media, magazine covers have hardly been subject to linguistic research. This is the more astonishing as front covers are omnipresent contact texts. Their multimodal character, which combines visual and verbal elements into complex persuasive messages, has a great influence on the competitive press market in two different ways: on the one hand it represents a complex form of advertisement whose visual-verbal rhetorics, in addition to selling the product, also enhance the pleasure in the reading of the text. On the other hand, in its function as a label or even a 'window', it can be considered an important pretext which announces, indicates and appraises subsequent texts inside the magazine. In the light of this overall captatio function, this paper intends to give a first overview of the most important visual and verbal means attested in my data - selected covers of Italian and French magazines compiled in the last decade. The language of covers, which is intentionally anchored in a creative visual, proves to be an extensive repertory of deictic forms of which the main function is cataphoric reference. While these are considerated as genre-constitutive according to some underlying semantic-functional criteria, others are occasional tricks created just to capture the reader's attention. From a strategic viewpoint covers, especially those of the Italian media, are full of such rhetoric devices which mainly cluster in the headlines and their interface with the dominant visual element. Very often, the comical effect that front covers achieve in their immediate context derives from processes of deviation from conventional sign-relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]