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The appropriate employment of language by politicians can settle many of the current global problems and crises. Iran's nuclear deal with all its complexities and subtleties is one of the most contentious global issues that demands a lot of tact and prudence on the part of the politicians to be resolved. Politicians could draw upon different politeness strategies to employ appropriate speech, save the face of others, gain their trust, and resolve problems. Considering the significance of this issue, this corpus based descriptive research investigated the politeness strategies employed in the editorials of Iranian and American newspapers. Fifty news articles from the Tehran Times and New York Times published from May 2019 to June 2022 were investigated according to Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness strategies. These news articles were relevant to Iran's nuclear deal. The findings indicated that the most frequent politeness strategy in the Tehran Times news was the positive politeness strategy and the most frequent politeness strategy in the New York Times news was the negative politeness strategy. Finally, the results of the chi-square test revealed that there is a significant difference in the frequency of politeness strategies use in both newspaper articles. The findings highlight the sociocultural dependency of the politeness concept and imply that cultural differences affect preference for the choice of types of politeness strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explicit teaching of pragmatics to second language learners has been studied by a large number of researchers. However, the review of the related studies shows that while some researchers believe in the effectiveness of explicit instruction of pragmatics, others believe that explicit instruction is not effective and it does not contribute to the language learners' pragmatics awareness. The main goal of this study was to investigate the outcomes of teaching pragmatics-focusing on the concept of politeness through the speech act of request - by explicit intervention. The participants were Iranian intermediate 36 EFL students who were selected through convenience sampling. A quasi-experimental research method was used, and the participants were divided into two groups. The experimental group benefited from overt metapragmatic discussions and explanations, role plays and other pragmatically-oriented tasks. Different instruments were used: a written discourse completion test (DCT), a general English proficiency test to homogenize the participants, a pre-test of participant's initial pragmatic awareness and ability in politeness, and a post-test of pragmatic awareness and ability in the production of politeness features following the periods of instruction. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics (t-test). The results of data analyses revealed that students' speech act comprehension and production improved significantly in the explicit instruction group, but no change was made in students' speech act comprehension and production of the students who received no instruction. It is concluded that pragmatic competence can be taught to EFL learners explicitly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-Cultural Pragmatics, written by Juliane House and Dániel Z. Kádár Specifically, Chapter 2 provides a reader-friendly overview of the chronological background of cross-cultural pragmatics, while revisiting the ground-breaking CCSARP Project (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989) as well as its developing connection with present-day cross-cultural pragmatics, with both practical and ethical challenges being highlighted. In this sense, this chapter can be read as a link between the methodological concerns of the previous chapters and the central concerns of the book in the ensuing chapters. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Akofena is the property of Universite Felix Houphouet Boigny and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Politeness is crucial to communicating among individuals or between groups in a speech community. This research mainly explores the politeness of welcoming guests in the Manggaraian speech community. Video recording and interviews were the techniques used to collect the data. Eight videos were recorded and transcribed in text. The data were interpreted in socio-pragmatics theory. The findings reveal that the Manggaraian speech community tend to apply positive and off-the-record politeness strategies. A positive politeness strategy was mainly employed to build a close relationship and friendliness and to show respect to a guest. The use of a positive politeness strategy was marked in honorifics such as ite, mori, ema, and downtoner yo. An offthe-record politeness strategy was utilised to designate generosity, modesty, and approbation to a guest. This politeness strategy was indicated in metaphorical expressions. The social factors that determine the use of those politeness strategies are related to the context of the event, age, relation, and guest status. In this study, the Manggaraian speech community employ politeness in the ritual of welcoming a guest to achieve three benefits: manifesting respect, maintaining a good relationship, and showing a positive attitude toward the guest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on Rauen’s goal-conciliation theory, Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, and Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, we model in this essay the utterance “Can you pass the salt?”—taken as a classic example of a polite request between politeness theorists—assuming the mobilization of a polite or attenuated speech act contributes to the accomplishment of practical goals. Next, we discuss the modeling considering some criticisms produced by second-wave politeness studies and politeness relevance-theoretic studies. We conclude that politeness aspects are part of intentional action plans, affecting the design of the lowest level practical goal superordinating the respective informative and communicative subgoals. We claim the speaker defines—in the scope of that lower-level practical goal—the speech-act, the politeness super-strategy, and the formulation of the polite utterance considering a palette of linguistic possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study's primary objective is to investigate how Thai EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners use politeness and complaint response strategies similarly or differently in email communication. Email data are collected from 30 male and 30 female Thai EFL learners. The learners' complaint response strategies for handling complaints include gratitude, apology, explanation, offer, appeal, and guarantee. The study shows that complaint response strategies differ among Thai male and female EFL learners. Compared to the female group, the male group uses the offer and appeal complaint response strategies more frequently. More often than the male group, the female group opts for the complaint response strategy of guarantee. Additionally, the chi-square analysis reveals that the use of the politeness strategy of the hedge is significantly different between the male and female Thai EFL learners with varying levels of English proficiency. The employment of the indirect politeness strategy is another crucial difference between male and female students in the high group. However, there is no significant difference in how male and female English language learners with high and low competence levels utilize the direct politeness strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to determine the linguistic patterns of politeness in the Balinese language. The pragmalinguistic approach was used because the linguistic patterns and politeness of the Balinese language are related to descriptive and pragmatic aspects. Data were collected through closed questionnaires distributed to informants consisting of lecturers, teachers, and Balinese language practitioners. The respondents were asked to give a politeness score for each proposed sentence pattern using a Likert scale, where 1 = very impolite, 2 = impolite, 3 = polite, 4 = more polite, and 5 = very polite. The analysis results showed that (1) passive sentences (score 3.64 - 4.29) were perceived as more polite than active sentences (score 2.76 - 3.14), (2) modality phrase forwarding (score 4.00 - 4.79) were perceived as more polite than sentences without modalities (score 2.64 - 2.71), (3) the use of institutional personification (score 4.07 - 4.76) was perceived as more polite than using the position as the subject of the sentence (score 2.88 - 3.00), and (4) the use of indirect speech (score 4.14 - 4.79) was perceived as more polite than using direct (score 2.76 - 3.00). Furthermore, the use of these linguistic instruments to determine politeness in the Balinese language is motivated by the speaker's desire to focus on information, soften and weaken the impositivity, as well as efforts to save a positive face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the dissertation titled "Syntax of Politeness: A Comparative Study Between Indian English and Bangla" submitted by the author for the award of Master of Arts degree at Jadavpur University. Topics include the objective of the thesis to demonstrate the morphological and syntactic aspects of politeness devices in Indian English and Bangla languages, a brief background on politeness research which began in 1970s, and the different pragmatic politeness theories by linguists.

The aim of this study is to analyse the use of the English politeness markers thank you, sorry and please in Polish. My initial hypothesis was that the politeness markers have already been incorporated into the mental lexicon of Polish speakers, and are thus understood and accepted by them, but they do not have the prospect of replacing their Polish equivalents because they lack the necessary pragmatic force. Previous studies (Terkourafi 2011; Peterson &Vaattovaara 2014) show that pragmatic borrowings are unlikely to do so. However, this corpus study finds a context in which a borrowing is used increasingly, namely sorry in the collocation with ale ('but'). It seems to have started replacing its Polish equivalents in this context, as it constitutes 25% of all collocations of apologetic behaviour with ale in the National Corpus of Polish. However, the majority of the occurrences of the analysed politeness markers in the corpus are restricted to Internet-mediated communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

4 This paper only examines request forms in terms of speech acts usage and of the request perspective (which is a form of internal modification) employed with them, since the choice of pronoun affects the verbal conjugation and also signals what type of relational work has been carried on. Keywords: pragmatics; Italian; request strategies; Head Acts; request perspective EN pragmatics Italian request strategies Head Acts request perspective 55 90 36 10/26/22 20220501 NES 220501 1 Introduction Research in the fields of pragmatics has highlighted important differences in speech act realisation strategies and the perception of contextual variables across languages and cultures (e.g. [41]; [58]). This holds especially true for requests, which are potentially face-threating acts ([14]) whose performance is dependent on culturally-driven perceptions of variables, such as (un)familiarity between interlocutors, the weight of the request, the rights and responsibilities behind such requests ([56]; [59]), and by expectations of compliance attached to them ([34]). 4 Results 4.1 General features of Italian requests Head Acts and Request perspective As Table 4 shows, in terms of HAs and Request perspective, overall participants predominantly employed RPC (49) and HO (63), always used together, as in B I c'hai i b I mica una sigaretta? This article attempts to fill these gaps, by exploring Italian request realisation patterns, in terms of HAs, request perspectives employed within the HAs and what pronouns are associated with them, and whether and how the sociopragmatic variables of D and W influence such choices. [Extracted from the article]

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The current study reports on a variational pragmatic comparison of compliments and compliment responses between Egyptian and Saudi Arabic. Data were collected by using Discourse Completion Tasks from 443 Egyptian and 428 Saudi undergraduates, and were analyzed using adaptations of Yuan's (2002) and Herbert's (1986) models. The results reveal significant differences in politeness management between Egyptian and Saudi youth, particularly with Egyptians producing more explicit compliment strategies and Saudis showing stronger preference for implicit compliment strategies and combination patterns. Less difference is noted in compliment responses with only Egyptians exhibiting higher use of additional strategies. The findings are interpreted in light of politeness theory and the interplay between cultural values and linguistic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implicit and explicit knowledge use in second language acquisition has been rigorously researched in areas such as syntax, however our understanding of how these knowledge constructs affect learner pragmatics is not well understood. Through an interlanguage pragmatic perspective we aim to understand how implicit and explicit knowledge intertwines with pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence. This is investigated by testing for L1 politeness transfer in Korean learners of French regarding their acquisition of tu and vous, which provides a new perspective as past research focuses on Anglophone learners. By triangulating data from two test types, results show that the learners have difficulty with vous but not tu, attributed to negative language transfer of L1 politeness values. Moreover, learner variation of tu/vous use can be linked to the explicit/implicit status of their pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge, showing that the implicitization of their sociopragmatic knowledge is a challenging hurdle towards native-like tu/vous use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguists consider insults/swear words as interjections carrying an expressive, cathartic, function, through which the enunciator manifests emotions. We provide a contrastive study of insults/swear words, investigating whether there are specific morphological/syntactic structures pertaining to insults/swear words and discuss the cross-cultural similarities/differences in the pragmatic use of this kind of language, focusing on the perspective of politeness. To do so, we analyse examples drawn from Hergé’s TinTin and their translation into Greek and English, this comic being rich in insults /swear words due to the particularities of the genre of discourse and Captain Haddock’s expressive character. The question is whether the implicit pragmatic/cultural values are the same in all the texts or there are important differences, which can be traced, deriving from the particularities of each of the languages of study. It emerged that the Greek chosen utterances reflect all the parameters influencing the original: phonological, semantic, pragmatic, stylistic. The English version seems to be more distant on all levels of analysis. The (non)preservation of the parameters depends on the peculiarities of the Greek, French and English languages and on the collective images of the recipients. Our conclusions match previous researches, proving Greek as positive politeness oriented, opposed to English (see also Romero 2000; Sifianou 2001).

The main purpose of this paper are the conditions of use and discourse functions of nominal forms of address (NFA) in dialogical interactions. The corpus includes Cervantes's six Entremeses and two Novelas Ejemplares. In the first part, we analyse the sociopragmatic conditions for NFA selection. We highlight the relevance of adding a third variable, status, to the classic ones: power and distance, in order to adequately explain the selection of forms in both asymmetric or hierarchical relationships and symmetric ones in different social groups. This variable is associated to the acknowledgement of social identity and position, which lies at the foundation of social rganization of European modern societies. It also advocates for the convenience of including discursive factors such as genre constraints and interaction dynamical development. In the second part, we analyse the functioning of NFA at two discourse levels: conversational organization and turn management and rapport management and linguistic politeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tertium Linguistic Journal / Pólrocznik Jezykoznawczy Tertium is the property of Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Acta Hispanica is the property of University of Szeged, Department of Hispanic Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the globalized world of today, English movies and series have seen a high turnout and people are having real interest in them. Movies and series are worlds of language use just like the real world human interact in; yet the language used in movies and series is not spontaneous. Writers plan their scripts pretty consciously to produce the best product that they can. In doing so, as the current study hypothesizes, writers of movies and series make use of some well-studied concepts in the field of linguistics to create some of their scenes. Those concepts can be for instance some semantic concepts (such as lexical relations, wordplay, etc.) and some other pragmatic notions (such as Grice's maxims, implicature, politeness, etc.). Writers do build whole scenes on linguistic concepts utilization. Highlighting the different linguistic concepts that are utilized in filmmaking, the current study finds it to be useful in two ways: (i) it, on the one hand, provides insights on the way filmmaking world benefits from linguistic studies and (ii), on the other hand, gives insights to teachers of English linguistics in universities to benefit from such movies and series in clarifying some of their lessons to students and well attract their attention by something (movies and series) that they have interest in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A high level of linguistic affinity usually results in higher commonality in the grammatical plane. However, this does not always occur in the pragmatic plane because of cultural conventions whose divergences can endanger communicative effectiveness. The objective of this article is to explain with empirical data the importance of the development of a pragmatic awareness in the study of related languages. For this purpose, verbal politeness strategies are analyzed in a sample of emails in Spanish and Italian in which university students have made requests to their professors. The results indicate that, despite the great linguistic and cultural affinity, emails from Spanish and Italian academic contexts show different tendencies in the selection of verbal politeness strategies and that the pragmatic characteristics of L1 are carried over to L2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current research focuses on the pragmatic failure of translating into English some Arabic religious politeness formulas. The formulas, which have been selected from everyday communication in different speech events, were translated by 10 M.A. students in the translation department at Oran University. The study has shown that inadequate pragma- religious competence often leads to the alteration of the source message. It has revealed that while a few Arabic religious formulas may be translated into corresponding English religious formulas, many Arabic formulas fail pragmatically to give comparable religious meaning in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to analyse communication from a pragmatic point of view, identifying some of the most important theories and principles that are to be mentioned in relation to this area of studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on ritual frames and politeness markers. Topics include application of words such as examination of politeness research and pragmatics in a broader sense; ritual and social norms which include rights and obligations; and application of formal words such as "Please" in English, "Bitte" in German, and "Qing" in Chinese.

This paper explores how the authors to the papers in this special issue of Acta Linguistica Academica (2019/2) understand the performance and evaluation of (im)politeness in various types of Chinese data across different contexts. The paper looks at the long-debated issue of universalism and particularism in (im)politeness research, since interaction takes place within different sociocultural systems, in different situational settings, at different interactive contexts, and with different interlocutors. The paper also brings forward the necessity to enhance the impact of Chinese (im)politeness research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Chinese has only one form of first-person pronoun; by contrast, there are at least four different first-person pronominal forms used in Classical Chinese. This makes Classical Chinese first-person pronouns noteworthy to investigate. This co-existence of forms with similar meaning of self-referencing raises two issues, namely the reason behind this co-existence and the relationships among these pronominal forms in terms of sociopragmatic use. Unlike what has been previously argued in the field that address forms rather than pronouns are politeness-related (e.g., Kádár 2007; Pan & Kádár 2011), first-person pronominal forms in Classical Chinese express a diverse set of contextually-situated politeness-related meanings. Furthermore, these pronominal forms are socially indexical, in the sense that they are allocated to speakers depending on their social status. Thus, a central argument of this paper is that the pronominal forms studied reveal information about both the person who uses them and the context in which they are used. The paper compares pronominal forms used in the Lunyu ... or The analects of Confucius (475 BC-221 BC) and Shishuo Xinyu ... (A new account of the tales of the world) (200 AD-400 AD), to understand the pragmatic implications and politeness values of these different first-person pronominal forms over a time-span of 400-600 years and also to provide a glimpse of how eventually only one form came to exist in contemporary Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While researchers have questioned the suitability of classic Western models for accommodating Chinese linguistic politeness phenomena, inadequate attention has been devoted to the role of ideologies in understanding Chinese language use. This study examines the key ideological notion of jia wenhua ... 'family culture', and uses it to model some typical discursive practices of (im)politeness in contemporary China. As an ideology, 'family culture' has its roots in ancient Chinese philosophy, and it continues to prevail to the present day. Adopting this ideological notion as an analytic construct, this study seeks to formulate a set of new maxims to account for some discursive practices of Chinese politeness, which neither previous Western nor Chinese models have captured. In so doing, it contributes to emancipatory pragmatics by demonstrating the necessity of deploying culturally-grounded ideologies as analytic constructs, such as 'family culture' in this study, to rationalize some types of Chinese sociopragmatic behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of 'political advice' covers events such as media appearances, in the course of which the representatives of a country deliver symbolic 'advice' to another country through a monologous announcement. As such, political 'advice' is a ritual practice (Kádár 2017): on the surface level it represents communication with another country and its style is formed according to this symbolic surface function; however, its implicit function is to form alignment between the political authorities who deliver the advice and the citizens of their country. Studying political advice provides a twofold contribution to politeness theory. First, on the empirical level, this discursive ritual practice has not received sufficient academic attention, and so modelling it through the lens of interactional ritual theory fills an empirical knowledge gap in the field of pragmatics and broader sense language and society. Second, by modelling the complex relationship between politeness and political advice, the paper delivers a contribution to the theory of language use, since it demonstrates that in certain ritual practices such as political advice, and arguably a variety of similar ritual practices in the political arena. It is challenging to capture 'politeness' in the conventional sense as an other-oriented (and interpersonal) form of pragmatic behaviour, in spite of the fact that on the surface level such forms of communication are veiled as abundantly polite and as other-oriented. We argue that one needs to deploy interactional ritual theory to model the pragmatic operation of this phenomenon. The data studied is drawn from the website of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present introduction provides an overview of the field of linguistic politeness research. Since Acta Linguistica Academica has diverse scope of inquiries, and linguistic pragmatics has been only one (and perhaps not the most central) of the various areas featured in the journal, it is relevant to provide such an up-to-date overview. My goal is not only to point out how the contributions advance politeness theory, but also to make the research featured in the special issue relevant to academics working in other areas of linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates and discusses the aspects of language use among the Igbo as reflected in their name calling practice, which the paper terms name avoidance cum alternative names in term of their classification. The study also assesses who uses the name and to whom. The socio-cultural factors affecting the usage of these alternative names or the euphemistic terms are discussed with the intention of highlighting their pragmatic and cultural importance to the people. The primary data for the study were collected through interview, focus group discussion and observation, while secondary sources of data collection included published materials such as books and journal articles, as well as through intuitive knowledge as native speaker of Igbo. The theoretical framework adopted for the analysis of the study is politeness and face approach as proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987). Politeness is seen as been respectful and considerate of other people, and which is culture base. Findings show that the avoidance of the personal names is conditioned by Igbo cultural and religious norms; and that the alternatives names or euphemistic terms are mostly used as replacements for the avoided lexemes in different contexts by different individuals. The paper argues that name avoidance are common sociolinguistic phenomena among the Igbo people. The use of personal names is being restricted by some people in certain contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims at presenting a thorough account of the field termed literary pragmatics which emerges in a consequence of applying the different pragmatic approaches to the study and analysis of literary genera. Additionally, it also attempts to explore and shed some light on the relationship between the two domains: pragmatics and literature in order to reveal their commonalities. There exists a strong assumption that these have something in common as they both have to do with language users and how meaning is conveyed. Despite the fact the various pragmatic approaches including speech act theory, conversational implicature, politeness theory and relevance theory are developed mainly in relation to spoken interactions, the study has revealed that they offer invaluable insights to the study of literary texts. Moreover, the process of analyzing literary texts has led to the development and the explanation of the pragmatic approaches themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses self-quotations as a strategy of politeness. I maintain that self-quotations fulfill strategies of linguistic politeness, and that the fulfillment of these strategies must be understood through the discourse event standing in the background of the self-quotation. In the corpus – 13 Hebrew articles written by women in eastern Europe in the nineteenth century – 35 self-quotations were found. All of them are "fictional", i.e. they do not refer to an actual discourse event that occurred in the past. Nevertheless, the fictionality is not identical in all the cases examined, and it arises from the specific characteristics of each case. The examination of the construction of the other discourse event (past, future, or fictional) reveals that it strongly influences the quotation's pragmatic function, and specifically its "polite" character. The discourse event might be a speech or thought event; it might actually have occurred in the past or only be implied by a future tense or a conditional structure; or sometimes it may be openly declared as a discourse event that will not take place altogether. Self-quotations function as hedging devices, qualifying various aspects of the utterance – its illocutionary force, comprehensiveness, the degree of social authority it expresses, or the act of uttering itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore how the analysis of im/politeness can be tackled from a discursive pragmatics perspective. Pragmatics and discourse analysis are interrelated disciplines as they are both concerned with language use. However, they differ mostly in terms of the units of analysis traditionally associated with them: pragmatics is typically concerned with the utterance whereas discourse analysis with what is beyond the utterance. Im/politeness research has drawn from both as it was initially based mostly on pragmatic notions and later, reacting to these and embracing the pragmatic turn, it turned primarily to big D discourse for additional or more useful tools. Thus, researchers abandoned isolated utterances as their data and gravitated towards longer stretches of discourse in context. However, context was mostly explored through aspects of the micro- and macro-levels leaving rather underexplored the meso level. Our contention in this paper is that for a truly discursive approach to pragmatics in general and to im/politeness in particular, we need to develop methods and tools that will facilitate the analysis of politeness phenomena also at the mesolevel and reveal the dynamic interaction among these three levels. • Pragmatics and discourse analysis are interrelated but differ mostly in terms of the units of analysis associated with them. • A trichotomy covering the macro/meso/micro levels of sociological enquiry is needed. • Genres/ texts are central to a discursive pragmatics. • A truly discursive approach to im/politeness should facilitate the analysis of phenomena at the meso-level. • It should also reveal the dynamic interaction among these three levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even some of the biggest names in pragmatics and politeness oftentimes confuse social etiquette with linguistic politeness. I was recently invited to examine a PhD thesis at a famous university in New Zealand, and it came to me as a shock to realize that neither the PhD candidate nor her thesis supervisors had noticed the difference between these two concepts. Since a clear understanding of rudimentary concepts is fundamental to any research in any field of science, and pragmatics and politeness are not exceptions, this paper aims at putting linguistic politeness in its right frame. I will first review the historical development of modern pragmatics from an Archimedean point; then, I will set politeness theory in its right place inside pragmatics. Finally, I will draw a line between social etiquette and linguistic politeness and argue that junior (and some senior) researchers working on politeness need to be very careful not to confuse the two, or their claims are doomed to be invalid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sort of is a pragmatic particle with a range of functions in different contexts. There are different factors which can contribute to its varied functions. Focusing on the media discourse, this study investigates the frequency and pragmatic functions of sort of in New Zealand English. Based on the analysis of the data from a current affairs TV program, the study shows that sort of is a pragmatic particle under-used in this discourse type. The analysis of its pragmatic functions demonstrates that right amount of information and mitigation fulfill a substantial proportion of sort of functions. The other two functions, avoidance and discourse management, are less frequent, but still perform important roles in effective media communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Human Sciences (19922876) is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The present study explores, from a contrastive point of view, the conditions that rule the political discourse in terms of linguistic politeness. By contrasting the data (examples drawn from press titles, mainly the French journal Le Monde Diplomatique and its' translations into Greek), we will be able to discover the underlying operations and constraints that regulate the use of such markers and to reach conclusions about the existence or not of symmetrical uses of our two languages. The theoretical framework followed is that of Brown and Levinson and the one of the Theory of Enunciation. In the case of press titles translation, despite the possibility of using symmetrical structures in source text as well as in target text, different structures are mostly preferred. This discrepancy leads to hypothesis about different linguistic attitudes of each linguistic community reflected explicitly by the use of different syntactic/lexical markers. It is this awareness that enabled Brown and Levinson (1987: 248) to consider cross-cultural variation and recognise that some societies may be oriented towards one or the other type of politeness (i.e. negative or positive)», formulating the so called cultural ethos of each linguistic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Back in the early 1990s, Gu Yueguo formulated the Politeness Principle and its maxims to explain Chinese politeness phenomena, as a counter reaction to Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, which claims that politeness is a universal phenomenon in language usage. Despite the fact that Gu's illustration of politeness phenomena in Chinese has attracted considerable attention from pragmaticians, this paper points out that there are at least three major issues in his study: failure to provide a generalized high-level definition of politeness, improper construction of some of the maxims, and inadequate adoption of Leech's theoretical framework for analysis of Chinese data. With the increasing call for culture-specific research on im/politeness, it is of great necessity to rethink these issues regarding Chinese politeness phenomena. Therefore, this paper attempts to reconstruct the Politeness Principle in Chinese by reexamining and clarifying Gu's approach. It argues that politeness can be defined as appropriate behavior in social interaction. Based on this definition, the Politeness Principle and four maxims of Modesty, Respectfulness, Friendliness, and Refinement are coherently reconstructed in a clarified and refined form. The reconstruction demonstrates that polite behavior in Chinese is exhibited in an appropriate or acceptable way in accordance with these maxims as social norms or regularities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for frequent targeted teaching of relational language use or (im)politeness in the L2 classroom. The approach presented here draws on authentic data in the target language and in the language of instruction, which are readily available online. It encourages the learner to make use of their multilingual resources and is exploratory in nature, allowing for a deep engagement with (im)politeness, viz., an extensive array of semiotic features invested in the co-construction of social relations in every social interaction. Working at the interface of (im)politeness studies, intercultural pragmatics, interlanguage pragmatics, and language pedagogy, and undertaken from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics and relational work, the qualitative analysis focuses on the collaborative work products from participatory learning activities of intermediate to advanced learners of German at a large North-American university. Results show the learners' raised awareness and broadened knowledge. In particular, learners became aware that what is judged as (im)polite is dependent on the relationship of the interactants, the gender of the interactants, the sociocultural background, norms, values, and believes of the interactants, the context of the interaction, the affiliations of the evaluator, the sociocultural background, norms, values, and believes of the evaluator, etc. Results also suggest that some of the learners need to develop their pragmalinguistic skills further to fully participate in the evaluation of pragmatically rich target language discourse. Additional studies are needed to explore the impact on the learners' interactional competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recently, research on im/politeness has primarily focused on the role of linguistic strategies while neglecting the contributions of prosody and acoustic cues for communicating politeness. Here, we analyzed a large set of recordings — verbal requests spoken in a direct manner ( Lend me a nickel ), preceded by the word “ Please ”, or in a conventionally-indirect manner ( Can you ) — which were known to convey polite or rude impressions on the listener. The pragmatic imposition of the request was also manipulated ( Lend me a nickel vs. hundred) . Fundamental frequency (f0: mean, range, contour shape), duration, and voice quality (harmonics-to-noise ratio) were measured over the whole utterance and for key constituents within the utterance. Differences in perceived politeness corresponded with systematic differences in continuous utterance measures as well as local acoustic adjustments, defined by both categorical and graded vocal contrasts. Compared to polite utterances, rude requests displayed a slower speech rate, lower pitch, and tended to fall in pitch (or rise less markedly in the context of yes-no questions). The high versus low imposition of a request separately influenced the acoustic structure of requests, with evidence of these effects right at utterance-onset. Results are consistent with theoretical proposals about how prosody functions to convey speaker politeness as one facet of emotive communication. It is suggested that while a specific “prosody of politeness” may not exist, prosodic cues routinely and potently interact with other sources of information to allow listeners to generate inferences about im/politeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The employment of você in current European Portuguese is not clear. Although Brazilian Portuguese has specialised it as an informal pronoun in certain geographical areas within the country, the European variety presents its use in contexts which seem to be contradictory: informal address, formal address and pejorative address. Due to the lack of an in-depth study on the evolution of this form, we have collected data from three different corpora that reflect the real usage of você throughout the twentieth century, since it is from the nineteenth century that você started specialising as an informal pronoun. The results show a decreasing use of this pronoun and a certain degree of polyvalence due to a gradual marginalisation experienced for over one hundred years. As a consequence, the strategy of null subject plus 3sg has emerged as the unmarked politeness strategy in current European Portuguese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WhatsApp provides the opportunity to send and receive text, audio recordings and messages with visual content. To our knowledge, there are no linguistic guidelines for writing WhatsApp messages and people may often be unsure about which politeness strategies and forms of language are appropriate for a specific occasion. This study addresses WhatsApp communication among native speakers of Spanish in Mexico and presents an analysis of a total of 82 WhatsApp messages containing requests sent by 60 native speakers of Spanish who were members of two different groups. The researchers examined verbal means of expressing politeness in the forms of address, opening and closing formulae, the degree of directness, and the amount of syntactic, lexical/phrasal and external modification used in the WhatsApp requests employed by Mexican Spanish speakers. The analysis focused on politeness strategy selection, with the findings obtained showing that people use conventionally indirect strategies and a great deal of syntactic modification. Opening and closing sequences occurred in all of the interactions analyzed. Greetings were preferred over deferential forms of address that could indicate a way of showing solidarity between interactants. The results were examined based on Watts' (2003) concepts of politic behavior and politeness to highlight the pragmalinguistic characteristics of the WhatsApp requests employed by Mexican Spanish users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this, paper we reassess the notion of (in)directness as a tool for the analysis of complaint strategies. Starting from an overview of previous taxonomies of complaints, we show that (in)directness has been used to capture both the degree of explicitness and the degree of face-threat. We argue that it is necessary to disentangle both understandings of (in)directness in order to arrive at a clearer understanding, the distinction between linguistic (in)directness and perceived face-threat being key to the classification of complaint strategies. The proposal, which is based on extensive data analysis of CMC business complaints (e-mail and social media), is more in tune with current theoretical and methodological advances in pragmatics, and it offers accurate insights into degrees and types of linguistic (in)directness in complaints across contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the American politeness phenomena from a comparative perspective between American native speakers and intermediate- or high-level second language learners in mainland China. Both groups are invited to inspect the same ten conversations randomly elicited from the Oral Corpus of California University at San Barbara and evaluate the politeness acceptability in terms of a questionnaire. In that questionnaire, Likert scaling as a bipolar scaling method, also called summative scales, measures either positive or negative responses to a conversation in judging whether it is polite or not. With the assistance of statistical software SPSS 21, it continues to discuss the discrepant understanding of the groups towards the same politeness phenomena. It is found that all the Chinese subjects, though already intermediate- or high-level English learners for at least ten years, are somewhat weak in evaluating American politeness. There is an apparent blocking 'plateau' in their accurately interpreting politeness in naturally occurring American English conversations. The article then conducts a closed follow-up structured review to discuss why Chinese interviewees exhibit strikingly low scores in the questionnaire comparatively so as to complement the quantitative results of politeness judgment with an in-depth qualitative exploration. The main focus was in revealing the panoramic status of second-language learners' politeness acceptability, their underlying explanatory motivations, as well as possible implications for pragmatic teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a growing body of research on impoliteness and conflict talk, the role of accusations in interpersonal conflict has been only addressed in passing. In this paper, we focus on accusations in conflict talk amongst interactants who are in a situation demanding the formation of intimate relationships within a relatively short span of time, namely, the television reality show Big Brother. We examine, in particular, accusation sequences arising in multi-party interactions from the Argentinian and Spanish versions of the show. We analyse the ways in which assertions of fault or wrongdoing are construed as accusations through such responses as denials, counter-accusations and challenges, and the ways in which participants explicitly evaluate each other's behaviour through such sequences. We conclude that accusations are designed primarily to enact moral denunciation or condemnation of another party, and so almost invariably occasion interpersonal disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Email is key in workplace communication. This study examines structure of request emails and display of politeness by Malaysian superiors when writing to subordinates. Authoritative and solidarity-oriented structures with corresponding linguistic strategies were found to reflect different leadership styles, autocratic and democratic. Language and communicative style were influenced by situational context of a request. When face threat and imposition were low, superiors were authoritative and when face threat and imposition were high, they were egalitarian. Email functioned as an equalising medium that enabled superiors to be democratic as well as a channel for power enactment that reinforced hierarchical structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study explores the politeness tendencies that result from attempts to pay bills in Palestinian Society. The significance of this paper rises from the fact that it attempts to highlight potential causes of pragmatic failure and breakdown that might occur in cross-cultural communication. Brown and Levinson's (1987) and Leech’s (1983) models of linguistic politeness are considered as a theoretical framework of the study. Naturally occurring data were collected ethnographically from four situations. Analysis of data shows that paying for meals by Palestinians is rooted in maintaining face which is oriented toward a person's public image. In Palestinian Arabic, it is necessary to preserve the interlocutors' face. The one who pays the bill finds it more important to make his/her addressee feel wanted, and to be considerate of his/her wants and feelings than it is to be honest or direct. Therefore, politeness battles that occur when paying bills in Palestinian society have taken on the pragmatic functions of minimizing the benefit of the self and maximizing the benefit of the others. Such battles are manifestations that aim at expressing intimacy and connectedness. These pragmatic functions of such battles of politeness reflect the role of politeness in Palestinian society as a device utilized by Palestinians to mark, establish, or assert social relationships including connectedness, generosity and solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this study is on a particular type of implied impoliteness in Persian commonly known as tikkeh. Given the lack of critical attention paid to the notion of implied impoliteness in the literature, the present study seeks to explore this issue further by addressing the following questions: (i) What is implied impoliteness? (ii) What are the properties which make it different from other types of conventionalized impoliteness? (iii) For whom is it offensive? And finally (iv) how does one evaluate an implied meaning as offensive? It will be argued that, in the right context, any utterance can potentially be evaluated as a tikkeh which can convey a negative impolite belief about the ratified and/or unratified hearer(s). In this respect, examples from both dyadic and polylogal interactions are provided. Along the way, the influence of relational histories as well as interpersonal expectations are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]