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This paper aims to explore the influences of prosody on (im)politeness perception in intercultural communication. Based on empirical data collected in perceptual experiments, the paper compares the perception of the (im)politeness prosodic properties of L1 German speakers and L2 German speakers of Chinese origin. It was found that the two subject groups show clear distinctions in their (im)politeness perceptions and that prosodic features exert different impacts on (im)politeness perception: L2 German speakers of Chinese origin perceive lower acoustic intensity, more pauses, and lower muscle tension as indicators of higher level of politeness, whereas the opposite holds true for L1 German speakers. In addition, the former demonstrate higher sensitivity to speech rate and modal particle stress than the latter. The study's findings indicate that (im)politeness and prosody perception are influenced by people's first language and home-grown culture, and a prosodic mitigation strategy may not be fully applicable in intercultural communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that attentiveness (kikubari) is a significant aspect of politeness in Japanese. The aim of this paper is to expand on earlier research on attentiveness by using Twitter data and examine how Japanese lay people understand and/or evaluate attentiveness and how attentiveness manifests politeness. The data for this study were 600 Japanese tweets which contain attentiveness. They were coded based on analysis of the content and analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results show that Japanese lay people evaluate attentiveness positively and that they think attentiveness is important in most cases. These results reflect a commonly held belief in Japanese culture, namely that attentiveness is a virtue. In some posts, the demonstrators of attentiveness appeared to infer the needs of the potential recipients and made pre-emptive offers, as they had known the situations of the potential recipients. Attentiveness in such posts coincides with the definition of attentiveness in previous research. In some other posts, attentiveness is used in the sense of consideration, which was included in the conceptualisation of politeness in Japanese. These results confirmed earlier findings and further our understanding of them through concrete examples from Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to explore the realisation and motives of off-record indirectness as a common mode of conversation in naturally occurring social interactions in Jordanian Arabic. It is found that off-record indirectness mirrors speaker's considerateness of the face wants of the speech act recipient, communicating face-threatening acts indirectly. The need to be polite justifies conversation partners' deliberate flouting of Grice's maxims and using conversational implicatures. Indirect means of communication and the employment of abbreviated conversations are also used for humour and as a preferred style and solidarity marker among family members, intimates and closely related people. It is also found that there are instances of off-record indirectness that might be perceived as impolite. In support of other scholars' arguments, the study stresses that instances of off-record indirectness which might be perceived as impolite in terms of first-order politeness are doing interactional facework in terms of second-order politeness. Indirectness, then, may always be face work but is not always politeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we revisit the popular assumption that politeness in languages such as Japanese and Korean with a complex honorific system is crucially different from politeness in languages with no comparably rich honorific repertoires, such as Chinese. We propose a bottom–up, contrastive and corpus-based model through which we challenge this binary view. This model combines interaction ritual and speech acts. As a case study, we compare a set of expressions representing lexico-grammatical honorifics in Japanese and Chinese, i.e., in a so-called "honorific-rich" and a "non-honorific-rich" language. Our results show that the group of honorifics studied work in an essentially comparable fashion, hence disproving the above-outlined binary view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores (im)politeness conceptualizations and evaluations and the moral foundations of lay notions of (im)politeness in Syrian Arabic. The data were collected using an online questionnaire which was administered to 88 native speaking participants. The results show that participants consider politeness and impoliteness as polar opposites; both are viewed as (in)consideration for others, chiefly conveyed through (dis)respect, and upholding/violating appropriate behaviors, respectively. Moreover, the results show that notions of hierarchical respect, face, equity rights, reciprocity, and attending to others' needs are central in motivating participants' views of (im)politeness. These notions are rooted in the moral foundations of authority/respect, fairness/reciprocity, and harm/care. Additionally, interesting findings emerge in that politeness in Syrian Arabic appears to be more of a relational phenomenon, based on morality, which is in line with contemporary views on politeness, than a rational and strategic behavior, as theorized in classical approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first-second order distinction has dominated theoretical discussions about (im)politeness for the past two decades. However, while there has been a lot of emphasis placed on different perspectives on (im)politeness in the field, what constitutes our object of understanding(s) arguably remains somewhat more elusive. In this paper, I suggest that one of the reasons for this is that we have inadvertently conflated (im)politeness-as-perspective (an epistemological issue) with (im)politeness-as-object (an ontological issue), and have largely ignored the latter in ongoing debates about the first-second order distinction. Building on observations about mundane interactions between co-participants who behave in ways we might not typically associate with politeness, I first propose that (im)politeness-as-object encompasses a complex, multi-layered set of first, second and third order evaluations that are reflexively interrelated but nevertheless ontologically distinct. I then suggest that the inherent complexity of (im)politeness-as-object calls for a more nuanced account of (im)politeness-as-perspective in which researchers necessarily draw on different first-order (commonsense, emic, user, folk theoretic) and second-order (academic, etic, observer, scientific theoretic) understandings to varying degrees. I conclude that the multidimensional, prismatic model of (im)politeness that emerges reflects the complex and multifaceted nature of (im)politeness itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Despite the fact that impoliteness research has spanned over three decades, it has been conceptualized persistently in terms of politeness as its binary opposite. In this paper, we endeavor to provide a theoretical framework for studying impoliteness as significant communicative practice. We aim to introduce Levinas' face as an alternative to Goffman's face and identify impoliteness with Levinas' face for the reason that Levinas' face, featuring absolute difference, can only be expressed through the discourse of resistance which manifests in various phenomena commonly categorized as impoliteness. We also argue that impoliteness is essentially the discourse of the authentic Self whose uncompromising difference, though potentially resulting in conflictive phenomena, facilitates understanding between individuals, not as actors, but as unique beings with their individualities and differences. We further contend that impoliteness is ethical in that the discourse of resistance does not aim for power but calls for respect for individual difference as well as responsibility for the Other in an effort to seek equality in human relations which are fundamentally power-laden and unequal. We also provide a case study to apply our theoretical construction of impoliteness to a literary classic, namely, Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" to illustrate our main points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical politeness scholars use Discernment as a second-order metaterm for compulsory social behaviour that is scripted according to circumstances and rank difference. However, in Renaissance courtesy books the Italian verb discernere 'to discern' has a first-order meaning: to individually work out appropriate behaviour when the fit of rules to circumstances is unclear. Discernment1 and Discernment2 appear to contradict each other. This paper addresses a theory gap: a theory of Discernment2 must unravel the link with Discernment1, given that Discernment1 functions as a metaterm in prescriptive politeness sources from a historical period for which scholars believe social practices are determined by Discernment2. Using a self-built corpus of ca. one hundred nineteenth-century etiquette books in US-UK English, French, Italian and Dutch, I conduct a semantic analysis of discern* (92 hits) and its collocate "tact", tact, tatto, takt (575 hits), which point to a practical type of reasoning, to carry out a careful assessment of the unique and complex situation at hand before deciding on a course of action. However detailed etiquette scripts are, discernment (tact) is needed to process the complexity of real-life circumstances. Hence, Discernment1 and 2 appear complementary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a distinction between "conduct politeness" and "etiquette politeness", where the former refers to the propriety of what people do and the latter to the decorum of how people do things. In everyday discourse, the distinction is often fuzzy, but as a second order distinction the terminology provides a useful analytical tool. In the history of politeness in English, a bifurcation into the two types of politeness can be observed in the eighteenth century, and today the distinction provides additional conceptual clarity of the changing theoretical focus during the three waves of politeness theory. After a review of the historical link between morals and manners, a brief case study focuses on their separation in the eighteenth century. A final discussion applies the distinction to the paradox that politeness is often seen as a positive thing that, unfortunately, is on the decline and as a negative thing because it is insincere, superficial and hypocritical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What (im)politeness means changes over time. As these changes are usually gradual, we tend to be relatively unaware of them. However, when changes are abrupt, people not only notice but are also concerned with them. The COVID-19 pandemic entailed such abrupt changes involving new rules most of which are at odds with the rather automatic conventions of politeness that we follow. My aim in this paper is to explore what politeness means to non-academics in the context of the pandemic and how similar or different their understandings are from academic accounts. To this end, I will draw from an online article entitled "Your politeness is a public health hazard", which appeared at the onset of the pandemic, and the user-generated comments it triggered. The discussion is placed within the discursive turn in (im)politeness research, considering its key distinction between first-order and second-order conceptualisations of politeness. The findings suggest that politeness in the pandemic is still mostly understood as consideration for the other, an understanding shared with (im)politeness research. However, posters' views are broader overlapping with understandings of 'civility'. These views manifest their knowledge as observers and participants of social reality but also reveal that they are in dialogue with work in philosophy, sociology and psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In politeness research and other areas, scholars use a range of metaphorical expressions involving the term face, as in "lose face", "threaten face" and "save face", drawing upon Goffman's paper "On face-work" (Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York: Pantheon Books), often through Brown and Levinson's influential theory of politeness (Brown, Penelope & Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The present paper argues that the interactional processes referred to by such expressions are of at least two kinds, here labeled "Observed-Behavior (OB) face-processes" and "Expressed-Attitude (EA) face-processes". X's OB face loss occurs when others negatively evaluate X on the basis of her behavior; X's EA face loss occurs when others convey to X that they do not have the same values as her ("positive face") or act in a way that impedes her freedom ("negative face"). Ten differences between OB and EA face-processes are set out. These differences are not acknowledged in the literature, which, as shown in this paper, leads to much ambiguity and confusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital discourse has emerged as a substantial focus of interest within the pragmatic field. Specifically, (im)politeness practices on social media have increasingly received scholarly attention in the last decade (Tagg, Caroline, Philip Seargeant & Amy Aisha Brown. 2017. Taking offence on social media. Conviviality and conviviality and communication on Facebook. Switzerland: Springer Nature, Palgrave McMillan; Tsoumou, Jean Mathieu. 2020. Analyzing speech acts in politically related Facebook communication. Journal of Pragmatics 167. 80–97). However, research combining COVID-19, Facebook and (im)politeness in a politically polarizing context is still scarce. This paper is an analysis of (im)politeness in Facebook comments posted as reactions to Giuliani's COVID diagnosis. Thus, by combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, the aim of the present paper is twofold: On the one hand, it intends to further our understanding of the manifestation of (im)politeness practices on Facebook through an analysis of reactive comments to Giuliani's Covid-19 diagnosis on BBC news Facebook page. On the other hand, the paper aims to examine how the struggle between impoliteness and politeness divides Facebook users between sympathizers and detractors of the patient. Through a metadiscursive analysis, the identified (im)politeness items are distributed in an uneven fashion, with impoliteness-oriented items prevailing as the dominant macro category against politeness-oriented ones. The findings suggest that users employ different strategies to express or intensify (im)politeness, favoring explicit expressions of impoliteness such as redress/agreement, insults, pointed criticisms/complaints, unpalatable questions and/or presuppositions over others like threats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politeness is one of the stereotypes associated with the British that seems to be crucial in terms of their self-identification and self-perception. The focus of this study is four frequently-used politeness markers: please, thank you, thanks, and sorry. The paper aims to precisely identify the different senses of these words in the newly released corpus of spoken British English, the Spoken British National Corpus 2014. The findings of this analysis reveal that the markers under investigation are primarily used in their core senses, such as politely requesting something, showing gratitude, or apologising; other identified senses include self-correcting and being confrontational or ironic. The analysis of the authentic data helps us classify senses for each of the target words based on different contextual situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the professional context of teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), whose first language is not English but who are required to help learners adhere to target-language (TL) politeness norms and practices. Many of these teachers have had little or no contact with TL countries/cultures and have limited professional training in this area. This paper highlights the specific context of 39 Mexican EFL teachers who reflected on their understandings and "teaching" of politeness. I argue that by employing existing resources and knowledge and with further training, bilingual teachers can be helped to take "possession" of politeness rather than having to unquestioningly teach appropriate, socially-accepted, socially-expected usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the concept of "verbal hygiene" (Cameron, Deborah. 1995. Verbal hygiene. Abingdon, UK: Routledge) to analyze metadiscourses in South Korea regarding a recent innovation in the use of subject honorific markers in the service industry. This innovation, commonly referred to as samwul contay 'inanimate object respect' involves using honorifics when the grammatical subject of the sentence is an inanimate object, typically the products or services being offered to the customer. Critical discourse analysis was conducted of materials produced by language authorities and mainstream media, as well as layperson-produced blogs and reader comments. The analysis shows that the materials mobilized discourses of ungrammaticality and immorality to delegitimize samwul contay, and stigmatize the sales personnel who used it. By applying the concept of "verbal hygiene" to politeness-related metadiscourses, the current paper advances the perspective that politeness is occasioned through the recursive evaluation of linguistic behavior. Rather than being idiosyncratic, these evaluations appeal to established language norms and moral orders. The way that verbal hygiene discourses promote the language usage of the powerful while stigmatizing the powerless demonstrates that politeness relies inherently on socio-historically imbedded discriminatory practices of placing value on the language usage of certain groups, while delegitimizing that of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas previous research on metapragmatic talk has tended to focus on what people say about politeness, the current paper additionally explores how people talk about politeness. More specifically, we extend our analysis to the embodied resources, including gestures and nonverbal behaviour, that people use when enacting politeness talk. The data comes from two semi-structured interviews that we conducted with South Korean participants, both of whom were middle-aged university professors. We subjected the data to three rounds of analysis. First, we thematically coded the content of the narratives, revealing important differences in how these two participants from the same language background conceived of politeness. Second, we analyzed the appearance of verbal and non-verbal markers of deferential politeness. This analysis revealed that the overall bodily comportment of the two participants closely matched the different politeness narratives that they inhabited. Third and finally, we examined how the participants used bodily movements when evoking specific embodied practices related to politeness, and used embodied behaviours to represent abstract politeness-related concepts and map them onto spatial locations. Overall, the analysis shows that metapragmatic talk about politeness is an embodied achievement and thus needs to be treated within the remit of the multimodal turn in politeness research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the concept of 'politeness marker', by proposing the bottom-up and corpus-based model of 'ritual frame indicating expressions' (RFIEs). Our central argument is that, in certain linguacultures, the relationship between 'politeness markers' and politeness itself is significantly stronger than in others. Therefore, any theory which argues that there is a definite relationship between form and politeness - or totally rejects this relationship - is potentially problematic if it does not take a contrastive pragmatic perspective, simply because this relationship is subject to significant linguacultural variation. The contrastive pragmatic study of RFIEs also helps us to determine the relationship between forms and speech acts and, indirectly, politeness. As a case study, we examine in this paper one-word and more complex expressions which are commonly associated with the speech acts of request and apology, drawn from the typologically distant Chinese and English linguacultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the stigma attached to human defecation and people's reluctance to talk about it openly, there are certain communicative situations in which one cannot evade referring to the elimination of body wastes. This is the case of laxative TV commercials, a type of discourse focused on the infrequent or difficult evacuation of the bowels that constitutes a breeding ground for euphemism. In this regard, following a socially-oriented approach to discourse analysis, politeness theory, and cognitive linguistics, the purpose of this paper is to gain an insight into the way euphemism works in a sample of contemporary American TV commercials advertising laxatives. The analysis reveals that euphemism – mostly in the form of metonymy and understatement – and non-euphemistic metaphors and similes serve as face-saving mechanisms for the company's self-presentational purposes and are ultimately used as part of a sales strategy aiming to attract the interest of viewers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focusses on compliment responses in the context of group undergraduate student projects, in a university in Hong Kong. It applies Geoffrey Leech's model of politeness. Although less well known than some other politeness models, it has proved relatively popular in studies of compliment responses, which are often said to involve a clash between the Maxim of Agreement (achieved by agreeing with the complimenter) and the Maxim of Modesty (achieved by mitigating the compliment, thereby disagreeing with the complimenter). This study deploys Leech's most recent work on politeness in the study of compliment responses. Using an innovative variant of the discourse completion task adapted to WhatsApp to collect text messages and metapragmatic comments from undergraduate students in Hong Kong on their messages, it reveals that acceptance strategies are overwhelmingly the most frequent type. This finding adds to the small body of work on compliment responses in Hong Kong cultures, and, more generally, to cross-cultural pragmatics studies on compliment responses. However, the interpretation of this result needs to attend to the detail. The key specific acceptance strategy in our data is the expression of gratitude, and this, we argue, is best accounted for through the Maxim of Obligation, a maxim proposed in Leech's more recent work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human/divine relationship is a dynamic that does not easily fit into existing politeness research frameworks and approaches. This paper will look to explore this relationship further, within the ancient Egyptian Late Ramesside Letters (c. 1099-1069 BCE), in order to explore the limitations of facework and ritual in fully exploring the phenomenon, and offer an alternative approach - the 'community-embedded' model - which expands on principles from both facework and ritual, as well as collective prayer. The use here of the 'community-embedded' approach allows for the analysis of the impact of utterances to and involving God (the divine entity who assumes this role in the communicative interaction) within wider social networks, and how this supports simultaneous relationship maintenance between humans, God, and larger networks specific to the culture under review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to show different terms of address in Lori and how the non-existence of deferential ʃomɑ (V) compared to Persian leads to some misunderstandings. Deferential V substitutes with other terms of address such as fictive kinship terms, formal titles, religious terms, address inversion and indirect address. For this purpose, the data were collected via two methods: (i) interviews (18 informants); (ii) direct observations (27 different contexts). The results obtained from direct observations were collected to check the reliability of interviews. The results demonstrate that politeness is not always a matter of 'non-solidarity' and 'power', but sometimes solidarity plays an essential role in making terms of address politer. Furthermore, social factors such as gender, age and social roles are crucial in determining appropriate terms of address. Lastly, men and women used fictive kinship terms differently. While women addressed their older cousins and affinal relatives by means of fictive kinship terms, men used them for addressing total strangers. This behaviour means that women tend to make a distance from the addressee whereas men try to create solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the use and non-use of please in American and British English requests. The analysis is based on request data from two comparable workplace email corpora, which have been pragmatically annotated to enable retrieval of all request speech acts regardless of formulation. 675 requests are extracted from each of the two corpora; the behaviour of please is analyzed with regard to factors such as imposition level, sentence mood, and modal verb type. Differences in use of please between the two varieties of English can be accounted for by viewing this as a marker of conventional politeness rather than face-threat mitigation in British English and as a marker of relationship asymmetry in American English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special issue on Chinese ‘face’ and im/politeness collectively raise very real challenges for the ways in which the now well-known distinction between first order and second order approaches is conceptualized and operationalized by face and politeness researchers. They highlight the difficulties we inevitably encounter when analyzing face and im/politeness across languages and cultures, in particular, those arising from (1) the use of English as a scientific metalanguage to describe concepts and practices in other languages and cultures, (2) the inherent ambiguity and conservatism of folk concepts such as face and politeness, and (3) the difficulties in teasing out face and im/politeness as important phenomena in their own right. In this paper it is suggested that these issues arise as a consequence of the relative paucity of critical discussion of the first-second order distinction by analysts. It is argued that the first-second order distinction needs to be more carefully deconstructed in regards to both its epistemological and ontological loci. It is suggested that equating first order approaches with an “emic” perspective and second order approaches with a “scientific” perspective masks a number of important distinctions that are too often glossed over by those who make claims to being either first or second order researchers. It is concluded that rather than treating the first-second order distinction as a simplistic dichotomy, it is much more productive to deploy the multiple loci of the first-second order distinction in clarifying the various focal points for analysis and theorization in face and politeness research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through reviewing the historical development of the English term face and the Chinese terms mianzi and lian, and drawing upon examples of the use of the terms mianzi and lian in the business domain in mainland China and explanations of negotiations in which the author has been personally involved, this paper argues that mianzi and lian (and by reference ‘face’) are not sub-concepts lying essentially at the heart of Chinese politeness, but separate concepts which, while overlapping with politeness in some instances, frequently operate in ways which are entirely removed from any accepted notions of politeness. In this way, this paper claims that concern for mianzi and lian in Chinese business interaction is just as likely to engender acts of impoliteness as it is to link with examples of politeness, and concludes that the sooner we accept the disassociation between Chinese ‘face’ and politeness, the more we will find ourselves better placed to understand crucial nuances of cross-cultural interaction between Chinese and non-Chinese interactants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impolite and aggressive behaviour of anonymous users appears to be an important feature of online newspaper comments. This paper identifies and investigates how impoliteness is utilized strategically by newspaper readers to attack the author of an article. Empirical data is drawn from ''Have-your-say'' sections of the Guardian Online, Times Online and Telegraph Online. Results illustrate that impolite moves frequently involve facethreats that question the journalists' authority, credibility and trustworthiness. In the main part of the paper a categorization scheme for different types of impolite moves is introduced and a working definition of impoliteness in the context of ''Have-your-say'' sections presented. After having sketched a number of fundamental methodological and theoretical challenges in impoliteness research, the paper also demonstrates how the communicative setting and medium influence the realization and interpretation of impolite behaviour in those forms of public debates. Given the challenge of identifying and conceptualizing impoliteness in general and more specifically in a computer-mediated environment, netiquette rules prove especially useful for norms of appropriateness. It is also argued that the strength of those face-threats may be boosted by the fact that they are uttered in front of a large audience and more specifically the journalist's readership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue for a different standard to assess the quality of communicative conduct in local governance meetings. Rather than seeing public talk occasions as needing politeness or civility, a better norm, I suggest, is “reasonable hostility”. Emotionally marked criticism of the past and future actions of public persons (i. e., reasonable hostility), I show, is necessary for the able functioning of democratic bodies. Following a critique of politeness theories, including a claim for why Goffman's concept of face is more suitable for exploring situated communicative practices, background on U.S. school governance practices and the particular U.S. school board meetings that are the focus of this paper are provided. Then, I illustrate and analyze recurrent, ordinary kinds of face-attack that occurred in the community's public meetings and provide evidence that meeting participants judged the remarks to be face-attacking. In the paper's concluding section, I describe the situation and face-attack features that distinguish reasonable hostility from unreasonable forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the use of impoliteness by Spanish–English bilingual pre-adolescents as a resource for accomplishing identities in spontaneous conversational interactions in an elementary school setting. The theoretical approach employed integrates the concept of relational work (Locher 2004; Locher and Watts 2005), which is based on Goffman's (1967) notion of face and which privileges participants' evaluation of language behavior within the norms of the community of practice, with recent work in sociocultural linguistics (Bucholtz and Hall 2004a, 2004b, 2005). This approach views identity as an interactional achievement reached through the use of what they call tactics of intersubjectivity. In this analysis, negatively marked, non-politic behavior is viewed as an interactional resource, which, along with other resources such as codeswitching, bilingual speakers may employ for the purposes of alignment and stance-taking. Specifically, the paper examines how speakers use strategies referred to as impolite (cf. Culpeper 1996) in the performance of a variety of tactics of intersubjectivity to manage local identities (e.g., leader/follower, insider/outsider) as well as membership in broad social categories (e.g., gender, ethnic identities) in interaction, how they engage in conflict talk and what they gain from it, and how codeswitching is (and is not) used in interactions. This analysis is situated within the wider social context of language politics and immigration politics in the individual school, the region, and the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many cross-linguistic studies have argued for a positive correlation between politeness and linguistic indirectness. While Anglo-American studies have asserted that this correlation is universal, many non-Anglo-American cross-linguistic studies have argued otherwise. Although indirectness is one of the main stereotypical characteristics attributed to Koreans, and indirectness is used strategically in order to indicate politeness, Korean is unique in having its own language-specific means of indicating politeness (honorifics). This paper investigates the link between politeness and the indirectness of speech acts by analyzing Korean request head act forms produced in the “Discourse Completion Tasks” (DCT) of 50 Korean native speakers. The findings of this empirical study highlight three important aspects of Korean language use in relation to directness and politeness. Firstly, it reveals how Koreans manipulate honorific elements along with the directness level of their speech acts to indicate the social meaning of politeness. Secondly, the paper proposes that the manipulation of honorifics along with the selection of a certain directness level is triggered by socio-cultural constraints unique to Korean society. Thirdly, the findings of the study, that the direct link between politeness and linguistic indirectness is not endorsed in the case of Korean, support the view that the relationship between indirectness and politeness has to be understood from a language- and culture-specific perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the role of translation in the exploration of intercultural communication and the issues that second person forms of address raise when translating humorous texts from English to Spanish, since Spanish differentiates between singular and plural second person pronouns and English does not. With examples taken from film and literature, it will be argued that in translating from English to Spanish, the translator can achieve different humorous effects, such as satire, irony or sarcasm through the conscious choice of tú or usted. It will also be argued that when the translator is translating texts into English s/he should take into account the role of tú and usted as encoders of social relationships and potential face-threats to the speakers. It is for these reasons that address terms should be considered in the translation of humour in order to achieve pragmatic equivalence in the target text. The paper suggests that politeness theory can provide a framework within which to analyze the way in which translators can exploit the potential of second person address forms in the rendering of humour. In this article I will largely be focusing on the filmic representation of workplace relationships and the way that second-person pronouns play a key role in the representations of positions of power and distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special issue of the Journal of Politeness Research arose from a workshop which took place at the University of the West of England, Bristol, in February 2003 entitled ‘Politeness and (business) communication across national borders’. The aim of the workshop was to draw together researchers on politeness in business contexts or in the workplace working mainly on British English with others working on politeness in other cultures or in cross-cultural contexts. Some papers focus more closely on the workplace (Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris; Mullany); others more closely on politeness in different cultural settings (Kerbrat-Orecchioni; Beeching on French; Arnáiz on Spanish) and others on cross-cultural phenomena (Daller and Yıldız on Western European cultures such as the UK and Germany in contrast with Turkey, Belarus and Uzbekistan; Traverso on French and Syrian). The studies, moreover, cover a range of levels of analysis from an extralinguistic to a macro- and micro-linguistic level. The subject of some studies involves a broad consideration of cultural factors, including power and distance, that of others involves an exploration of speech events and linguistic rituals, whilst still others study the implementation of politeness at a micro-level. All of the researchers acknowledge the primacy of the Brown and Levinson politeness framework yet many attempt to adjust the theory so that it accounts in a more satisfying way for the sometimes apparently contradictory nature of the empirical data investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a data-based comparative study of polite behaviour in French and Arabic (Syrian) service encounters. It focuses on the use of conversational routines and rituals, which are not only an important component of interactions in any service encounter, but also a prominent characteristic of Arabic interaction. The first part of the paper is devoted to a presentation of these two notions. The methodological problems raised by contrastive data analysis are then discussed, especially that of choosing comparable situations for conducting fieldwork, and of establishing a linguistic grid of reference for the contrastive analysis. The results of the study presented in part four lead to a discussion of what appear to be specific features of polite behaviour in the French and Syrian corpora. The corpora are composed of interactions audio-recorded in small shops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politeness at work is examined in this paper by focusing on small talk as a form of linguistic politeness in relation to gender in business meetings. The paper embarks on a theoretical discussion of politeness and small talk, and also critically examines recent theoretical developments in the area of language, gender and politeness. Politeness is conceptualized from a communities of practice (CofP) perspective (Mills 2002, 2003). Butler's (1990) model of performativity, along with the CofP approach and the notion of gendered discourses are integrated to form an overall framework for the data analysis. Small talk is analyzed in managerial meetings, drawing on data taken from two ethnographic studies of UK businesses. Small talk is highlighted as a multifunctional device and the importance of power when analyzing politeness in the workplace is emphasized. The analysis indicates that, despite being stereotypically associated with unimportant, trivial feminine discourse, small talk is utilized in powerful ways in the public context of workplace meetings. Women managers use small talk strategically to create solidarity/collegiality, as an in-group identity marker, and also as a device to place social distance between themselves and men within their CofPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes rapport (Spencer-Oatey 2000, 2002) as its central concern, since (im)politeness is typically associated in some way with harmonious/conflictual interpersonal relations. The paper discusses the factors that influence people's dynamic perceptions of rapport, and proposes that there are three key elements: behavioral expectations, face sensitivities, and interactional wants. The paper explores the components of these three elements and uses authentic discourse data to illustrate how people's judgments about rapport can be unpackaged in relation to these elements. The approach enables us to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that influence people's dynamic judgments of rapport, which is essential if we are to understand how and why problems of rapport occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to fill a gap in politeness research by introducing the concept of behavioural politeness and including the hearer as a significant component in the proposed analytical framework, which is set in the context of a cross-cultural study. Research into politeness has predominantly focused on linguistic features and on the speaker. Little attention has been paid to politeness as a whole unit of behaviour, and to the perspective of the hearer/receiver, i. e. how the hearer/receiver would judge politeness. It is proposed that politeness manifested through behaviour, i. e. behavioural politeness, and evaluation of politeness by the hearer/receiver are also important, and this paper takes the evaluation of attentiveness as an example of behavioural politeness using subjects from three cultural backgrounds. An attempt is also made to characterise the cultures (British, Japanese and Swiss) involved in this study in order to clarify this significant variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents an overview of articles published in the January 2004 issue of "Multilingua." The papers in this special issue were initially presented at the Politeness and Power conference held at Loughborough University in England in 2002. The papers range from studies that focus on variation in linguistic behavior within specific institutional contexts and those that address cultural variation in politeness behavior, to discussions that raise fundamental questions about the conceptualization and application of politeness as an analytical tool. Indeed, as the range of contexts within which politeness has been investigated has broadened, so too have the theoretical frameworks that are called on in order to be able to address the questions generated by the findings of such studies. The development of alternative frameworks for analyzing politeness has been triggered by a range of questions, but perhaps most significantly by recurring questions about what it is that we are analyzing when we focus on phenomena that we want to categorize as politeness. The debates that have been generated by this set of questions have a number of strands. Two that are picked up by the papers in this special issue are debates surrounding the distinction between politeness as a term used in scholarship and politeness as a term used by the speakers whose behavior is being subjected to analysis, and debates relating to the different conceptualizations of politeness that are proposed by scholars.

This paper illuminates Japanese politeness orientation by investigating the use of the formulaic expression, yoroshiku onegaishimasu (literal meaning: 'I make a request and I hope things go well') in naturalistic data. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu is frequently used in various contexts, serving various pragmatic functions. The paper discusses the link between its literal meaning and its functions, and reveals a Japanese culture-specific 'face' which is more sensitive to debt than the threat to the freedom of action. By saying yoroshiku onegaishimasu, the speaker clearly indicates that s/he is a debtor or, in other words, the speaker clearly acknowledges s/he benefits (or will benefit) from the hearer. Such an act is considered to be polite in Japanese, and thus yoroshiku onegaishimasu is used in wider contexts. It is argued that caring for the debt credit equilibrium is a significant politeness phenomenon in Japanese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes four frameworks for understanding linguistic politeness (Brown and Levinson, Watts, Terkourafi, Hall) and tests each on the same corpus to see whether they yield results that are useful and/or in keeping with the other information we have about the material. The corpus used consists of 661 polite requests made in letters by a single Roman author, Cicero. The results demonstrate first that politeness theories are helpful as explanatory tools even in dealing with very well-known material, and second that no one theory is best: different theories are more and less useful in answering different questions about the data. It is therefore suggested that the use of multiple frameworks will provide the best understanding of the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests the applicability of Brown and Levinson's concept of off-record politeness on a specific sub-set of patterned dialogues in Sophocles' extant tragedies, i.e., those involving the participation of female speakers. Brown and Levinson's framework still provides the most suitable model for empirical analysis, but with refinements concerning the interrelation between emic and etic politeness, the notion of face, the extension of analysis to longer stretches of conversation, and the absolute ranking of the super-strategies. The survey suggests that a strict connection between the use of off record and the mitigation of FTAs can be established quite straightforwardly and that the hearer's reactions to off record can help to identify the valid instances of the phenomenon. Moreover, it is argued that (a) female speakers frequently resort to off record, most notably in cross-sex interactions with men invested with high power; (b) few restricted categories of male speakers, i.e., strangers and lower-status characters, do use off-record politeness towards women; (c) off record in same-sex interactions among female characters is limited to when the imposition is of extraordinary seriousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the study of linguistic politeness in the Latin language, through the analysis of the speech act of congratulation. Taking the comedies of Plautus ( ca. 254-184 B.C.) and Terence ( ca. 185-159 B.C.) as the corpus, the present study analyses both the possibilities that the speaker has at his/her disposal to express this communicative intention, and the interferences that are produced with other speech acts that are conceptualised in a similar way in the corpus. The article also discusses some of the sociolinguistic distribution tendencies at play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper deferential and strategic or face-based politeness are distinguished (Jucker 2010). The distinction seems to be crucial for a proper understanding of the use of address and self-presentation terms and the address formula in Hittite state correspondence. Namely, the corpus of 80 letters written between c. 1450 and 1190 B.C. shows that the appropriate use of politeness largely reflects the writer's awareness of his place in society, as well as his desire to behave in conformity with culturally expected forms of behavior. Examples of deferential politeness are thus influenced by the relative and absolute social status of communication participants as well as general and socially expected concern for the addressee's face. Examples of real strategic politeness may be observed in symmetric relations where the writer is trying to minimalize a potentially face-threatening act and in some letters to the Hittite king. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the methodology and theory of research on conversational humour in the context of (im)politeness theory, focusing on the production and reception ends (the speaker's intention and the hearer's evaluation respectively). In the light of a critical overview of the relevant scholarship from both humour and impoliteness studies, several notions are elucidated, such as mock (im)politeness or banter. Generally, conversational humour forms may give rise to face-saving and rapport, thereby subscribing to (solidarity) politeness; and/or face-threat and conflict indicative of impoliteness. Moreover, impoliteness can be viewed as a source of humour in its own right, especially in media entertainment discourse. Additionally, one utterance may invite diverging evaluations on the part of the various participants, depending on their interactional statuses: the butt/target or the receiver of humour, which is most pronounced in media discourse. This discussion on the interdependence between humour and (im)politeness is conducted with reference to film talk and is illustrated with humorous extracts taken from the American series entitled "House". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to provide an exemplification of the way that the discursive approach can work in relation to the analysis of data. As such, it argues for the validity of the discursive approach to politeness. Because the discursive approach has been seen as difficult to employ in the analysis of data, in recent years, there has been a proliferation of research returning to Brown and Levinson's approach. Although discursive approaches to politeness have functioned successfully as a critique of Brown and Levinson's work, they are not seen as a means of analyzing politeness and impoliteness in their own right. By tracing the development of the discursive approach to politeness, and by addressing the critiques that there have been, we argue that although the critical role of the discursive approach is paramount to the development of the field, discursive approaches are more than just a critique, and should be seen as constituting an approach to the analysis of politeness as well. As a case in point, we illustrate what a discursive approach consists of through analyzing an intercultural interaction between a group of close friends of Dutch and Italian origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between politeness behaviour and rhetoric by examining the case of the historical Chinese pragmatic act of refusal in epistolary discourse. The analysis presented is based on the hypothesis that it is possible to identify culture-specific choices of rhetorical patterns in certain pragmatic and relational acts. Such patterns, in particular in written genres, originate in culturally-situated rhetorical traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting a discursive approach to politeness (see, for example, Mills 2011), this paper explores spontaneous naturally occurring compliment responses (CRs) in Chinese from a cross-generational perspective. It aims to extend our understanding of the dynamic nature of face and/or politeness in contemporary Chinese. 16 multiparty conversations among two generations of the Chinese in China’s mainland were audio-recorded. Based on evidence provided by the participants in the follow-up interviews, my data analysis yielded two major results: (a) compliments, CRs and CR strategies are not as easily identifiable as previous studies claim; (b) considerable generational variation emerges in the use of CR strategies, viz. the older generation participants were more than twice as likely as the younger to reject a compliment while those in the younger group tended to use Acceptance much more readily. In the discussion, I show how, by using a methodology which emphasizes the interactants’ perceptions obtained through interviews, my study brings to light evidence that intention is not self-evident in performing compliments and CRs. Finding (a) indicates that my emic approach to data analysis provides a useful perspective on the complexity of the notion of intention in studies on speech acts (and perhaps beyond). Finding (b) appears to indicate that the two generations of the Chinese have diverged in their conceptualization of face and/or politeness perhaps due to differences in their early socialization before and after the launch of China’s reform. I also demonstrate how my methodology enables me to seek this generational variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to demonstrate and analyze the behaviours of two Jordanian persons employing different positive politeness strategies in a face-threatening situation. The discussion explicitly centres on the fact that the directionality of politeness could be realized and encoded in the individuals' linguistic choices. The present paper primarily addresses the strategy of displacing the main topic of discussion on the part of Jordanian interlocutors exhibiting a positive politeness direction, in an apology-calling situation, as a way to protect the speaker's face. The discussion is based on the analysis of an exchange between two acquaintances of mine. The main point raised is that though the two neighbours are displaying politeness behaviours that may appear to be in tension -- with one considering his addressee's as well as his own face (neighbour 1) and the other being primarily concerned with his own face (neighbour 2) through his disinclination to get involved in a lengthy conversation and through the displacement of the main topic of discussion -- the two neighbours' behaviours are nevertheless orienting to an over-arching relational goal of maintaining the relationship. This is also to suggest that intracultural differences should be addressed before moving on to discuss cross-cultural differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst computer-mediated communication (CMC) can benefit users by providing quick and easy communication between those separated by time and space, it can also provide varying degrees of anonymity that may encourage a sense of impunity and freedom from being held accountable for inappropriate online behaviour. As such, CMC is a fertile ground for studying impoliteness, whether it occurs in response to perceived threat (flaming), or as an end in its own right (trolling). Currently, first and second-order definitions of terms such as im/politeness (Brown and Levinson, Politeness: Some universals in language use, Cambridge University Press, 1987; Bousfield, Impoliteness in interaction, John Benjamins, 2008; Culpeper, Reflections on impoliteness, relational work and power, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008; Terkourafi, Towards a unified theory of politeness, impoliteness, and rudeness, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), in-civility (Lakoff, Civility and its discontents: Or, getting in your face, John Benjamins, 2005), rudeness (Beebe, Polite fictions: Instrumental rudeness as pragmatic competence, Georgetown University Press, 1995, Kienpointner, Functions of Language 4: 251–287, 1997, Kienpointner, Journal of Politeness Research 4: 243–265, 2008), and etiquette (Coulmas, Linguistic etiquette in Japanese society, Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), are subject to much discussion and debate, yet the CMC phenomenon of trolling is not adequately captured by any of these terms. Following Bousfield (in press), Culpeper (Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence, Cambridge University Press, 2010) and others, this paper suggests that a definition of trolling should be informed first and foremost by user discussions. Taking examples from a 172-million-word, asynchronous CMC corpus, four interrelated conditions of aggression, deception, disruption, and success are discussed. Finally, a working definition of trolling is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates invitations and invitation refusals in Greek and their relationship to politeness within Brown and Levinson's (Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge University Press, 1987) framework. On the basis of data drawn from role plays corroborated with informants' verbal reports, it is argued that age is a determining factor for both the format of the speech event of inviting/refusing and the politeness strategies preferred for its realization. It is shown that the younger age group conceptualize invitations as face-enhancing acts for the addressee, thus, they insist more and prefer positive politeness strategies. By contrast, the older age group conceptualize invitations as addressee face-threatening acts, so they hardly ever insist and appear to favour negative politeness strategies. This latter observation seems to challenge earlier findings regarding the positive politeness orientation of Greek society. However, a closer look at the data reveals that the negative politeness strategies employed are intermingled with positive politeness ones or they function as such in the specific context. These findings bring to the fore a number of issues relating to Brown and Levinson's theory, including the difficulty of drawing a clear-cut distinction between positive and negative politeness strategies and the caution that should be exercised when attributing type of politeness to decontextualized utterances. The findings are further used to offer suggestions for foreign language teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Norms of what are considered appropriate and polite ways of communicating are situated in the cultural context in which interactions occur. This crucial role of culture is particularly apparent in a workplace setting: norms regarding appropriate ways of integrating the competing discourses of power and politeness at work are strongly influenced by wider cultural expectations. Drawing on naturally-occurring data recorded in business meetings in New Zealand and Hong Kong, and using Locher and Watts' (Journal of Politeness Research 1: 9–33, 2005) framework for analyzing relational work, this paper explores how leaders from two white-collar organizations achieve their various workplace objectives while simultaneously adhering to culture-specific politeness norms and expectations. The analysis focuses on just one of the discursive strategies which these leaders employ when performing relational work: humour. This strategy constitutes a versatile and multi-functional tool which assists leaders in achieving their various leadership objectives. It is particularly useful for building rapport with subordinates and mitigating the impact of negatively affective speech acts. The analysis explores how the leaders' use of humour is consistent with culturally specific politeness norms negotiated in the leaders' community of practice; and how by drawing on it the leaders also meet cultural expectations concerning the enactment of effective leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a few introductory remarks on recent impoliteness research, a preliminary definition of impoliteness/rudeness is given. Then the important role emotions play in relation to (im)politeness is briefly sketched, followed by descriptions of some connections between emotional arguments, fallacies and impoliteness. Emotional arguments need not be fallacious nor are they always formulated in impolite ways. However, certain fallacious subtypes of emotional arguments involving appeals to negative emotions tend to be formulated in an impolite way. Such arguments are called “destructive arguments” in this paper. A few case studies of spoken and written passages of argumentative discourse are used to support the hypothesis that certain subtypes of emotional arguments are likely to be destructive. It is also shown, however, that sometimes even fallacious arguments involving positive emotions, such as pity, can be formulated in an impolite way. Finally, it is demonstrated that in certain exceptional cases even rude and fallacious arguments are not (totally) destructive because they ultimately serve some vital interests of the opponent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]