#Sympol12
Professor Jonathan Culpeper
Lancaster University, UK
(Im)politeness: The development of a field of research
This presentation reflects on how the field of (im)politeness studies has developed, notably, its beginnings and the various stages of its development. Along the way, it considers its position relative to other fields, the problem with its name, and opportunities for development that have been missed. It concludes with some thoughts about the current state of the “paradigm”, if that is what it is, and the avenues it is likely to pursue – or indeed could profitably pursue – in the future.
Professor Juliane House (with Professor Daniel Z. Kádár)
Politeness, Globalisation and Translation: More on ‘Polite’ Forms
In this presentation, we explore the impact of globalisation on lingua-cultures by examining the ways in which T/V pronouns are translated in a number of IKEA catalogues appearing in different languages. We continue to exploit our corpus-driven bottom–up and replicable framework, by arguing that T/V pronouns are part of a broader set of expressions. By means of such expressions, language users indicate their awareness of rights and obligations across certain standard situations. It is through translations that discrepancies between the ways in which lingua-cultures use T/V pronouns (and other ritual frame indicating expressions, i.e. RFIEs) may be revealed. Our findings show that even when it comes to seemingly simple language forms such as the T/V pronouns, translators of IKEA catalogues deploy complex translation strategies in order to avoid irritating and/or offending customers. In the presentation, we will examine such strategies in a bottom-up fashion. In addition, we use our investigation to make the broader argument that it is counterproductive to describe globalisation practices from a top–down angle because it is only through bottom–up analyses that such practices are revealed as being far more complex than meets the eye. By discussing this topic, we aim to promote our new journal – Contrastive Pragmatics: A Cross-Disciplinary Journal (Brill) – which along with cross-cultural pragmatics and politeness also features language acquisition and translation.
Professor Andreas H. Jucker
University of Zurich, Switzerland
The rise (and fall) of non-imposition politeness in English
Non-imposition politeness is the stereotypical form of politeness for Present-day English. But it turns out to be a very recent phenomenon. In order to get a more comprehensive picture of politeness forms in requests throughout the twentieth century, a genre-based bottom up methodology is being used. Small-scale sample corpora drawn from the Brown and LOB families of corpora (1931, 1961, 1991 and 2006) are manually searched for relevant forms for subsequent searches in much larger corpora. The results show a sharp increase of non-imposition politeness in the second half of the twentieth century and clear signs of a reduction at the beginning of the twenty-first.
Professor Daniel Z. Kádár (with Professor Juliane House)
Dalian University of Foreign Studies, China; Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary; Anglia Ruskin University, UK
Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions: A New Look at ‘Polite’ Forms
In this lecture, we will introduce a new framework with which we can revisit forms popularly associated with linguistic politeness. We define such forms as ‘ritual frame indicating expressions’ (RFIEs). Such expressions are deployed in settings where it is somehow important to show awareness of the rights and obligations of the interactants, which is of course the essence of ritual frame. The present framework is based on an empirical bottom–up investigation of RFIEs drawn from Mandarin Chinese and English: ‘duibuqi’ (sorry) and ‘qing’ (please) in Chinese, and their English counterparts ‘sorry’ and ‘please’. These expressions are conventionally associated with the speech acts of apology and request, and thus are often (mis)interpreted as ‘forms of politeness’. However, we will show that the link between RFIEs and speech acts is complex and subject to variation across lingua-cultures. What makes the study of such expressions important is the fact that all lingua-cultures are heavily loaded with them, spanning the conventional RFIEs studied in our talk, through honorifics in languages such as Japanese, to terms of address. Note that by delivering a contrastive pragmatic framework, we also intend to promote our new journal – Contrastive Pragmatics: A Cross-Disciplinary Journal (Brill) – dedicated to the bottom up investigation of language use.
