Journal articles on the topic 'Politeness (Linguistics) Sociolinguistics'

This paper presents a critique of politeness theories. As such, it aims to show the shortcomings and defects of the different theoretical foundations and pragmatic models of politeness. This work is hopefully supposed to be significant for the specialists and analysts in the field of pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and conversational analysis, ethnomethodology and communication studies. On the basis of the results of the criticism, it has been concluded that politeness theories suffer from different shortcomings and problems that lessen their efficiency in the successful analysis of interactive communication. Universalism, for instance, is not well-defined by Brown and Levinsons’ theory. Leech’s model is limited to some speech acts. Besides, his model is not clear whether to cover culture-specific as well as cross-cultural aspects of communication.

ABSTRACTThe function of apologies is discussed within the context of a model of interaction with two intersecting dimensions – affective and referential meaning. Apologies are defined as primarily social acts conveying affective meaning. The syntactic, semantic, and sociolinguistic features of apologies are described, based on a corpus of 183 apologies. While apology exchanges divided equally between those which used a combination of strategies and those where a single strategy sufficed, almost all apology exchanges involved an explicit apology. An account is provided of the kinds of social relationships and the range of offenses which elicited apologies in this New Zealand corpus.Apologies are politeness strategies, and an attempt is made to relate the relative “weightiness” of the offense (assessed using the factors identified as significant in Brown and Levinson's model of politeness) to features of the apology strategies used to remedy it. Though some support is provided for Brown and Levinson's model, it is suggested that Wolf-son's “bulge” theory more adequately accounts for a number of patterns in the data. In particular, the functions of apologies between friends may be more complex than a simple linear model suggests. (Apologies, politeness, speech functions, New Zealand English, sociolinguistics, pragmatics)

Facebook forms one of the most widely used online social networks, through which people manage their communication with diverse contacts or ‘friends’, ranging from members of the family and schoolmates to work colleagues and popular cultural idols or other people, whom they admire. Hence, it can be seen as an integral part of people’s digital presence. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is to investigate the ways politeness is constructed in a context, in which it is not very typical to find politeness in the Western world: The reception of birthday wishes. The focus is on the (para)linguistic reception of birthday wishes on behalf of 400 native Greek users of Facebook, aged between 25–35 years old, as evidenced in the ways they respond to birthday wishes posted on their walls. By using a combination of interactional sociolinguistics, discourse-centered online ethnography and offline ethnographic interviews, I argue that native speakers of Greek do not just stick to the politic behavior found in other languages, like English, of personally thanking their friends for their birthday wishes; rather, they employ contextualization cues, such as shifts in spelling, emoticons and punctuation markers, in order to construct frames and footings of politeness by actually reciprocating the wishes they received from their friends. The value of this study lies not only in being, to my knowledge, the first description and interpretation of an important cultural phenomenon for Greeks, which is the exchange of birthday wishes, but also it contributes towards understanding politeness in online environments, such as Facebook, which in turn is used for establishment and maintenance of interpersonal relationships, hence it can lead to smooth communication.

ABSTRACTThis article explores the linguistic practices of Japanese men and women giving directions to subordinates. Previous research on language and gender across a number of languages has equated the speech of women with powerlessness. The literature on Japanese women's speech would support this notion. It characterizes Japanese female speech as soft, polite, indirect, in sum, as powerless. This presents problems for women who must command. The present study, an extension of my previous work on Japanese female speech (Shibamoto 1985, 1987) centered on women in more typically female roles, examines the directives of women in positions of authority in traditional and nontraditional domains and compares them with the directive forms chosen by men in similar positions. Explanations for the differences found are placed within the frameworks of a general theory of politeness and the culturally specific, gendered strategies for encoding politeness and authority in Japanese. (Sociolinguistics, language and gender, politeness)

A study of Thai linguistics works in 2005 shows that most are MA. theses and doctoral dissertations done by Thai students in five universities in Thailand and a few universities in the U.S.. and the UK.. Only three works analyse foreign languages, while the rest investigate the Bangkok Thai dialect. Five main areas are identified: sound and orthography, sociolinguistics, utterance semantics, lexical semantics and syntax-semantic interface. More works focus on the last two areas. With regard to the frameworks used in the analyses, pragmatics, discourse, and speech acts are found most often. Several topics such as village names, politeness, and slang, which have been studied previously, were investigated again in 2005 with different locations or different groups of speakers. Although such investigations may yield additional information on the topics, new questions or new probes into similar data may be preferable.

Virtual interactions are often an extension of face-facing encounters, solidifying in digital spaces as the discursive discourse of racism and sexism practices. Starting from the studies of Sociology, Pragmatics and Interactional Sociolinguistics, our goal is to understand, from Fanon (2008), Van Dijk (2017) Brown and Levinson (1987) and Culpeper (1996; 2011), as the prejudice of materializing in (im) language policy through Facebook posts. We conducted a qualitative, exploratory and descriptive survey whereby we selected a post in a Facebook group about a possible case of harassment between a foreign student and a brazilian student. For this, it selects and analyzes as the most relevant answers, according to the criteria of the social network itself. The results demonstrated how politeness strategies were used both to create a positive image of the potential offender and to solicit support from group members in relation to him; In addition, there is condensation between politeness and impoliteness strategies when the effect was to attack one of the group members, the victim or the supposed aggressor himself. Our investigation shows the historical, ideological, social and contextual foundations for the event, as well as an analysis of the politeness and impoliteness strategies applied by the group participants. Conclude that the statements seek alternate between politeness and linguistic impoliteness for the production of biased messages.

Culture and language are connected in a myriad ways. Proverbs, rules of turn-taking in conversations, pronouns of power and solidarity, background knowledge to the understanding of conversations, politeness, linguistic relativity, the principle of cooperation, metaphor, metonymy, context, semantic change, discourse, ideology, print culture, oral culture, literacy, sociolinguistics, speech acts, and so forth, are just some of the concepts in which we find obvious connections between culture and language. Several disciplines within the language sciences attempt to analyze, describe, and explain the complex interrelations between the two broad areas. (For a brief and clear survey, see Kramsch 1998). Can we approach this vast variety of topics from a more unified perspective than it is traditionally done and currently available? The present paper focus on such possibilities.

This study aimed to present the status quo of linguistic studies on social media in the past decade. In particular, it conducted a bibliometric analysis of articles from the field of linguistics of the database of Web of Science Core Collection with the aid of the tool CiteSpace to identify the general characteristics, major strands of linguistics, main research methods, and important research themes in the area of linguistic studies on social media. The main findings are summarized as follows. First, the study reported the publication trend, main publication venues, researched social media platforms, and languages used in researched social media. Second, sociolinguistics and pragmatics were found to be major strands of linguistics used in relevant studies. Third, the study identified seven main research methods: discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, multimodal analysis, narrative analysis, ethnographic analysis, and corpus analysis. Fourth, important research themes were extracted and classified based on four dimensions of the genre framework of social media studies. They were the participation nature and technology affordances of social media in the dimension of compositional level, the researched topics of education, (language) policy and politics in the dimension of thematic orientations, the researched discursive practices of (im)politeness, humor, indexicality and multilingualism in the dimension of stylistic traits, and the researched communicative functions of constructing identity, communicating (language) ideology, and expressing attitude in the pragmatic dimension. Moreover, linguistic studies on social media tended to be characterized by cross-disciplinary and mixed-method approaches.

Translation does not only deal with language problems but also cultural problems. There are transferring language and culture in translation. Some aspects needs more attention in translation such as linguistics aspects which involve phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. These aspects are able to give a strong basic for a translator to be a good translator. Another aspect that is also important is about form and meaning aspects. Meaning may appeared from various aspects such as the structure of languages, the situation of using language, and the social and culture of languages. The equivalence problems in target language are able to be coped with by giving definition, elaboration, or giving the explanation to the words. A translator should be able to process his translation well in the and a translator also should consider linguistics aspect, acceptability aspects, and politeness. High and low acceptability rate is also influenced by elaborating translator politeness in the translation.AbstrakPenerjemahan bukan sekadar persoalan bahasa, tetapi juga menyangkut masalah budaya. Terdapat alih bahasa dan budaya dalam penerjemahan. Beberapa aspek perlu mendapat perhatian dalam penerjemahan seperti aspek-aspek linguistik yang mencakup fonologi, morfologi, sintaksis, semantik, pragmatik, sosilinguistik, dan psikolinguistik. Aspek-aspek ini dapat memberikan dasar yang kuat bagi seorang ahli bahasa agar dapat menjadi penerjemah yang baik. Hal yang perlu mendapat perhatian adalah unsur bentuk dan makna. Makna bisa ditimbulkan dalam berbagai konteks, makna bisa muncul karena struktur bahasa, situasi penggunaan bahasa, dan sosio-kultur budaya. Masalah keterpadanan makna dalam bahasa sasaran dapat diselesaikan dengan menempuh cara memberikan definisi, elaborasi, atau menerangkan kata-kata tersebut. Penerjemah harus mengolah hasil terjemahannya dengan baik dalam proses penerjemahan. Penerjemah juga harus mempertimbangkan aspek-aspek linguistik, aspek keberterimaan, dan kesantunan berbahasa. Tinggi rendahnya nilai keberterimaan juga dipengaruhi oleh kesantunan berbahasa penerjemah dalam menguraikan hasil terjemahan.

Abstract This paper is devoted to the analysis of the use of hedging in a corpus of articles from applied linguistics, and in this sense, it is complementary to the previous research of academic persuasion in research articles (Hinkel, 1997; Hyland, 1996, 2004). This study examined the types and frequency of hedges employed by the authors of academic research articles (RAs) in the field of applied linguistics. A corpus consists of 20 research articles, randomly selected from the Open Access Journals on Educational linguistics (5 RAs), Psycholinguistics (5 RAs), Sociolinguistics (5 RAs) and Pragmatics (5 RAs) The data were manually coded according to Hyland’s taxonomy of hedges and hedging devices (Hyland, 1996) and then formatted to calculate the frequency and type of hedges in RAs on Applied Linguistics. Results of the study indicate that reader-oriented hedges constitute the main pragmatic type of hedges in RAs in the field of applied linguistics, recognizing the need for reader’s ratification of the author’s claims and politeness conventions of academic discourse per se. Combination of qualitative and quantitative methods applied to computer readable data proved that hedges in RAs on Applied Linguistics are topic dependent, showing differences in typology, frequency and distribution even within one discipline.

Every social and cultural community has its own appropriate ways and forms to address someone. Addressing someone in appropriate way is a sign of respect and honorific. This paper describes various uses of address forms in Japanese society. Japanese society has four address forms in common: ―chan, ―kun, ―san, and ―sama forms. They are related to social dimensions: social distance scale, status scale, and formality scale. In addition, background of various uses of the forms in perspective of sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics is thought as reflection of cultural aspects which exist in Japanese society. Those are politeness-deference aspects, seniority-junior aspects, and insider-outsider aspects. Finally, there are two major findings of this study: (1) various uses of address forms in Japanese society and cultural relation to social dimensions, (2) various uses of address forms in Japanese society and Japanese culture as a reflection of cultural aspects. Setiap komunitas sosial dan budaya memiliki cara-cara dan bentuk-bentuknya sendiri untuk memanggil seseorang. Memanggil seseorang dengan cara yang tepat adalah sebagai tanda penghargaan dan penghormatan. Penelitian ini adalah tentang perbedaan penggunaan bentuk panggilan dalam masyarakat Jepang. Secara umum, masyarakat Jepang memiliki empat bentuk panggilan yaitu –chan, -kun, -san, dan –sama. Perbedaan dalam menggunakan bentuk tersebut dikaitkan dengan dimensi sosial contohnya skala jarak sosial, status sosial, dan formalitas. Sedangkan dalam perspektif sosiolinguistik dan linguistik antropologi, latar belakang perbedaan dalam menggunakan bentuk-bentuk sapaan adalah sebagai refleksi aspek budaya yang ada dalam masyarakat Jepang seperti aspek-aspek kesopanan-penghargaan, aspek-aspek senioritas-junioritas, dan aspek-aspek ke dalam dan ke luar. Dari penelitian ini didapat dua temuan utama: (1) perbedaan dalam menggunakan bentuk-bentuk sapaan di masyarakat Jepang dan budaya yang berkaitan dengan dimensi social, (2) perbedaan dalam menggunakan bentuk-bentuk sapaan dalam masyarakat dan budaya Jepang sebagai refleksi aspek budaya.

Effective communication between people from different cultures requires not only the ability to speak a common language but also an awareness of sociocultural rules and sociolinguistics features, an important one being speech acts the realization of which realization by Emirati non-native speakers of English has not been studied sufficiently. This paper investigates a particularly face-threatening speech act - refusals. It explores Emiratis comfort level and the use of the refusal speech act in communicative exchanges with unknown tourists. The data set consisted of 94 participant responses to a pre-instructional activity in an introductory linguistics class. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data sets. The key findings suggest that both male and female participants were rather comfortable conversing with a tourist couple that they had never met, but male participants reported being more at ease accepting the couples request to take a photo with the tourists at a statistically significant level. While more than half of the participants reported willingness to take the photo with the tourists, approximately 41.5% would decline such a request, with significantly more females declining the request. The most frequent components of the refusal speech act included a statement of regret, a thank-you note, and an excuse, reason, or explanation. Results also showed that linguistic devices for positive politeness purposes were used rather sparingly, and it was mainly the females who used them. Based on the results, it is helpful for visitors to the UAE to be mindful of Emiratis' sociocultural and sociolinguistic behaviors so that the nuances of communication can be understood and responses are appropriate, which can reduce the likelihood of communication breakdowns and increase the well-being of all involved in the interaction.

ABSTRACTThis article presents an analysis of gender differences in the use of compliments in one genre of written discourse. The data base is a set of 47 peer reviews of academic papers written by graduate students in the form of letters. Drawing on work from several theoretical perspectives, we analyzed the forms, strategies, and discourse functions of compliments in these papers. We found that women made significantly greater use of compliment intensifiers and personal referencing than did men. In using compliments to structure discourse, women more often framed the text with both opening and closing compliments. Consistent patterns suggested that women writers accommodated to the gender of their addressee more than did men, resulting in a discernible female-female complimenting style. The study illustrates specific ways that gender is involved in being polite and in creating and sustaining a sense of involvement in written discourse. (Complimenting, politeness, sociolinguistics, gender, discourse strategies, cross-sex communication, English)

This article is intended to show that Sociolinguistics background influences linguistic behavior among people. The way people communicate with other is vary based on their Sociolinguistics background; included the way to show Politeness. Thus, the difference Sociolinguistics background will determine the linguistic Politeness. Politeness is a concept which seeks to give respect to other when we are speaking. Some Sociolinguistics backgrounds that determine Linguistic Politeness, such as: power relationship and social distance, education, social status, job profession, gender, and ethnicity

Politeness in Afrikaans: a sociolinguistic perspectiveThis article argues that because the phenomenon of linguistic politeness is embedded in a particular linguistic community, linguistic politeness should in the first instance be studied from sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspectives. Using Afrikaans examples, different types of linguistic politeness are identified. The identified politeness types are discussed with special reference to conversational politeness, directives, complaints and honorifics. It is also argued that the specific choice of lexical items and ‘in group’ variants can be regarded as a form of linguistic politeness. A feminist perspective on politeness clearly illustrates that linguistic politeness is an everchanging, dynamic concept which is closely linked to both interpersonal and societal associations which prevail at a specific point in time.

Linguistic politeness is considered a vexed question amid scholars and researchers alike which still, up to the date, a disputed phenomenon in the discipline of linguistics. This paper reports on a study that examined the gender differences in the stereotypical assumption that women are more polite than men in the use of request by the application of the Linguistic politeness marker (please) by Egyptians (Egypt, Mansours city). In the literature of linguistic politeness, the are many pioneers in the area as Culpeper et al. (2019) says that Maria Sifianou has enriched politeness research and pragmatics, viz. the inspection of the relationship amid universality and politeness. Furthermore, Leech (2014, p. 162) ,in The Pragmatics of Politeness, points out three different degrees of politeness from semantic sight in the account of the linguistic politeness marker "please" (a) Politeness marker (b) Illocutionary marker and (c) Information question marker. However, the linguistic politeness marker "please" is used to be uttered in requests as a general term to mitigate or soften the directive force of the speech event to addressee. Researchers and scholars who address the speech event request have spent considerable effort in classifying the variety of strategies for requesting in Anglophone. Moreover, Brown and Levinson’s model (1987, p. 68–9) proposed five “superstrategies” for doing FTAs, of which requests were a paradigm case. In this study, the data were collected from the Egyptians riders who were going to their destinations in Mansoura city, Egypt. There are two groups (a) women (100) and (b) men (100). The participants are speaking in the local vernacular Arabic (Egyptian dialect). They came from random social background. Further, there are a table and a chart to illustrate the gender differences amid the two groups of women and men.

This paper addresses Geoffrey Leech's (2014) three semantic classifications of apology on The Portrait of a Lady which was written by Henry James. The researchers apparently address Leech’s three semantic classifications and also there are two charts and a statistic table in order to be scientific while answering the preceding assumption about gender differences in apology strategies. Apology strategies sound well-known in Anglophone. In the literature of gender, this paper targets the linguistic politeness and gender to give the readers extra vision by studying the fiction. Moreover, the researchers' purpose in this paper is to address the stereotypical assumption that women used to be politer than men. In order to find out whether these differences in number of utterances by the two groups are statistically significant or not, the researchers have used some statistical tools, namely a (T-test). An analysis of the linguistic politeness and gender can help to deep insight into each character’s personae and experiences in the fiction as well as appreciate the special gist of the fiction as well.

The researcher wanted to evaluate the students’ opinion of using media of advertisements in order to get the deep description of the understanding of linguistic theory. Using media of advertisement is one of the techniques in increasing students’ understanding of linguistic matters, especially in teaching sociolinguistics, especially in politeness and gender concept. In digital era, using media of advertisement is familiar media seen by the students that is using gadget actively. The research aims at students’ perception of the use of media of advertisements in teaching sociolinguistics. The descriptive research was employed to this research. A group of students in a classroom using this media of advertisements is the population and the sample of this research. There were 10 students of the third year of STIBA Persada Bunda Pekanbaru through media of advertisement during 2017/2018 academic year. In collecting data, the students were asked to watch two videos from media of advertisements relating to politeness and gender. Then, in analysing data, the researcher used six questions relating to politeness and gender to the students by semi structured interview. The result indicated that most of the students motivated in obtaining information and enjoyed during the learning process and media of advertisement also increased their curiosity in understanding politeness and gender concepts of teaching sociolinguistics.

SETTING: The University of Arizona's idyllic desert campus. As in many colleges across the United States, ‘formalist’ linguistics is implicitly understood to be at cross-purposes with ‘functionalist’ linguistics. The Linguistics Department's only course on non-minimalist syntax is famously nicknamed ‘Bad Guys’. Although the linguistics department forms a unified front, malcontent quietly simmers across campus as functionalist sociolinguists, discourse analysts, grammaticalization specialists and linguistic anthropologists outnumber formalists, though they roam within their own language-department fiefdoms. Politeness and cooperation reign among senior faculty linguists, who have realized that antagonism only hurts students and programs in all the language sciences. The junior faculty are more brash: they work hard, publish a lot, and speak loudly to get tenure as respected form/functionalists. They socialize together and joke about each other's positions, but don't talk very much serious shoptalk. Until now …

The Routledge Handbook of language and culture represents a comprehensive study on the inextricable relationship between language and culture. It is structured into seven parts and 33 chapters. Part 1, Overview and historical background, by Farzad Sharifian, starts with an outline of the book and a synopsis of research on language and culture. The second chapter, John Leavitt’s Linguistic relativity: precursors and transformations discusses further the historical development of the concept of linguistic relativity, identifying different schools’ of thought views on the relation between language and culture. He also tries to demystify some misrepresentations held towards Boas, Sapir, and Whorf’ theories (pp. 24-26). Chapter 3, Ethnosyntax, by Anna Gladkova provides an overview of research on ethnosyntax, starting from the theoretical basis laid by Sapir and Whorf and investigates the differences between a narrow sense of ethnosyntax, which focuses on cultural meanings of various grammatical structures and a broader sense, which emphasises the pragmatic and cultural norms’ impact on the choice of grammatical structures. John Leavitt presents in the fourth chapter, titled Ethnosemantics, a historical account of research on meaning across cultures, introducing three traditions, i.e. ‘classical’ ethnosemantics (also referred to as ethnoscience or cognitive anthropology), Boasian cultural semantics (linguistically inspired anthropology) and Neohumboldtian comparative semantics (word-field theory, or content-oriented Linguistics). In Chapter 5, Goddard underlines the fact that ethnopragmatics investigates emic (or culture-internal) approaches to the use of different speech practices across various world languages, which accounts for the fact that there exists a connection between the cultural values or norms and the speech practices peculiar to a speech community. One of the key objectives of ethnopragmatics is to investigate ‘cultural key words’, i.e. words that encapsulate culturally construed concepts. The concept of ‘linguaculture’ (or languaculture) is tackled in Risager’s Chapter 6, Linguaculture: the language–culture nexus in transnational perspective. The author makes reference to American scholars that first introduced this notion, Paul Friedrich, who looks at language and culture as a single domain in which verbal aspects of culture are mingled with semantic meanings, and Michael Agar, for whom culture resides in language while language is loaded with culture. Risager himself brought forth a new global and transnational perspective on the concept of linguaculture, i.e. the use of language (linguistic practice) is seen as flows in people’s social networks and speech communities. These flows enhance as people migrate or learn new languages, in permanent dynamics. Lidia Tanaka’s Chapter 7, Language, gender, and culture deals with research on language, gender, and culture. According to her, the language-gender relationship has been studied by researchers from various fields, including psychology, linguistics, and anthropology, who mainly consider gender as a construct that preserves inequalities in society, with the help of language, too. Tanaka lists diachronically different approaches to language and gender, focusing on three specific ones: gender stereotyped linguistic resources, semantically, pragmatically or lexically designated language features (including register) and gender-based spoken discourse strategies (talking-time imbalances or interruptions). In Chapter 8, Language, culture, and context, Istvan Kecskes delves into the relationship between language, culture, and context from a socio-cognitive perspective. The author considers culture to be a set of shared knowledge structures that encapsulate the values, norms, and customs that the members of a society have in common. According to him, both language and context are rooted in culture and carriers of it, though reflecting culture in a different way. Language encodes past experience with different contexts, whereas context reflects present experience. The author also provides relevant examples of formulaic language that demonstrate the functioning of both types of context, within the larger interplay between language, culture, and context. Sara Miller’s Chapter 9, Language, culture, and politeness reviews traditional approaches to politeness research, with particular attention given to ‘discursive approach’ to politeness. Much along the lines of the previous chapter, Miller stresses the role of context in judgements of (im)polite language, maintaining that individuals represent active agents who challenge and negotiate cultural as well as linguistic norms in actual communicative contexts. Chapter 10, Language, culture, and interaction, by Peter Eglin focuses on language, culture and interaction from the perspective of the correspondence theory of meaning. According to him, abstracting language and culture from their current uses, as if they were not interdependent would not lead to an understanding of words’ true meaning. David Kronenfeld introduces in Chapter 11, Culture and kinship language, a review of research on culture and kinship language, starting with linguistic anthropology. He explains two formal analytic definitional systems of kinship terms: the semantic (distinctions between kin categories, i.e. father vs mother) and pragmatic (interrelations between referents of kin terms, i.e. ‘nephew’ = ‘child of a sibling’). Chapter 12, Cultural semiotics, by Peeter Torop deals with the field of ‘semiotics of culture’, which may refer either to methodological instrument, to a whole array of methods or to a sub-discipline of general semiotics. In this last respect, it investigates cultures as a form of human symbolic activity, as well as a system of cultural languages (i.e. sign systems). Language, as “the preserver of the culture’s collective experience and the reflector of its creativity” represents an essential component of cultural semiotics, being a major sign system. Nigel Armstrong, in Chapter 13, Culture and translation, tackles the interrelation between language, culture, and translation, with an emphasis on the complexities entailed by translation of culturally laden aspects. In his opinion, culture has a double-sided dimension: the anthropological sense (referring to practices and traditions which characterise a community) and a narrower sense, related to artistic endeavours. However, both sides of culture permeate language at all levels. Chapter 14, Language, culture, and identity, by Sandra Schecter tackles several approaches to research on language, culture, and identity: social anthropological (the limits at play in the social construction of differences between various groups of people), sociocultural (the interplay between an individual’s various identities, which can be both externally and internally construed, in sociocultural contexts), participatory-relational (the manner in which individuals create their social–linguistic identities). Patrick McConvell, in Chapter 15, Language and culture history: the contribution of linguistic prehistory reviews research in this field where historical linguistic evidence is exploited in the reconstruction and understanding of prehistoric cultures. He makes an account of research in linguistic prehistory, with a focus on proto- and early Indo-European cultures, on several North American language families, on Africa, Australian, and Austronesian Aboriginal languages. McConvell also underlines the importance of interdisciplinary research in this area, which greatly benefits from studies in other disciplines, such as archaeology, palaeobiology, or biological genetics. Part four starts with Ning Yu’s Chapter 16, Embodiment, culture, and language, which gives an account of theory and research on the interplay between language, culture, and body, as seen from the standpoint of Cultural Linguistics. Yu presents a survey of embodiment (in embodied cognition research) from a multidisciplinary perspective, starting with the rather universalistic Conceptual Metaphor Theory. On the other hand, Cultural Linguistics has concentrated on the role played by culture in shaping embodied language, as various cultures conceptualise body and bodily experience in different ways. Chapter 17, Culture and language processing, by Crystal Robinson and Jeanette Altarriba deals with research in the field of how culture influence language processing, in particular in the case of bilingualism and emotion, alongside language and memory. Clearly, the linguistic and cultural character of each individual’s background has to be considered as a variable in research on cognition and cognitive processing. Frank Polzenhagen and Xiaoyan Xia, in Chapter 18, Language, culture, and prototypicality bring forth a survey of prototypicality across different disciplines, including cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology. According to them, linguistic prototypes play a critical part in social (re-)cognition, as they are socially diagnostic and function as linguistic identity markers. Moreover, individuals may develop ‘culturally blended concepts’ as a result of exposure to several systems of conceptual categorisation, especially in the case of L2 learning (language-contact or culture-contact situations). In Chapter 19, Colour language, thought, and culture, Don Dedrick investigates the issue of the colour words in different languages and how these influence cognition, a question that has been addressed by researchers from various disciplines, such as anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, or neuroscience. He cannot but observe the constant debate in this respect, and he argues that it is indeed difficult to reach consensus, as colour language occasionally reveals effects of language on thought and, at other times, it is impervious to such effects. Chapter 20, Language, culture, and spatial cognition, by Penelope Brown concentrates on conceptualisations of space, providing a framework for thinking about and referring to objects and events, along with more abstract notions such as time, number, or kinship. She lists three frames of reference used by languages in order to refer to spatial relations, i.e. a) an ‘absolute’ coordinate system, like north, south, east, west; b) a ‘relative’ coordinate system envisaged from the body’s standpoint; and c) an intrinsic, object-centred coordinate system. Chris Sinha and Enrique Bernárdez focus on, in Chapter 21, Space, time, and space–time: metaphors, maps, and fusions, research on linguistic and cultural concepts of time and space, starting with the seminal Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which they denounce for failing to situate space–time mapping within the broader patterns of culture and world perspective. Sinha and Bernárdez further argue that although it is possible in all cultures for individuals to experience and discuss about events in terms of their duration and succession, the specific words and concepts they use to refer to temporal landmarks temporal and duration are most of the time language and culture specific. Chapter 22, Culture and language development, by Laura Sterponi and Paul Lai provides an account of research on the interplay between culture and language acquisition. They refer to two widely accepted perspectives in this respect: a developmental mechanism inherent in human beings and a set of particular social contexts in which children are ‘initiated’ into the cultural meaning systems. Both perspectives define culture as “both related to the psychological make-up of the individual and to the socio-historical contexts in which s/he is born and develops”. Anna Wierzbicka presents, in Chapter 23, Language and cultural scripts discusses representations of cultural norms which are encoded in language. She contends that the system of meaning interpretation developed by herself and her colleagues, i.e. Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), may easily be used to capture and convey cultural scripts. Through NSM cross-cultural experiences can be captured in a thorough manner by using a reduced number of conceptual primes which seem to exist in all languages. Chapter 24, Culture and emotional language, by Jean-Marc Dewaele brings forth the issue of the relationship between language, culture, and emotion, which has been researched by cultural and cognitive psychologists and applied linguists alike, although with some differences in focus. He considers that within this context, it is important to see differences between emotion contexts in bilinguals, since these may lead to different perceptions of the self. He infers that generally, culture revolves around the experience and communication of emotions, conveyed through linguistic expression. The fifth part starts with Chapter 25, Language and culture in sociolinguistics, by Meredith Marra, who underlines that culture is a central concept in Interactional Sociolinguistics, where language is considered as social interaction. In linguistic interaction, culture, and especially cultural differences are deemed as a cause of potential miscommunication. Mara also remarks that the paradigm change in sociolinguistics, from Interactional Sociolinguistics to social constructionism reshaped ‘culture’ into a more dynamic as well as less rigid concept. Claudia Strauss’ Chapter 26, Language and culture in cognitive anthropology deals with the relationship between human society and human thought/thinking. The author contends that cognitive anthropologists may be subdivided into two groups, i.e. ones that are concerned with the process of thinking (cognition-in-practice scholars), and the others focusing on the product of thinking or thoughts (concerned with shared cultural understandings). She goes on to explore how different approaches to cognitive anthropology have counted on units of language, i.e. lexical items and their meanings, along with larger chunks of discourse, as information, which may represent learned cultural schemata. Part VI starts with Chapter 27, Language and culture in second language learning, by Claire Kramsch, in which she makes a survey of the definition of ‘culture’ in foreign language learning and its evolution from a component of literature and the arts to a more comprehensive purport, that of culturally appropriate use of language, along with an appropriate use of sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic norms. According to her, in the postmodern era, communication is not only mere transmission of information, it represents construal and positioning of the self and of self-identity. Chapter 28, Writing across cultures: ‘culture’ in second language writing studies, by Dwight Atkinson focuses on the usefulness of culture in second-language writing (SLW). He reviews several approaches to the issue: contrastive rhetoric (dealing with the impact of first-language patterns of text organisation on writers in a second language), or even alternate notions, like‘ cosmopolitanism’, ‘critical multiculturalism’, and hybridity, as of late native culture is becoming irrelevant or at best far less significant. Ian Malcolm tackles, in Chapter 29, Language and culture in second dialect learning, the issue of ‘standard’ Englishes (e.g., Standard American English, Standard Australian English) versus minority ‘non-standard’ speakers of English. He deplores the fact that in US specialist literature, speaking the ‘non-standard’ variety of English was associated with cognitive, cultural, and linguistic insufficiency. He further refers to other specialists who have demonstrated that ‘non-standard’ varieties can be just as systematic and highly structured as the standard variety. Chapter 30, Language and culture in intercultural communication, by Hans-Georg Wolf gives an account of research in intercultural education, focusing on several paradigms, i.e. the dominant one, investigating successful functioning in intercultural encounters, the minor one, exploring intercultural understanding and the ‘deconstructionist, and or postmodernist’. He further examines different interpretations of the concepts associated with intercultural communication, including the functionalist school, the intercultural understanding approach and a third one, the most removed from culture, focusing on socio-political inequalities, fluidity, situationality, and negotiability. Andy Kirkpatrick’s Chapter 31, World Englishes and local cultures gives a synopsis of research paradigm from applied linguistics which investigates the development of Englishes around the world, through processes like indigenisation or nativisation of the language. Kirkpatrick discusses the ways in which new Englishes accommodate the culture of the very speech community which develops them, e.g. adopting lexical items to express to express culture-specific concepts. Speakers of new varieties could use pragmatic norms rooted in cultural values and norms of the specific new speech community which have not previously been associated with English. Moreover, they can use these new Englishes to write local literatures, often exploiting culturally preferred rhetorical norms. Part seven starts with Chapter 32, Cultural Linguistics, by Farzad Sharifian gives an account of the recent multidisciplinary research field of Cultural Linguistics, which explores the relationship between language and cultural cognition, particularly in the case of cultural conceptualisations. Sharifian also brings forth illustrations of how cultural conceptualisations may be linguistically encoded. The last chapter, A future agenda for research on language and culture, by Roslyn Frank provides an appraisal of Cultural Linguistics as a prospective path for research in the field of language and culture. She states that ‘Cultural Linguistics could potentially create a paradigm that “successfully melds together complementary approaches, e.g., viewing language as ‘a complex adaptive system’ and bringing to bear upon it concepts drawn from cognitive science such as ‘distributed cognition’ and ‘multi-agent dynamic systems theory’.” She further asserts that Cultural Linguistics has the potential to function as “a bridge that brings together researchers from a variety of fields, allowing them to focus on problems of mutual concern from a new perspective” and most likely unveil new issues (as well as solutions) which have not been evident so far. In conclusion, the Handbook will most certainly serve as clear and coherent guidelines for scholarly thinking and further research on language and culture, and also open up new investigative vistas in each of the areas tackled.

Im/politeness research has been a solid and growing research field in sociolinguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis during the last four decades. The scientific interest in this topic is not accidental and may be explained by the general pragmatic turn of modern interdisciplinary linguistic studies which are not focused on language as an abstract system, but on its functioning in various contexts and types of interaction. Knowledge of the strategies and politeness mechanisms used in various social and cultural contexts promotes mutual understanding in communication. In this introduction to the special issue on im/politeness in global contexts we will briefly position the topic of im/politeness research, and highlight advancements in im/politeness theory, method and data. We then turn to a brief synopsis of each individual paper and highlight the theoretical and methodological contributions and innovations proposed by our authors. We end with a discussion of the results and a brief outlook on future research.

In order to determine if offensiveness was a necessary trait to characterize certain expression as a swear word by the speakers, this paper presents a pilot experiment designed for this purpose. Based on the statistical analysis of the data, we show that these two concepts ("offensiveness" and "swear word") are not correlated. Next, we focus our considerations on "offensiveness" in works about the linguistic and sociolinguistic politeness, specifically regarding the social contexts and the influence of the gender role on certain linguistic uses.

Abstract The speech act of greeting is one of the most frequent linguistic interactional routines performed among the Maasai of Arusha in Tanzania. The structure of their greetings demonstrates a number of culturally specific features of Maasai society, illuminated by analysing data collected through interviews and non-participatory observations of both men and women. The structure of Maasai greetings highlights the importance of maintaining gentility and exercising deference in everyday affairs. Politeness and civility are demonstrated by acknowledging vertical ranking between those who greet each other; sustaining propriety is determined by recognition of social status and by a heightened gender sensitivity which is ever present. Good manners are performed not only by following verbal codes scrupulously, such as tone of voice and word choice; non-verbal signals are just as important in the demonstration of Maasai etiquette; these include the posture adopted when a greeting is initiated, the adjustment of spatial distance and by whom once a greeting has commenced, the manner of shaking hands, as well as the length of time spent greeting.

Gender and language studies in general have not been fully explored in most parts of the globe particularly in Nigeria. The objective of the study therefore was to examine the politeness and hedging strategies in the English language conversation of Igbo native speakers in Nigeria as well as establish whether men and women’s conversational styles have been gendered As a cross-sectional questionnaire and interview-based survey, the sample population was studied by means of ten-item questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Task and structured interview at seven Universities systematically selected from the South-East and South-South geo-political zones in Nigeria. The study instruments were completed, returned, transcribed and statistically analysed using the quantitative and qualitative tools for analysis of production and perception data respectively. Results showed that politeness and hedging are indispensable sociolinguistic elements in the conversational English of the study sample. Also, results revealed that to accomplish a communicative goal, the samples adopted different politeness/hedging strategies given the discourse situation. Also, findings showed that the female respondents were found to adhere more to linguistic politeness principles than their male counterparts considering the context hence demonstrating a difference in conversational style. The study found evidence to establish that females are more polite than males in conversations. In conclusion, findings of this study showed that respondents yielded to certain sociolinguistic factors such as age, culture, hierarchy, disposition and religion as they were believed to inform the use of a particular strategy or another.

AbstractThis article explores variation in the language of male characters in the plays of the Athenian playwright Aristophanes, using Thesmophoriazusae and Frogs as in-depth case studies. Studies of modern languages have shown that men’s linguistic practices can be just as marked for gender as women’s, and the data from these plays bears this out. Using past work on ‘female speech’ as a starting point, this article explores the incidence of gendered markers in male characters’ speech, and shows that some of these features characterise not just gender but the intersection of different aspects of identity including gender, social class and sexuality. These features include particular oaths, obscenities, certain uses of the particle ge, hedging and politeness strategies. The article shows that a lack of male-associated speech markers is enough to characterise a male Greek speaker as ‘unmanly’, without the addition of female-associated speech markers.

This study focuses on the politeness used in the acceptance speeches of all winners of the Cervantes Prize, since its origins in 1976 until 2017. The objective is to carry out a quantitative and qualitative study to verify if the use of the forms of politeness at the beginning and end of these acceptance discourses is related to some sociolinguistic variables, such as the origin of the author, sex, and ideology, and if diachronic changes have taken place. The research methodology is based on three notions: discourse, courtesy and gender. We start from a pragmatic and interactive approach to discourse, conceived as a linguistic cognitive process and as a social linguistic product (Van Dijk 2012). Regarding politeness from a functional point of view is an individual and group identity strategy, which highlights the social image of a person and reinforces the individual one (Bravo 2004), it is also the backbone of these discourses. They respond to a prototypical model (Bajtin, 1982) of protocolar discourse, written to be read in front of an institutional audience that recognizes its literary and professional value. All these discourses have in common semantic-pragmatic characteristics, although the fact of being elaborated by masters of the language and literature of Spain and Latin America makes them personal, original and unique.

This paper posits that certain “qualificatory” semantic primes are recruited to serve face-management needs in a metonymic Meaning1>Meaning2 relationship at what Traugott and Dasher (2002) have called the inter­subjective, non-truth-conditional, procedural, scope-over-discourse end of the trajectory of pragmatico-semantic change. Terms expressing smallness, approximativeness, demurral/correction, adversativeness/concession and interrogation are applied in an attenuating manner in a number of languages. The paper draws on Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, Sweetser’s (1990), Geeraerts’ (1997) and Kövecses and Radden’s (1998) cognitive and metaphorical/metonymic approaches to etymology, Traugott and Dasher’s (2002) Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change, Haspelmath’s (1999) notions of irreversibility and Kerswill and Williams’ (2002) sociolinguistic concept of “salience”. It is suggested that politeness theory, with its dual conceptualisation to do with conflict-avoidance and social indexing, has strong explanatory power in the two phases of semantic change: innovation and propagation. A new form–function configuration emerges in inter­action to manage rapport and is diffused, provided it is given positive social ­evaluation.

ABSTRACTThis article reports sociolinguistic research on linguistic change in an intonation feature of New Zealand English, namely, the use of high rising terminal contours (HRTs) in declarative clauses. Recorded interviews from 75 inhabitants of Porirua, a small city north of Wellington, were analyzed for the use of HRTs. The speaker sample was subdivided according to years of age (20–29, 40–49, 70–79), sex, ethnicity (Maori and Pakeha), and class (working and middle). The results show that linguistic change is in progress, the use of HRTs being favored by young Maori and by young Pakeha women. The results are explained in terms of the function of HRTs as positive politeness markers. The usefulness of the term “linguistic variable” in the analysis of intonational change and discourse features is assessed.

ABSTRACTThis article provides a descriptive analysis of the entire system of address forms in Yoruba, a Defoid language of the Niger-Congo phylum, spoken principally in the western part of Nigeria and to a lesser extent in the Republics of Benin and Togo. With data from short radio and TV plays, unobtrusive observation of actual usage, and introspection, it was discovered that the choices made by interlocutors are guided by the perceived social relationship that exists between them. The principal indices of this among the Yoruba are age, social status, and kinship. Nevertheless, certain peculiarities are noticeable. For instance, the dichotomy of power vs. solidarity (Brown & Gilman 1960) becomes blurred with respect to Yoruba kinship terms of address; thus solidarity does not necessarily imply equality among the Yoruba. (Politeness, address, kinship, Africa, Yoruba)

This paper deals with gender and communication in terms of different features of women’s speech based on the previous studies done by many sociolinguists. Gender refers to categories that distinguish people based on their socio-cultural behavior, including speech. In their speech, gender-men and women- use different ways to say a similar thing in communication. This paper described women’s and men’s speeches from several studies in a frame of linguistics perspectives. Some different features were compared with the women’s speeches in Minangkabau community that indicates Minangkabau politeness maxims. This paper also describes how Minangkabau culture is different from other cultures in criticizing among native speakers of Minangkabau both direct and indirect. Then, some hedges are used by women as politeness markers to minimize face-threatening acts (FTA), a concept proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987).

ABSTRACTThe sudden shift from power to solidarity in Iran in the face of the sociopolitical upheaval in the country has yielded some interesting changes in the forms of address in Persian. In general, since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, forms of address in Persian have undergone a sociolinguistic simplification. In post-revolutionary Iran plain speech and forms of address marking solidarity have gained popularity, whereas asymmetrical forms reflecting the complex social class structure of pre-revolutionary Iran have gradually declined. This article gives a sociolinguistic account of the forms of address in present-day Iranian Persian and documents the impact of the revolution on this aspect of the Persian language. (Sociopolitical change, language change, forms of address, politeness systems, Iranian Persian)

Speech etiquette is an essential part of culture, behavior and human communication. Based upon a theoretical framework of politeness and face-threatening acts (FTAs), this study investigates cultural differences in apology responses (ARs) moderated by the threatened face type and the relationship between participants. A discourse completion test, consists of twelve situations is used for data collection. The data was collected from 150 Pakistani Urdu speakers (teachers, doctors, army personals, lawyers, journalists and academicians) working in different institutions and 30 British English speakers (faculty members of English Department, Coventry University, UK, Leeds University, UK and British Association of Applied Linguistics members). The findings reveal that Pakistanis are found using more positive face threatening apology responses (Acceptance and Acknowledgment) including Absolution, Dismissal, Intensifiers, and Acknowledgement with Thanking, Advice, and Suggestion, than British speakers who tend to use both positive FTAs (Acceptance) based on Absolution “That’s Okay”, and Dismissal “no worries at all but be careful next time” and negative FTAs based on Evasion with Deflection and Evasion with Thanking. The findings further illustrate that the understanding and demonstration of politeness and face in conversation functions are susceptible to cultural and sociolinguistic variations.

This paper investigates the use of forms of address by court interpreters, combining a participation framework approach to dialogue interpreting with a sociolinguistic analysis of intra-speaker variation. Based on transcripts from interpreter-mediated court proceedings in New York City, the paper explores how interpreters respond when the participant status of their target recipients changes from addressee to unaddressed overhearer. The interpreters are found to design their utterances primarily to conform to institutional norms and not to the expectations of target recipients, who rely on politeness features as cues for their participant status. Adding to recent research on discourse processes in dialogue interpreting, the paper explores how the interpreter’s task becomes more complex when more than two primary participants are present.

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the use of well as a discourse marker in some New Zealand courtrooms. While well has been discussed by many in the past, the data have been selected mainly from small, friendly encounters of various kinds, including sociolinguistic interviews. The study reported on here looks at a very different situation that necessarily involves a range of relationships and includes both cooperative and adversarial activities. It confirms that explanations of well’s use focusing on single strands such as social indicators (e.g. gender) or discourse coherence are simplistic, a more fruitful account being afforded through a multi-pronged functional approach. Finally, the article considers the application of politeness and relevance theory.*

Any conversational exchange can be informational or phatic. Occasional exchanges are of no lesser importance than the informative content of dialogue. One needs to establish the channel of communication by setting up a social environment conducive to the exchange of ideas among the participants. Such a strategy of showing politeness is intended to avoid face-threatening acts through the use of compliments and non-verbal gestures. Mistranslating the function of a given phatic communion expression might lead to problems ranging from the disruption of mundane daily small talk such as the break up of a courtship dialogue to grave consequences as the failure of crucial peace talks among belligerent nations. The paper explores the effect of misinterpreting culturally divergent phatic communion formulae in an English-Arabic context. Other sociolinguistic parameters such as topic, setting, age, sex and social status will be considered.

This paper investigates the use of modal particles in spoken Dutch imperatives. Two types of particles are differentiated: mitigating, which are often used as a politeness strategy, and reinforcing, which add extra force to the utterance (Vismans 1994). Our findings show that in Netherlandic Dutch, the use of mitigating particles is determined by the type of occupation that the speaker has: Speakers in service-oriented occupations use mitigating particles significantly more often than speakers in nonservice-oriented occupations, and it is argued that this is a function of their need to be more polite in their role as a service provider. Since the data do not come from the speakers’ workplace interactions but from informal conversations with friends and family, it is suggested that speech patterns of speakers’ professional and private language practices influence each other. The effect of occupation is not observed in Belgian Dutch, however, where mitigating particles are significantly less frequent. Moreover, an important methodological consideration arises from this analysis: There is the need for researchers to examine the data beyond the standard sociolinguistic categorizations made available by large corpora.

Abstract The aim of this article is twofold: first, to analyze and characterize forms of address in present-day Basque from a linguistic and sociolinguistic point of view, and, second, to underscore some of the distinctive features that make Basque interesting with regard to address. This work characterizes forms and systems of address in Basque based on two main factors: second-person pronouns and allocutivity. Five types are proposed depending on dialectal variety, and the existing differences in each of these systems are described. This article aims to fill a gap in Basque studies by analyzing modes of address in present-day Basque as a whole and going beyond mere grammatical analysis: previous studies are rather partial and confusing in terms of linguistic description, dialectal distribution and social usage (hierarchy among modes of address); in contrast, this article, based on extensive field work, gives an account of the different address systems according to the dialect and shows the sociopragmatic value (i.e., level of formality or politeness and personal distance) that each mode of address acquires in its system. The article will also highlight some of the distinctive linguistic features that make Basque interesting with regard to address. Forms of address in Basque display strong similarities with those in other languages in terms of the pronominal system and its historical development, yet they also show some distinctive features, namely: verbal allocutivity, which presents the speaker-hearer axis; gender differences in verb forms for familiar address; and the grammaticalization of expressive palatalization in the case of the xu form of address (xu being an expressive variant of the polite pronoun zu). Current trends towards simplification of the systems of address are also discussed, as is the existence of groups of speakers who use a simplified system.

In this article I intend to show how Pickwick's trial in Dickens's novel The Pickwick Papers is characterized by a strategic use of address and reference forms that produce effects of discoursal incongruities during the opening and the evidence phase of the proceeding. The analysis reveals Dickens's ability to exploit socio-pragmatic features of the speaker—addressee and speaker—referent—addressee relationships in order to foreground the lawyers' manipulative discourse behaviour towards their addressees and referents. In so doing, the writer undermines the assumption according to which the courtroom is a polite setting characterized by the exchange of mutual respect and deference between participants. The manipulation of address strategies is mainly accomplished by violating the sociolinguistic rules expected in the legal setting or by producing a disjunction between the conventional meaning of honorifics and the speaker's pragmatic intention. The result is that many of the honorifics in the text assume a sarcastic function that contrasts with the politic behaviour prescribed by the courtroom. The manipulation of reference strategies, on the other hand, is accomplished by means of a skilful selection of words for the description of persons and events in a way congenial to the story as claimed and supported by the speaker, no matter how far from the truth this may be. Text evidence shows how the lawyer's referent-term selection denigrates the defendant and creates a mismatch between the reader's expectation of formal politeness in the courtroom and the interrogator's strategic use of a controlled but finally effective rudeness.

Sociolinguists and discursive psychologists interested in the construction of identity in discourse have focused their attention on how people recount their life events, arguing that narrative choices can reveal much about how narrators see themselves and how they wish to be seen by those listening to their stories. What happens, though, when severe memory loss interferes with this process? In this article, I examine the intersection of narrative, identity and memory by revisiting five (total of 2 hours and 39 minutes) tape-recorded conversations I had over 4½ years with a woman, Elsie, in her 80s at the moderately severe stage of Alzheimer’s disease (Hamilton, 1994). Focusing on a set of 204 clauses spoken by Elsie that contain past references within these conversations, I differentiate those clauses that are part of conversational narratives (56 or 27%) from independent clauses I term ‘narrative traces’ (148 or 73%). I then identify and examine in greater detail the linguistic construction of the storyworld within fifteen short narratives comprising the 56 narrative clauses. Special attention is given to nominal, verbal, spatial and temporal reference. I identify problems in orientation that have consequences for the coherence of the narrative as a text, as well as for the discursive construction of the narrator’s identity. I close with thoughts about how identity construction can be understood in the (near) absence of coherent reconstructions of the past. Possible useful approaches include Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of word “flavors,” Agha’s (2005) work on enregistered voices, and discourse strategies anchored in the interactional here-and-now, such as “small” talk and politeness work (Brown & Levinson, 1987).

Tujuan - Kajian ini bertujuan untuk mengenal pasti upaya berbahasa menerusi penggunaan Bahasa Melayu Tinggi dan Berbudaya (BMTB) dalam kalangan guru pelatih sebagai ciri kesantunan yang dapat diukur menerusi Indikator Profesionalisme Guru Pelatih berdasarkan skala morfofonetik, sosiolinguistik dan sosiopragmatik. Metodologi - Sembilan orang guru pelatih Bahasa Melayu daripada lima buah sekolah menengah terpilih di negeri Perak dijadikan responden. Kajian ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif yang memberikan kefahaman mendalam berkaitan dengan upaya BMTB dalam kalangan guru pelatih berasaskan senarai semak pencerapan pengajaran dan pemudahcaraan (PdPc) yang dibina berpandukan penentuan skala morfofonetik; skala sosiolinguistik; dan skala sosiopragmatik mengikut kerangka konseptual Brown dan Levinson (1987). Pencerapan dilaksanakan terhadap sembilan orang guru pelatih dengan menganalisis rakaman sesi PdPc mereka yang berdurasi 540 minit dan telah ditranskripsikan. Dapatan - Kajian ini menunjukkan bahawa masih terdapat ketidakpatuhan aspek morfofonetik terutamanya dalam mengartikulasikan perkataan-perkataan tertentu dalam bahasa Melayu dengan menggunakan sebutan baku dalam kalangan guru pelatih. Selain itu, ketidakpatuhan mereka terhadap peraturan sosiolinguistik juga dikesan, iaitu masih terdapat penggunaan bahasa yang kurang rapi kerana mengandungi percampuran kod. Ketidakpatuhan aspek morfofonetik dan sosiolinguistik ini perlu ditangani dengan baik agar upaya berbahasa dan tahap profesionalisme guru pelatih dapat ditingkatkan. Dari aspek sosiopragmatik pula, kesemua 15 substrategi kesantunan berbahasa di bawah Strategi Kesantunan Positif Brown dan Levinson (1987) didapati telah diamalkan oleh guru pelatih yang menunjukkan bahawa mereka memiliki upaya berbahasa yang positif dan memenuhi indikator profesionalisme sebagai bakal pendidik. Signifikan - Kajian ini menyumbang kepada saranan membina indikator profesionalisme guru pelatih UPSI khususnya dan bakal pendidik umumnya dalam perspektif upaya BMTB bagi mengukur amalan kesantunan berbahasa, khususnya dalam bidang Bahasa Melayu semasa mereka menjalani latihan mengajar.

Abstract This article focuses on intersections of race, gender, class, and (im)politeness within the African American speech community (AASC). Although general linguistic theorizing aims at universalizing (im)politeness, ultimately identifying common components within human (im)politeness systems worldwide, African American perspectives have not been interjected within that broader theorizing. Thus, I examine (im)politeness from the perspective of African Americans with a focus on females’ linguistic and nonlinguistic behaviors. A plethora of work examines, challenges, and refutes stereotypical gender. I explore facets of the stereotypical, particularly as applied to Black females with the aim of broadening understandings of (im)politeness based on cultural variation. Specifically, I examine sassy as a social construct when applied to Black women in U.S. contexts, especially two Black women’s online assessments of sassy performativity by Sasha Obama, as a vehicle for allowing Black women’s voices and experiences to enter into theory-making. The analysis is interpretative and idiographic. The two African American women bloggers’ words and meanings suggest that (im)politeness within the AASC resides in sociolinguistics, not pragmatics. As a result of the analysis, I suggest that (im)politeness theorizing could pay attention to the social embodiedness of human polite and impolite behaviors. This, in part, constitutes the sociolinguistics of (im)politeness.

04–660 Chen Eoyang, Eugene (Indiana U., USA & Lingnan U., Hong Kong). English as a postcolonial tool: anti-hegemonic subversions in a hegemonic language. English Today (Cambridge, UK), 19, 4 (2003), 23–29.04–661 Heinz, Bettina (Bowling Green State U., USA; Email: bheinz@bgnet.bgsu.edu). Backchannel responses as strategic responses in bilingual speakers' conversations. Journal of Pragmatics (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 35, 7 (2003), 1113–1142.04–662 Hinkel, Eli (Seattle U., USA; Email: elihinkel@aol.com). Adverbial markers and tone in L1 and L2 students' writing. Journal of Pragmatics (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 35, 7 (2003), 1049–1068.04–663 Mackie, Ardiss (Okanagan University College, B.C., Canada). Race and desire: toward critical literacies for ESL. TESL Canada Journal (Burnaby, B.C., Canada), 20, 2 (2003), 23–37.04–664 MacPherson, Seonaigh (Manitoba U., Canada). TESOL for biolinguistic sustainability: the ecology of English as aLingua Mundi. TESL Canada Journal (Burnaby, B.C., Canada), 20, 2 (2003), 1–22.04–665 Marsh, Jackie (Sheffield U., UK). One-way traffic? Connections between literacy practices at home and in the nursery. British Educational Research Journal (London, UK), 29, 3 (2003), 369–382.04–666 Matthews, Mona W. and Kesner, John (Georgia State U., USA). Children learning with peers: the confluence of peer status and literacy competence within small-group literacy events. Reading Research Quarterly (Newark, DE, USA), 38, 2 (2003), 208–234.04–667 Spencer-Oatey, Helen and Jiang, Wenying (UK eUniversities Worldwide, UK; Email: hspencer-oatey@ukeu.com). Explaining cross-cultural pragmatic findings: moving from politeness maxims to sociopragmatic interactional principles (SIPs). Journal of Pragmatics (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 35, 10–11 (2003), 1633–1650.04–668 Zhu, Huimin (China). Globalization and new ELT challenges in China. An account of the teaching of English and the kinds of English used in a vast, varied, and rapidly changing society. English Today (Cambridge, UK), 19, 4 (2003), 36–41.

Beyond leisurely reading, Farghal presents a tome that has great potential as a text for a wide array of academic lectures: culture, literature, linguistics, comparative studies, Near Eastern studies, etc. One could easily imagine using this work as the basis for a course in sociolinguistics or linguistic pragmatics; in fact, one is reminded of Brown & Levinson’s(1978) seminal work, Politeness: Some universals in language usage, and how Jordan’s Proverbs as a Window into Arab Popular Culture would complement it as a companion text for lectures on the conveyance of potent meaning, being couched within the face-saving speech act of a proverb.

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This introductory paper sets the scene for the present double special issue on degree phenomena. Besides introducing the individual contributions, it positions degree in the overlapping fields of intensity, focus and emphasis. It outlines the wide-ranging means of expressing degree, their possible categorizations, as well as the many-fold uses of intensification with respect to involvement, politeness, evaluation, emotive expression and persuasion. It also decribes the many angles from which degree features have been studied as extending across, e.g., (historical) sociolinguistics, (historical) pragmatics, and grammaticalization.

AbstractWesterners are often depicted in intercultural communication literature as direct and Asians indirect when they communicate. If their communication styles are so different, however, how can they understand each other and collaborate in the workplace? The present article looks at internal e-mail communication in the workplace. More specifically, the aim of this article is twofold: first, to analyze the way Western employees formulate three different speech acts (request, criticism, and disagreement) when writing internal work e-mails to their Asian colleagues, and second, to examine the way these e-mails are perceived by the Asian employees in terms of politeness, friendliness, and clarity. The data consists of 182 elicited e-mails produced by Western employees using role enactment and 33 perception questionnaires collected in different Asian business units of an international company. The procedure to analyze the elicited e-mails is inspired by the CCSARP while the questionnaires are analyzed following sociolinguistics studies. Last, the discussion of the results is anchored partly in the ongoing East-West politeness debate.

Cultural differences are brought to attention basically in cross-cultural communication where members of each culture start to compare and contrast their culture to the cultures of their addressees. While some cultures like Arabic can be described as high context cultures for basically depending on non-verbal communication, other cultures might be low context cultures for relying basically on words. In cross-cultural communication, i.e. communication between speakers from different cultural backgrounds, speakers are not expected to find it difficult to understand their addressees as long as they have the required semantic and pragmatic competence. The present study examines the occurrence of cross-cultural pragmatic failure in a Jordanian social drama focusing on how pragmatic failure might contribute to communication breakdown. It is an attempt to identify aspects and sources of pragmatic failure in both Arabic and English, and to investigate how cultural factors might influence language use of native and non-native speakers. Keywords: Pragmatic failure; cross-cultural communication; politeness; sociolinguistics.

ABSTRACTThis paper is part of a larger study on mobile communication in the Spanish language variety of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and the peninsular Spanish (Spain) from a sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspective, which aims to identify discursive regularities and phenomena of pragmatic variation, and associated to contextual variables. Communication via SMSes, subscribed to “electronic style” (Vela Delfa 2005, 670), progressively has distinguished characteristics that differen-tiate it from other communications produced in digital environment. In the analysis, we consider the how, on one hand, despite the brevity required by character-limit, pragmatics elements of expressive, appellative, phatic functions of language are verified, and, second, how these issues reflect attitudes related to rapport management between speakers, therefore, questions of (im)politeness and, in addition, negotiation of image. These linguistics practices associated with digital literacy, as knowledge to be acquired, impact on social practices and attitudes derived from the adaptation to the context of interac-tion. Central features of pragmatic aspects related to (im)politeness, which were collected by test of social habits (Hernández Flores, 2002) implemented in both study communities, will be presented. The present study is framed within the Interactional Sociolinguistics’ approach, concepts from Cyberpragmatics(Yus, 2010) and sociocultural Pragmatics. We follow Spencer-Oatey (2000-2011) and Fant & Granato (2002) in the study of rapport management.RESUMENEste trabajo forma parte de un estudio más amplio sobre la comunicación por teléfono móvil en la variedad lingüísti-ca del español bonaerense (Argentina) y del español peninsular (España) desde una perspectiva sociolingüística y pragmática, que tiene por objeto identificar regularidades discursivas y fenómenos de variación pragmática, asociados a variables sociolin-güísticas y contextuales. Las comunicaciones por SMS, inscritas en el estilo electrónico (Vela Delfa 2005,670), progresivamente han distinguido características propias, que las diferencian de otras comunicaciones producidas en entornos digitales. En el análisis atendemos al modo en que, por un lado, a pesar de la brevedad —exigida por el límite de caracteres—, se verifican elementos pragmáticos vinculados a las funciones expresiva, fática y apelativas del lenguaje y, por otro, a cómo estas cuestiones reflejan actitudes vinculadas a la gestión interrelacional entre hablantes y, con especial atención a cuestiones de (des)cortesía verbal y, adicionalmente, negociación de imagen. En tanto prácticas lingüísticas vinculadas a la literacidad digital, como cono-cimiento y habilidades repercuten, en parte, en prácticas sociales y actitudes derivadas de la adecuación al contexto de interac-ción. Se presentan características medulares de aspectos pragmáticos relativos a la (des)cortesía verbal recogidos con test de hábitos sociales (Hernández Flores 2002) implementados a 219 hablantes en ambas comunidades de estudio entre septiembre de 2013 y febrero de 2014. El presente estudio se enmarca en los lineamientos de la sociolingüística interaccional e integra concep-tos de la ciberpragmática (Yus, 2010) y la pragmática sociocultural. Por otra parte, para la conceptualización de la gestión interrelacional, consideramos a Spencer-Oatey (2000) y a Fant y Granato (2002).