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The close link between politeness and culture has often been highlighted, with some scholars having proposed taxonomies of cultures based on the diverse uses and conceptions of politeness. Generally, research (Hickey 2005; Ardila 2005) places Spanish-speaking cultures in the group of
rapprochement cultures
, which relate politeness to positively as...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... answers of ENS, SNS and SNNS to this question are summarized in Table 2 and discussed immediately below. Americans made it clear in their answers to the first question (see Section 5.1 above) that politeness is a matter of adequacy and as such depends on the culture and the situation. ...Context 2
... [R]apport interruptions often strive to bolster the interruptee's positive face" (Goldberg 1990: 893). -order politeness in rapprochement and distancing cultures 25 conversational styles. Furthermore, it seems logical to claim that Peninsular Spanish has a high-involvement conversational style and American English a high-consideration conversational style, if we look at the results of the questionnaire. ...Citations
... Banyaknya penelitian mengenai kesantunan berbahas tersebut, menunjukan bukti bahwasanya kesantunan berbahasa di berbagai belahan dunia juga diterapkan. Zhang (2011) di Jepang menyatakan tuturan dengan kesantunan yang tinggi lebih cenderung menimbulkan emosi positif, emosi negatif dan menyebabkan resistensi, selanjutnya temuan penelitian yang dilakukan oleh García & Terkourafi (2014) di Amerika Serikat menyatakan bahwa perilaku komunikatif dalam (khususnya) debat elektoral berkaitan dengan kehadiran unsur-unsur kesantunan atau ketidak santunan dalam debat. Sementara itu, Akinwotu (2015) di Negeria menemukan dua bentuk perilaku verbal, yaitu perilaku verbal santun dan tidak santun dengan strategi persuasif ofensif dan strategi kesantunan defensif ditandai dengan ucapan kontestan. ...
Masalah penelitian ini adalah berdasarkan peristiwa dalam proses berkomunikasi antara pelajar terhadap guru karena kurang memperdulikan pengunaan prinsip kesantunan yang terjadi saat proses pembelajaran. Adapun tujuan penelitian ada menjelaskan pengunaan prinsip kesantunan dalam tindak tutur direktif menyuruh oleh guru bahasa Indonesia dalam proses pembelajaran di SMP Kabupaten Merangin. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah analisis deskriftif kualitatif dengan teknik pengumpulan data (SBLC). Data dalam penelitian ini berupa tuturan direktif guru sumber data adalah guru bidang studi bahasa Indonesia yang ada di SMP Negeri 21 Merangin SMP Negeri 32 Merangin dan SMP Negeri 43 Merangin. Hasil yang diperoleh berdasarkan temuan penelitian tuturan guru bahasa Indonesia SMP Negeri 21 Merangin, SMP Negeri 32 Merangin dan SMP Negeri 43 Merangin Jumlah tuturan yang teridentifikasi tindak tutur menyuruh terdiri dari 668 tuturan pematuhan maksim kesantunan berjumlah 324 tuturan yang terdiri dari maksim (1) Maksim Kearifan, (2) Maksim Kedermawanan, (3) Maksim Pujian, (4) Maksim Kerendahan Hati, (5) Maksim Kesepakatan dan (6) Maksim Kesimpatian. Berdasarkan temuan penelitian kesantunan berbahasa yang sering digunakan guru dalam mematuhi kesantunan berbahasa tindak tutur direktif menyuruh adalah maksim kearifan. Konteks tuturan yang banyak digunakan dalam pematuhan maksim S3 (-S,+R) situasi 3 dengan konteks topik tutur tidak sensitif dan suasana tidak tenang dan S4 (-S,-R) situasi 4 dengan konteks topik tutur tidak sensitif dan suasana tenang.
... What this means is that even if a speech act can be observed and recorded in sufficient volume, locating speech acts in naturally-occurring data is time-consuming, and the researcher will not be able to find exhaustive contexts in which the influence of all social variables can be tested. On the other hand, a researcher might use questionnaires, which resolve the problem of frequency and representative contexts, but would yield artificial data that are only representative of speakers' prototypical knowledge (Barros García & Terkourafi 2014;Leech 2014). Second, as far as politeness is concerned, recent developments in politeness theory have shown that politeness subsumes not only what the speaker says, or linguistic production, but also the hearer's evaluations of what the speaker says, or evaluative politeness (Mills 2011). ...
The aim of this methodological paper is to present an overview of research methods in speech act and politeness research, providing evidence in support of the triangulation approach (Jucker 2009; 2018). By taking research on politeness and speech acts as an example, I show that the respective advantages of different qualitative and quantitative methods such as corpus methods, roleplays, and interviews, are in fact complementary. Different research methods should be combined in the research design in order for the reliability and validity of the research tool to be increased and a fuller understanding of various pragmatic phenomena to be obtained.
... Apart from British and American English , Sifianou 1992, Pizziconi 2007 and Greek (Sifianou 1992, Sifianou & Tzanne 2010, Fukushima & Sifianou 2017, Bella & Ogiermann 2019, studies taking a metapragmatic approach have examined Hebrew (Blum-Kulka 1992), Japanese , Pizziconi 2007, Fukushima & Sifianou 2017, Fukushima 2019, Spanish (Bolívar 2008, Barros García & Terkourafi 2014, Polish, Hungarian (Ogiermann & Suszczyńska 2011), Finish and French (Isosävi 2020). ...
This study contributes to cross-cultural politeness research by comparing British and Greek conceptualisations of politeness. It focuses on lay understandings of politeness by taking an emic, metapragmatic approach to the study of politeness. The study is based on questionnaire data from 100 British and 100 Greek participants and examines both concepts associated with politeness and situated examples of politeness.
While both groups consider helping behaviour to be a central aspect of politeness and refer primarily to non-verbal forms of politeness, the data also show some culture-specific differences. The British participants associate politeness primarily with public situations involving strangers. The Greek participants, in contrast, referred to both public and private contexts, involving family and friends, thus displaying an overall broader understanding of politeness. Service encounters, on the other hand, played a more central role in the British data, with many participants recognising the instrumental nature of politeness in these contexts.
The findings also raise some methodological issues, while a critical review of research on metapragmatic politeness conducted to date calls for a more systematic engagement with how metapragmatic politeness can be meaningfully linked with theoretical work on metapragmatics.
... Something that these findings suggest is that, in a global environment such as Airbnb, the dichotomies closeness-distance and involvement-independence, are not only cultural orientations necessarily, as stated in previous studies (cf., e.g., Barros García and Terkourafi 2014), but are also subject to the users' milieu. Thus, each orientation will serve specific purposes: friendliness would be at the polite/politic end, while formality would be at the impolite, or face-aggravating, end of the continuum. ...
Peer-to-peer businesses such as Airbnb have recently given rise to new travel trends in which electronic word of mouth, in the form of online consumer reviews (OCRs, henceforth), is the main trust mechanism with a threefold purpose: to make informed decisions regarding accommodation, gain good reputation, and manage the relational component as continuity from the offline stage of the experience. In the light of the above, this study will analyse 120 reviews (60 positive and 60 negative) written by Airbnb travellers and linked to three different emotional orientations: delighted/satisfied, ambivalent/neutral, and dissatisfied/disappointed. Taking an illocutionary and stylistic domain perspective, the reviews will be examined to understand how users manage relational work (Watts 1989, Locher and Watts 2005, Locher 2006, Locher and Watts 2008), and to ascertain what is likely to be the ‘norm’ in this particular genre (i.e., OCRs) and for the particular Virtual Community of Practice (VCoP, henceforth) (i.e., guests and hosts interacting in Airbnb). The results show that being polite seems to be the norm (hence being politic), while being rude or offensive is the exception. The data also suggest that users tend to be politic/polite through very enthusiastic and friendly messages, while dissatisfaction and ambivalence are shown by means of a process of depersonalisation, with a tone based on formality and distancing from the host. Information is also obtained from what is not said, which creates the implicature of dissatisfaction. This seems to be implicitly understood by the members of this VCoP, who seem to perceive sociability as pivotal to assess their experience.
... It is uncertain how participants perceive unexpected topic switching until we elicit their moral evaluations and emic perspectives (Locher & Langlotz 2008;Kádár & Haugh 2013). Metapragmatic data can give us access to first-order understandings of (im)politeness (e.g., García & Terkourafi 2014). Therefore, I conducted playback, a type of semi-structured interviewing, with ten of the participants. ...
... This explains why many scholars describe Peninsular Spanish culture as a culture that leans towards proximity in communication (Hickey 1991(Hickey , 2005Haverkate 1994Haverkate , 2003Haverkate , 2004Bravo 1999;Márquez Reiter 2000;Lorenzo-Dus 2001;Ardila 2002;Piatti 2003;Hernández Flores 2004Albelda 2004;Contreras Fernández 2005;Bernal 2007; Barros García 2011; among others), since social acceptance is crucially dependent on one's ability to establish a network of familylike bonds (Fant 1992: 150). For this reason, communicative success in Spanish interactions relies more on establishing friendly relationships by confirming and boosting the interlocutors' face with Face-Enhancing Acts (FEAs) 1 than on avoiding/mitigating Face-Threatening Acts (FTAs) 2 (Barros García & Terkourafi 2014a& Terkourafi , 2014b& Terkourafi , 2015. According to Barros García and Terkourafi (2014b: 289), the Spanish tendency towards face-enhancement guides Spaniards' interpretation of speech acts as face-threatening or face-enhancing, and thus motivates different uses and realizations of speech acts. ...
This article presents the results of an analysis conducted on politeness in informal conversations in Peninsular Spanish; more specifically, on the use of compliments in casual Valencian Spanish with face-enhancing effects. Face-enhancing compliments typically have the primary function of constituting and reinforcing the face of the addressee. The compliments that were analyzed consisted of positive comments about the complimentees’ belongings, people related to them, their actions, and their qualities. Most of these face-enhancing compliments were exchanged in situations defined by a high degree of communicative immediacy (Koch & Oesterreicher 1985) and conventionality. The settings where these compliments were produced, plus their discursive, structural and formal features, illustrate their formulaic nature. Among the most important of these features is the fact that there is a predominance of face-enhancing compliments (1) formulated as declarative, copulative and exclamatory sentences; (2) containing a short repertoire of adjectives with a positive meaning; (3) modified by intensifiers that help to reinforce and guarantee the face-enhancing effect of the speech act; (4) consisting of isolated utterances; (5) occupying a second turn position in adjacency pairs; and (6) that were rarely responded to with direct acceptances by their addressees.
... Early research which advocates the usefulness of such a tool includes Blum-Kulka (1992) who attempted to unveil such metapragmatic conceptualizations within families in Israeli society with the aid of interviews. Questionnaires were used by Bolívar (2008) to investigate the perceptions of politeness by Venezuelans, by Sifianou (1992) and Sifianou and Tzanne (2010) to explore conceptualizations of politeness by Greek people, and by Barros García and Terkourafi (2014) to explore conceptualizations of politeness by speakers of Spanish. Blum-Kulka (1992: 257) is careful to alert us that in such metapragmatic quests informants tend to depict normative descriptions of politeness (see also Mills 2003: 166) and engage in positive self-presentation by providing researchers with what informants assume to be socially accepted definitions. ...
The main aim of this paper is to investigate how Japanese and Greek female students conceptualize politeness and then compare the findings in order to tease out any cross-cultural similarities and differences. The data is drawn from a questionnaire filled in by two hundred female undergraduates (one hundred from each group). The results show that there are significant similarities as well as some differences. Although research on im/politeness has concentrated almost exclusively on linguistic performance, a significant similarity between the two groups is that politeness is conceptualized as primarily non-linguistic action. Another major similarity is that both groups conceptualize politeness mainly as “consideration to others” and “appropriate behavior,” the former expressed mostly non-linguistically and the latter involving both linguistic and non-linguistic manifestations. Most participants view politeness as conveyed through attentiveness/helping others, respect and empathy. Differences were located mostly in the numbers of participants who mentioned the various subcategories. For example, more Greek participants related a broad sense of “respect” to politeness, whereas more Japanese participants related it to “empathy” and only Japanese participants mentioned “honorifics.” Our participants’ understandings of politeness appear to be in contrast to earlier politeness theories which view politeness as strategic concern for conflict avoidance and closer to current approaches which view it as relational, expressing concern for the needs and feelings of others.
... Second, an interesting common denominator in various early studies considering politeness phenomena in diverse societies (see, e.g., Wierzbicka, 1985;Hickey, 1991;Blum-Kulka, 1992;Sifianou, 1992;Hassall, 1999) is that these societies have been identified as bearing a primarily positive politeness orientation, a finding which to our knowledge, far from being contested, has been further corroborated by subsequent research (see among others, Tzanne, 2001;Bella, 2009;Ogiermann, 2009b;Barros García & Terkourafi, 2014). 2 Thus, relevant research so far concerning cultural orientation directs attention to the inadequacy of predictions relating mostly to the negative politeness orientation. ...
... Other related distinctions include rapprochement v. distancing (Barros García & Terkourafi, 2014), and collectivist v. individualist cultures (Hofstede, 1980). Ide (1989) argues that such distinctions are inadequate for Japanese and suggests one between discernment and volition (but see Pizziconi, 2007Pizziconi, , 2011. ...
This chapter explores the issues of universality and cultural variation of politeness norms and practices. Early approaches to politeness have been criticised for seeing them as applicable to societies as wholes. In contrast, recent discursive approaches focus instead on lay understandings and subjective evaluations of politeness in situated real-life interactions. This chapter argues that the latter limits the possibility of generalisation and, importantly, cross-cultural comparison. It shows that generalisation is needed if we aim at analyses which are not simply valid for specific participants in specific encounters. It is also needed if we are interested in understanding similarities and differences among different cultures, which however, are not seen as unified wholes but as sharing a repository from which interlocutors select practices.
... We compensate analysis of our conversational data with follow-up interviews because metapragmatic data could be valuable tools for achieving knowledge about extended concurrent speech for floor taking or topic switching. They give us access into first-order understandings of politeness (Jaworski et al. 2004;Schneider 2012;García and Terkourafi 2014). ...
In this paper, we adopt Kádár and Haugh’s (2013) discursive-interactional approach to argue that extended concurrent speech for floor taking or topic switching can be perceived as normal and qiàdàng (appropriate). Spontaneous mundane conversations and interviews in Mandarin were collected and transcribed by means of interactional sociolinguistic methods. A close analysis was conducted on participants’ responses to the extended concurrent speech for floor taking or topic switching and their retrospective thoughts. Results show that the participants did not view the speech as inappropriate. They produced the speech to achieve relational goals, clarify things, collaborate on a topic, claim participatory rights or display high involvement. They enjoyed conversing around a trivial topic in informal settings. This challenges the argument of long overlapping, floor taking or topic switching as problematic in the literature. The findings indicate the importance of embracing different perspectives from varying sources to understand perceptions of turn-taking mechanisms in Mandarin conversation. This study can contribute to our understanding of interpersonal pragmatics and the conventional views/norms that might cause communication misunderstanding in cross-cultural contact.
... If we turn our attention to Peninsular Spanish and British English, the literature places Spanish within the group of 'rapprochement cultures', whilst British culture is placed in the group of 'distancing cultures' (Ardila, 2005;Barros García & Terkourafi, 2014;Hickey, 2004). In rapprochement cultures, smooth personal relations are taken for granted and thus cooperation in interaction is linked to social acceptance and person orientedness. ...
... Culture. Contrary to previous findings, in which Spanish seems to be oriented towards directness, involvement and solidarity (Ardila, 2005;Barros García & Terkourafi, 2014;Bravo, 2001;Hickey, 2004), and British English towards indirectness, restraint and independence (Fant, 2007;, the study of the frequency of disagreement and degrees of assertiveness shows that the issue is in fact relatively more complex. The highest occurrence of disagreement was indeed that found in the data set based on British doctors. ...
This paper examined disagreement in two sets of data in the context of service encounters: problem-solving interactions (doctor-patient communication) and purchase-oriented encounters (pharmacies) from a cross-cultural perspective (Spanish-British English). We proposed assertiveness, a term that refers to both socio-psychological and linguistic features of communication, as a concept that may help understand disagreement. To this end, this study explored, on the one hand, frequency and types of disagreement in 160 British and Spanish service encounter interactions (SEIs, henceforth), in order to understand degrees of assertiveness, as well as the difficulty to grasp motivations for disagreement. On the other hand, five case studies were examined to unravel the social meanings attached to disagreement. The results showed that not in all cases Spanish interlocutors are more assertive than British interlocutors, that social meanings are not stable within the same genre and that linguistic choices may be linked to psychosocial motivations, such as assertiveness.
