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Universal and Culture‐Specific Properties of Greetings
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
Abstract
The literature on greetings includes several commonly made claims that require an agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a greeting exchange. I propose six criteria for identifying greetings across languages and speech communities. Applying these criteria to a speech community in Western Samoa, I identify four types of greeting exchanges there. These exchanges show, contra claims in the greetings literature, that not all greetings are devoid ofpropositional content and that they need not be "expressive" acts of the type proposed by speech act theory. In greetings, Samoans accomplish various social acts, including searching for new information and sanctioning social behavior.
... This is true for the vast majority of speech acts, such as greetings (cf. Duranti 1997), refusals (cf. Felix-Brasdefer 2006 or compliments (cf. ...
... Routines and conventions, then, are very helpful devices to make daily social interactions flow more easily and more smoothly (cf. Duranti 1997). ...
While politeness has originally been closely associated with indirectness in early politeness research, the field has since moved to a view that conventionalized indirectness tends to be the preferred option by interlocutors. The approach to conventionalization posits that conventionally indirect forms are considered to be the most polite. However, equating indirectness to politeness has been shown to be problematic. While indirectness may well remain an important construct within some cultural contexts, this certainly does not hold across all cultures and lingua-practices. This paper discusses the relevance of the concepts of conventionalization vs. expectation as a research construct and explores the link between communicative conventions, expectation, politeness and pragmatic impact within a German cultural framework. The data indicates that while many Anglo-Saxon cultures express face concerns and relational work through overt politeness markers and avoid direct communication, German culture does not show a dispreference for directness. The insights from this paper further reinforce this well-documented tendency. Furthermore, the findings suggest that relational work is actually achieved via the use of explicit, direct communication and modal particles that express contradiction. The evidence suggests that greater confrontational responses to the previous speaker can equal greater support of the conversational partner.
... Co-presented individuals may assume that people are unwilling to engage in interactions if a greeting takes too long to start [1,2]. Even though greetings have culture-specific characteristics, such as interpersonal distances, gaze patterns, or salutation gestures, their basic structure is universal among cultures [3]. ...
... 2, and we review related literature in Sect. 3. Then, we present our hypotheses and their rationale in Sect. ...
Engagement during first encounters needs both parties to comprehend each other’s intent without mutual information. A robot may fail to engage someone because people are unaware of the robot’s presence or intent to interact, or because they are uninterested in interacting with robots. In this paper, we compared three different greeting strategies for mobile social robots in first encounters with humans using the Kendon’s greeting protocol, which was derived from observations of human greeting behaviors. The theoretical protocol defines a sequence of six phases during greetings: initiation of the approach, distance salutation, head dip, approach, final approach, and close salutation. The three greeting strategies we compare in our empirical studies specifically implement the first three phases of the Kendon’s model (M1), the six phases (M2), or the six phases as a response of the human greeting phase (M3). We performed a user study during a public art exhibition in two different situations: in-the-wild and with invited participants. The results of these two experiments combined both quantitative and qualitative measures and support that people’s engagement and impressions of the robot can be enhanced when the robot employs M2 and M3, compared to M1. Our results generally support that Kendon’s greeting model is effective in human-robot first encounters for mobile social robots. We also discuss important considerations for running in-the-wild robotic experiments.
... In addition, it is sometimes used to identify a person to others. It is used to confirm identity and enhance solidarity (Duranti, 2008). ...
... It is used to reflect politeness in the conversation. Greeting interchanges are used to preserve ties of unity or human relationship (Duranti, 2008). ...
Greeting expressions represent an important part of conversation and are considered a fundamental element in the Arabic culture. Arabic language has more various and colorful greeting expressions with a culture-specific nature than other languages. However, dealing with the translation of such expressions, especially the Iraqi Arabic informal ones, poses a significant problem for translators, complicating the task of translating these expressions accurately and appropriately. Therefore, this study aims to identify the problems translators face when translating informal Iraqi Arabic greetings into English. To achieve this aim, a total of (4) informal greeting expressions collected from the Iraqi Arabic community were used as a sample of the study. These expressions were distributed to (5) MA candidates, from the Department of Translation, College of Arts, University of Tikrit, representing the subjects of the study to translate them into English. As for the data analysis, the study employed Vinay and Darbelnet's (1995) direct and oblique strategies of translation. The results showed that the study subjects face numerous problems in translating greeting expressions, mainly due to the lack of understanding the cultural contexts in which these expressions are used, in addition to the difficulty of finding a one-word equivalent to the informal greeting expressions under study.
... In the context of music, Klapuri and Davy (2006) suggested that transcription entails converting an acoustic signal into some type of notation. However, Duranti (1997) added that transcription is also akin to fixing fleeting events, such as utterances or gestures on a paper or electronic device, to analyze them rather than only writing down oral discourse. Thus, from a multimodal perspective, transcription may have utility in language teaching, though its primary objective remains developing language skills and acquiring linguistic forms. ...
Deep listening is an educational approach that involves a high degree of concertation to decode a message. Transcribing is one of the most usual activities within this approach. This research aims to assess the efficiency of the deep listening approach among engineering degree students taking the subject of English B2. The students had to transcribe six videos in a period of twelve weeks, and their progress was measured with three listening tests that the students had to complete before, during, and after the twelve weeks. Their results were compared to those of a control group that watched the same videos. However, their exercises consisted of responding to open questions about the content of each video. Results showed that the experimental group had more significant progress than the control group, especially during the first six weeks of the experiment. In conclusion, the deep listening approach, more concretely transcription, seems to be a valuable resource for teachers that helps learners further develop their listening skills.
... A sistemática da tomada de turnos é opcionalmente ordenada, pois não especifica o que cada parte deve fazer, mas especifica opções a serem selecionadas (DURANTI, 1997). Os turnos são organizados adjacentemente/ sequencialmente em duas partes (PPP ou Primeira Parte e SPP ou Segunda Parte do Par) e relativamente ordenados, sendo que uma característica importante que podemos extrair da ordenação das primeiras e segundas partes dos pares adjacentes é que elas são conectadas por tipo (SACKS, 2011(SACKS, [1987). ...
Este estudo apresenta uma proposta inovadora e singular de analisar, a partir do aparato teórico-metodológico da Análise da Conversa, a relevância da parceria interacional entre o paciente, o familiar e o terapeuta no contexto da Telefonoaudiologia, auxiliando na efetividade terapêutica nesse novo cenário de intervenções. Em virtude da expansão das práticas em telessaúde por circunstância da pandemia do coronavirus em 2021, o familiar foi inserido na terapia fonoaudiológica e buscou-se compreender a configuração da dinâmica interacional da tomada de turnos nesse cenário, a fim de eluciar o seu papel no interior dessa nova dinâmica, entender quando sua atuação é necessária e identificar de que forma ela pode atuar a favor de um benefício terapêutico.
... Research on greetings has also been wide and frequent (e.g., Duranti, 1997;Goodness, 2020;Oumarou, 1997;Rusbiyantoro, 2011;. However, studies of greetings from a metaphorical perspective, especially in the Acehnese language, are still scarce. ...
World Englishes coexist and interact with local languages in multilingual ecologies. Multilingual speakers use the languages in their ecologies for different functions, with different interlocutors, and at different proficiency levels. Attitudinal responses to the languages vary. Speaker groups are heterogenous manifesting only partial overlap regarding language repertoires, use, proficiencies, and attitudes. The languages in multilingual ecologies may shift in status over time. Some languages may be lost while new languages appear. Strong regional languages and English typically persist. The volume explores multilingual ecologies around the globe and the position of English within them. Case studies are drawn from Africa, East, South, and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, all written by distinguished scholars in the field who consider both standardized and non-standardized forms of English. The volume argues for a more inclusive study of World Englishes incorporating speakers’ social backgrounds as well as the other languages in their repertoires.
Despite the importance of greetings for opening social interactions, their multimodal coordination processes remain poorly understood. We used a naturalistic, lab‐based setup where pairs of unacquainted participants approached and greeted each other while unaware their greeting behavior was studied. We measured the prevalence and time course of multimodal behaviors potentially culminating in a handshake, including motor behaviors (e.g., walking, standing up, hand movements like raise, grasp, and retraction), gaze patterns (using eye tracking glasses), and speech (close and distant verbal salutations). We further manipulated the visibility of partners’ eyes to test its effect on gaze. Our findings reveal that gaze to a partner's face increases over the course of a greeting, but is partly averted during approach and is influenced by the visibility of partners’ eyes. Gaze helps coordinate handshakes, by signaling intent and guiding the grasp. The timing of adjacency pairs in verbal salutations is comparable to the precision of floor transitions in the main body of conversations, and varies according to greeting phase, with distant salutation pair parts featuring more gaps and close salutation pair parts featuring more overlap. Gender composition and a range of multimodal behaviors affect whether pairs chose to shake hands or not. These findings fill several gaps in our understanding of greetings and provide avenues for future research, including advancements in social robotics and human−robot interaction.
The article studies theoretical and methodological principles of researching national cultural semantics of onyms in the structure of set expressions of postmodern discourse using the example of English fiction by A. Carter; presents theoretical and methodological bases on which the study of the national cultural peculiarities of set expressions with onym components is grounded; outlines national cultural features of set expressions with onym components; determines origin sources of onyms in the composition of set expressions; identifies types of assessment reflected in phraseological units with onym components; offers a linguocultural approach to the study of phraseology through the prism of linguistic and cultural interaction; highlights the role of set expressions with onym components in the linguage model of the world; identifies functions of onyms in the semantic structure of phraseological signs (creating expressive imagery, ensuring conciseness of information presentation, enhancing clearness/expressiveness of the statement, conveying attitude/evaluation, giving connotative shades to the statement, expanding the boundaries of the language game, etc.). The relevance of the study grounds on the increased emphasis of modern anthropocentric linguistics on researching the interaction of language, environment, and culture. Therefore, it is the linguocultural aspect of studying phraseologisms in connection with the fund onymicon that contributes to identifying the spiritual and moral values of the national cultural community, establishing the language and culture interaction, determining the national cultural specifics of set expressions as signs of speech, which contain in their semantic structure the value heritage of the national culture with all its inherent universal phenomena. A promising aspect of further research is an in-depth study of implementing linguocultural concepts using the fund onymicon in postmodern literary discourse.
The book explores the multifaceted nature of media and communication by challenging traditional views that consider media solely as technical infrastructures for transmitting information. Instead, it focuses on mediality as an empirically relevant concept and proposes to understand media as socially constituted semiotic procedures that shape and are shaped by communicative practices. The book is structured around this central idea, with four main sections. Part I examines digital environments, analyzing the interplay between multimodal approaches and mediality through case studies such as digital learning platforms and Zoom seminars. Part II focuses on journalistic procedures, investigating how media shapes political debates and news presentation on platforms like Instagram. Part III delves into embodied processes, particularly the role of the body movements and gestures in communication, illustrated through analyses of yoga tutorials and family dinner conversations. Part IV combines diverse semiotic and medial resources, with studies on historical data interpretation and virtual reality gaming practices. The book aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the role of different media in constituting meaning and shaping social interactions.
This paper analyzes Samoan ceremonial greetings and shows that, although their sequential organization recognizes only two parties - greeters and greeted - the internal organization of each part of the exchange acknowledges subtle individual differences in terms of status and ability to verbally perform. Participants routinely overlap one another within and across turns not at transition-relevant places but more in the fashion of a nonmusical version of canonic counterpoint. The interlocking organization of words and turns in the greetings is analyzed as a phonosymbolic construction of both sameness and differentiation, a type of public discourse in which an inter-actionally constituted sociopolitical body is represented as only partially unified. These findings are used to suggest that (i) even in the most cohesive social moments, when relatedness reigns, distinctiveness may be symbolically reproduced, and (ii) cohesiveness is problematic in hierarchical social systems as much as in egalitarian ones.
Outline of a Theory of Practice is recognized as a major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu, a distinguished French anthropologist, develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood. With his central concept of the habitus, the principle which negotiates between objective structures and practices, Bourdieu is able to transcend the dichotomies which have shaped theoretical thinking about the social world. The author draws on his fieldwork in Kabylia (Algeria) to illustrate his theoretical propositions. With detailed study of matrimonial strategies and the role of rite and myth, he analyses the dialectical process of the 'incorporation of structures' and the objectification of habitus, whereby social formations tend to reproduce themselves. A rigorous consistent materialist approach lays the foundations for a theory of symbolic capital and, through analysis of the different modes of domination, a theory of symbolic power.
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