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Combining Self-Report and Role-Play Data in Sociopragmatics Research: Towards a Methodological Synthesis
Abstract
As several studies have shown, speakers from different countries, and even speakers from different regions of the same country, ‘vary their speech act production […], convey and perceive politeness differently, and display different interactional patterns during conversational interaction (e.g. greetings, opening and closing sequences, turn-taking, laughter)’ (Félix-Brasdefer 2007).1 Sociopragmatics focuses on the relationship between linguistic structure and social action (Leech 1983, Thomas 1983), more specifically on the influence of socio-contextual factors on language as social action (Martínez-Flor and Usó-Juan 2010: 6). To achieve this goal, the study of sociopragmatic variability ought not to limit itself to the ‘where’, the ‘who’ and the ‘how’ of speech act behaviour, but also crucially tackle the ‘why’. That is, it should move beyond description and attempt to address interlocutors’ reasons for opting for particular acts and for particular realizations of those acts in specific circumstances. Understanding the emic significance of speech act behaviour is important because it cannot be taken for granted that when people from different sociocultural backgrounds engage in the same speech act behaviour, they mean the same thing by it. As numerous examples testify, the possibility of pragmatic failure (Thomas 1983) looms large, and this is especially so for speakers using the same language, as is the case with L1 and L2 speakers of a language, or speakers of different varieties of the same language.
... The data collection method was a self-report questionnaire where participants were asked to talk about their experiences and behaviors (Barros García and Terkourafi 2015). The advantages of the self-report questionnaire include ease of distribution and accessibility to a large number of informants. ...
This paper explores (im)politeness conceptualizations and evaluations and the moral foundations of lay notions of (im)politeness in Syrian Arabic. The data were collected using an online questionnaire which was administered to 88 native speaking participants. The results show that participants consider politeness and impoliteness as polar opposites; both are viewed as (in)consideration for others, chiefly conveyed through (dis)respect, and upholding/violating appropriate behaviors, respectively. Moreover, the results show that notions of hierarchical respect, face, equity rights, reciprocity, and attending to others’ needs are central in motivating participants’ views of (im)politeness. These notions are rooted in the moral foundations of authority/respect, fairness/reciprocity, and harm/care. Additionally, interesting findings emerge in that politeness in Syrian Arabic appears to be more of a relational phenomenon, based on morality, which is in line with contemporary views on politeness, than a rational and strategic behavior, as theorized in classical approaches.
... 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.
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.
This paper argues that a cross-linguistic study of the lexical semantics of terms used to apologise in English and French can shed light on the conventionalisation of (mock) politeness. Despite the long historical interdependence between the two languages, the linguistic forms most often used to say sorry in Present-Day English and French derive from different etymons. S'excuser and désolé((e)s) are most frequently used in French while ‘sorry’ is more commonly used in English. Both languages draw more rarely on ‘pardon’, and ‘regret’.
The paper explores the semantico-pragmatics of apology and aims to identify norms and variations in the expression of apology intra- and interlinguistically. Tokens of SORRY, APOLOGI/ES/SE/ZE, DÉSOLÉ, EXCUSE, PARDON and REGRET were identified and analysed in a range of (mainly) spoken corpora of American, British and Canadian English and Canadian and French French. Distributional patterns highlight differences in the rates and pragmalinguistics of apologies across (different varieties of) English and French but, crucially, also across different genres.
While SORRY and EXCUSE have acquired the same illocutionary meaning in English and French, respectively, denoting APOLOGY, ironic uses of apologetic IFIDs are very rare in the data, arguably not denotative, and rely on a pragmatic mismatch to do mock politeness.
Intercultural interaction may be complicated by differing verbal and nonverbal displays of (im)politeness. Yet cultural outsiders’ evaluations of (im)politeness have not been widely examined. To fill this gap, this study investigated perceptions of Finnish politeness among French people living in Finland and perceptions of French politeness among Finns currently or previously living in France. Focus groups were used in order to study culturally shared (im)politeness norms and their variations. Based on a dialogical discourse analysis of five focus group discussions, it is argued that personal space emerges as a salient factor for politeness in Finland, while verbal and nonverbal rapport is more important in France. These overarching themes — personal space and rapport — led to discussions about greetings, silence and holding doors open. Greeting and opening doors appeared more categorical in France, while silence was better tolerated in Finland. In addition to dominant norms, regional and individual variations were reported. Overall, (im)politeness norms appeared to be more vague in Finland than in France. Building upon this study, future research should examine if changes emerge in Finnish (im)politeness norms related to rapport or if space remains more valued.
In English-speaking countries, it is ”Sir” or ”Mam”, in French, ”Monsieur” or ”Madame”. But oh, this clumsy Finnish language! We lack of established terms for calling a waiter. What would be the right form to address them? (NYT-liite 40/2007, cited in Isosävi 2010: 185).
As the above quote shows, even Finns themselves are sometimes critical of Finnish politeness, at least compared to some other European languages. Finnish students of French consider French to be a ”polite” language ¬– in contrast to their mother tongue – and this perception also extends to French people, who are considered to be sophisticated and well-mannered (Buchart’s 2010: 100).
According to Yli-Vakkuri (2005: 199), in Finnish, there are fewer politeness phrases than in many other European languages, which is due to fact that Finnish is based on the use of suffixes, and many of the mitigating strategies are grammatical (for instance conditional mood, see Peterson 2009). Finnish politeness phrases are generally loans from Swedish, and nowadays more and more from English. Yli-Vakkuri (2005: 199) claims that the Finns seem to be embarrassed to use politeness strategies they have adopted as loans.
In my study, I aim to examine perceptions of Finnish politeness by French people living in Finland. The participants in this study are university lecturers and teachers, and many of them have been living in Finland for a long time. All the informants speak Finnish, but their level of language proficiency varies. The data are collected through focus groups, which have the advantage of providing data on shared and contrasted conceptions (Dervin 2015). The study thus focuses on first-order politeness (Eelen 2001), that is on participants own understanding of im/politeness (see also Ogiermann & Suszczyńska 2011) of Finnish. The French participants provide a less studied outsider’s view on Finnish politeness, as well as uncovering expectations and norms reflecting the French concept of politeness.
The current study reports on three role-plays investigating the understanding and uses of politeness by native speakers of Spanish from Spain, native speakers of English from the United States, and nonnative speakers of Spanish from the United States. Motivated by the different characterization of Peninsular Spanish and U.S. American cultures as solidarity and distancing cultures, respectively (Hickey, 2005; Pinto, 2011), we expected that American English speakers would be more inclined towards the use of politeness strategies linked to the protection of face, while Spaniards would make more use of maneuvers to enhance face. The pertinent research question is whether learners transfer into L2 their L1 preference for face-saving, or, conversely, are able to adapt their behavior depending on the language of the interaction. Our results show that, overall, nonnative speakers still abide by the norms of their L1 to some extent, attaching more importance to the avoidance of face-threats when speaking in Spanish than native speakers do, although this preference tends to become less marked as their proficiency in the L2 increases.
The papers in this special issue on Chinese 'face' and im/politeness collectively raise very real challenges for the ways in which the now wellknown distinction between first order and second order approaches is conceptualized and operationalized by face and politeness researchers. They highlight the difficulties we inevitably encounter when analyzing face and im/politeness across languages and cultures, in particular, those arising from (1) the use of English as a scientific metalanguage to describe concepts and practices in other languages and cultures, (2) the inherent ambiguity and conservatism of folk concepts such as face and politeness, and (3) the difficulties in teasing out face and im/politeness as important phenomena in their own right. In this paper it is suggested that these issues arise as a consequence of the relative paucity of critical discussion of the first-second order distinction by analysts. It is argued that the first-second order distinction needs to be more carefully deconstructed in regards to both its epistemological and ontological loci. It is suggested that equating first order approaches with an "emic" perspective and second order approaches with a "scientific" perspective masks a number of important distinctions that are too often glossed over by those who make claims to being either first or second order researchers. It is concluded that rather than treating the first-second order distinction as a simplistic dichotomy, it is much more productive to deploy the multiple loci of the first-second order distinction in clarifying the various focal points for analysis and theorization in face and politeness research.
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 assessing the addressee and creating bonds of friendship and cooperation; and English-speaking cultures in the group of
distancing cultures
, which primarily use politeness to generate respect and social differentiation. This means that English politeness is not only supposed to be different from Spanish politeness, but diametrically opposed to it. The main goal of this study is to check these predictions against the understandings and use of politeness by native speakers of Spanish from Spain and nonnative speakers of Spanish from the U.S. Thus, this research is grounded in first-order politeness norms, which are then correlated with the informants’ behavior as reported in written questionnaires. The results confirmed these predictions and further showed that the more advanced learners were able to align themselves better with Spanish norms. Nevertheless, even they found some aspects of Spanish politeness –– such as the turn-taking system –– harder to adapt to, suggesting that certain aspects of native norms may be more difficult to abandon. We propose that firstorder notions of politeness may be prototypically structured, with some aspects being more central to its definition and therefore less easily foregone than others.
While the notion of face has continued to play a key role in many accounts of im/politeness, there have increasingly been calls for im/politeness to be theorized in its own right, drawing from the emic understandings of members in relation to im/politeness. In this paper, we make a contribution to this latter agenda by comparing emic understandings of attentiveness, and the related notions of empathy and anticipatory inference in Japanese and Taiwanese Mandarin Chinese. Drawing from metapragmatic interviews with Japanese and Taiwanese participants from two different generations, we suggest that there are both similarities and differences in the ways in which these notions are conceptualized among speakers of Japanese and Mandarin Chinese spoken in Taiwan. It was found that while the participants evaluated these practices positively, and in some cases linked them to politeness concerns, in other instances they evaluated them negatively. Intracultural variability also emerged in the course of our cross-generational-cultural comparison. We conclude that further work investigating the metapragmatics of interpersonal notions such as attentiveness, empathy and anticipatory inference is necessary if we are to better understand the moral grounds on which evaluations of im/politeness are made across different languages and cultures.
This paper focuses on the notion of politeness formulae in linguistic
politeness research. It argues that the formal make-up of politeness formulae
is crucially motivated by their function. The major claim of this paper is thus
that there is a link between form and function of expressions of linguistic politeness.
The usefulness of this account will be illustrated by the analysis of
empirical data from Slavic languages and German. Reference to Roman Jakobson’s
markedness theory will show that the choice of linguistic means is not
only dependent on concrete contexts (as is usually claimed in linguistic politeness
theory) but also motivated by the language system itself.
Speech acts are an important and integral part of day-to-day life in all languages. In language acquisition, the need to teach speech acts in a target language has been demonstrated in studies conducted in the field of interlanguage pragmatics which indicate that the performance of speech acts may differ considerably from culture to culture, thus creating communication difficulties in cross-cultural encounters. Considering these concerns, the aim of this volume is two-fold: to deal with those theoretical approaches that inform the process of learning speech acts in particular contextual and cultural settings; and, secondly, to present a variety of methodological proposals, grounded on research-based ideas, for the teaching of the major speech acts in second/foreign language classrooms. This volume is a valuable theoretical and practical resource not only for researchers, teachers and students interested in speech act learning/teaching but also for textbook writers wishing to have an informed opinion on the pedagogical implications derived from research on speech act performance.
Speech acts are an important and integral part of day-to-day life in all languages. In language acquisition, the need to teach speech acts in a target language has been demonstrated in studies conducted in the field of interlanguage pragmatics which indicate that the performance of speech acts may differ considerably from culture to culture, thus creating communication difficulties in cross-cultural encounters. Considering these concerns, the aim of this volume is two-fold: to deal with those theoretical approaches that inform the process of learning speech acts in particular contextual and cultural settings; and, secondly, to present a variety of methodological proposals, grounded on research-based ideas, for the teaching of the major speech acts in second/foreign language classrooms. This volume is a valuable theoretical and practical resource not only for researchers, teachers and students interested in speech act learning/teaching but also for textbook writers wishing to have an informed opinion on the pedagogical implications derived from research on speech act performance.
This book presents a general account of politeness, championing the thesis that politeness is communicative altruism. It gives an account of a wide range of politeness phenomena in English, illustrated by hundreds of examples of actual language use taken from authentic British and American sources. Leech takes a pragmatic approach based on his earlier work on politeness, going back to his well-known book Principles of Pragmatics (1983), but also taking on board more recent approaches. The 1983 book introduced the now widely accepted distinction between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of politeness, seeing politeness both from a linguistic angle, and from a social angle. This book gives more attention to the recently-neglected pragmalinguistic side, and, drawing on the work of Grice, Searle, and the Neo-Griceans, rejects the prevalent view that, since politeness is indefinitely variable according to context, it is impossible to apply the terms polite or impolite to linguistic phenomena. The book provides a broad survey of politeness in present-day English, covering all major speech acts that are either positively or negatively associated with politeness, such as requests, apologies, compliments, offers, agreement, and disagreement. There are also chapters dealing with impoliteness and the related phenomena of irony (mock politeness) and banter (mock impoliteness). Supplementary chapters deal with research methods, and the learning of English as a second language. A final chapter looks back over a thousand years on the history of politeness in the English language.
Speech acts are an important and integral part of day-to-day life in all languages. In language acquisition, the need to teach speech acts in a target language has been demonstrated in studies conducted in the field of interlanguage pragmatics which indicate that the performance of speech acts may differ considerably from culture to culture, thus creating communication difficulties in cross-cultural encounters. Considering these concerns, the aim of this volume is two-fold: to deal with those theoretical approaches that inform the process of learning speech acts in particular contextual and cultural settings; and, secondly, to present a variety of methodological proposals, grounded on research-based ideas, for the teaching of the major speech acts in second/foreign language classrooms. This volume is a valuable theoretical and practical resource not only for researchers, teachers and students interested in speech act learning/teaching but also for textbook writers wishing to have an informed opinion on the pedagogical implications derived from research on speech act performance.
Politeness is key to all of our relationships and plays a fundamental part in the way we communicate with each other and the way we define ourselves. It is not limited only to conventional aspects of linguistic etiquette, but encompasses all types of interpersonal behaviour through which we explore and maintain our relationships. This groundbreaking exploration navigates the reader through this fascinating area and introduces them to a variety of new insights. The book is divided into three parts and is based on an innovative framework which relies on the concepts of social practice, time and space. In this multidisciplinary approach, the authors capture a range of user and observer understandings and provide a variety of examples from different languages and cultures. With its reader-friendly style, carefully constructed exercises and useful glossary, Understanding Politeness will be welcomed by both researchers and postgraduate students working on politeness, pragmatics and sociolinguistics more broadly.
Increasing attention to the distinction between first- and second-order im/politeness has led to considerable soul-searching among theorists regarding which of the two should form the basis of a theory of im/politeness. In this article, I take an alternative path: I build on norms of Politeness1, as attested in influential texts laying out Politeness1 norms in different parts of the world from antiquity to this day, to extract from them the core elements of a theory of Politeness2. By affording us with some glimpses into the diachronic intertwining of Politeness1 and Politeness2, this analysis helps explain why it has been so difficult to keep these two notions apart in previous research. At the same time, it suggests some possible ways forward. Specifically, this survey reveals two overarching themes regarding the role of politeness (and, by implication, impoliteness) in these cultures. The first concerns the social regulatory role of Politeness1 norms, while the second concerns the relationship of Politeness1 norms with an underlying morality. I propose that these two elements should be placed at the heart of an empirically grounded theory of Politeness2.
The goal of this paper is twofold. The overarching aim is to address the issue of egocentrism and to argue that conversational participants are generally not egocentric. However, it also secondarily addresses the issue of the appropriate methods to use to study perspective taking in conversation. I argue that we should not rely solely on narrow temporal focus, individualistic methodologies, such as those used in Visual World eye-tracking studies, which tend to look at millisecond snapshots of the behavior of individuals rather than at broad temporal swaths of behavior of dyads (or of larger groups of conversationalists). I also challenge the idea that in referential communication there is a first automatic, egocentric phase of comprehension that is then followed by a conscious and effortful non-egocentric phase.
Corpus evidence is presented which suggests that from a first-order perspective ‘appropriateness’ and ‘inappropriateness’ are more salient notions than ‘politeness’ and ‘impoliteness’ or ‘rudeness’. It is then argued that norms of appropriate verbal behaviour in a community can be established empirically by employing experimental methods. Production questionnaire data may not reflect what participants would actually say in real life, but reveal what guides their expectations, perception and performance in a given social situation. It is shown that small talk between strangers at a party is governed by diverging norms in different national varieties of English, viz. American English, Irish English and English English. It is further shown that gender and age differences exist within a national variety and that norms of appropriate verbal behaviour seem to be subject to age-grading.
In this paper we briefly revisit politeness research influenced by Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory. We argue that this research tradition does not deal with politeness but with the mitigation of face-threatening acts (FTAs) in general. In our understanding, politeness cannot just be equated with FTA-mitigation because politeness is a discursive concept. This means that what is polite (or impolite) should not be predicted by analysts. Instead, researchers should focus on the discursive struggle in which interactants engage. This reduces politeness to a much smaller part of facework than was assumed until the present, and it allows for interpretations that consider behavior to be merely appropriate and neither polite nor impolite. We propose that relational work, the "work" individuals invest in negotiating relationships with others, which includes impolite as well as polite or merely appropriate behavior, is a useful concept to help investigate the discursive struggle over politeness. We demonstrate this in close readings of five examples from naturally occurring interactions.
Politeness research to date has generally adopted one of two views: the "traditional" view based on the dual premises of Grice's Co-operative Principle and speech act theory (Lakoff 1973, Brown and Levinson 1987 [1978], Leech 1983), or the "post-modern" view, which rejects these premises and substitutes them by an emphasis on participants' own perceptions of politeness (politeness1) and on the discursive struggle over politeness (Eelen 2001, Mills 2003, Watts 2003). Contrasting these two views, this article considers not only their points of disagreement, but, crucially, points where the two views coincide, bringing to light their common underlying assumptions. It then goes on to show how, departing from these common assumptions, a third direction for politeness studies, the "frame-based" view, is possible. Following an outline of the frame-based view, it is suggested that this fits in with the traditional and the post-modern views in a three-layered schema addressing politeness phenomena at different levels of granularity.
Linguistic theory is extended to embrace all those areas of human behavior which are learned and in greater or less degree culturally patterned. "Etic" and "emic" approaches (on the analogy of phon
etic and phon
emic) investigate, respectively, generalized phenomena of culturally patterned behavior, and phenomena peculiar to one language or culture system. Various units, such as the behavioreme and the grameme, are proposed. Part II considers further the behavioreme and the uttereme. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The article reviews the methods of data collection employed in 39 studies of interlanguage pragmatics, defined narrowly as the investigation of nonnative speakers' comprehension and production of speech acts, and the acquisition of L2-related speech act knowledge. Data collection instruments are distinguished according to the degree to which they constrain informants' responses, and whether they tap speech act perception/comprehension or production. A main focus of discussion is the validity of different types of data, in particular, their adequacy to approximate authentic performance of linguistic action.
This paper reports the results of two questionnaire studies which primarily address the issue of speech act data collection
in non-Western contexts. The first employed a discourse completion test (DCT) and was initiated as a contrastive study of
requests in Japanese and American English. The second used a multiple-choice questionnaire (MCQ) as a means of exploring the
validity of open-ended questionnaires in non-Western contexts. Based on the results of both studies, there are reasons to
suspect that DCTs may be inappropriate for collecting data on Japanese, but more research is needed to show this conclusively.
These studies do make some headway, though, in addressing these two central issues of speech act research, and they help to
underscore the fact that more work is needed to both extend the scope of speech act studies and refine the methodologies used
in them.
Young speakers in dialogue must establish mutual knowledge. Traditionally, researchers have focused on how children used indefinite and definite articles to signal novel and shared information. In this study of 170 children aged seven to thirteen, the form of introduction chosen, whether question or statement, is more significant than the type of article used. No developmental effects on article use emerge, with statement + indefinite always the least common choice. However, young speakers use question introductions significantly less than older children. There is also a developmental interaction between speakers' and listeners' behaviour. Question introduction elicit effective listener responses at all ages, but only twelve-year-olds respond reliably to statements. Unfortunately, young speakers prefer just those forms of introduction to which young listeners are least likely to provide informative feedback. Thus two separate developmental effects appear to combine to hamper young subjects' chances of achieving successful communication in dialogues.
Discourse Pragmatics: Language and Culture Resources for Instructors, Students, and Researchers of Spanish Linguistics
- J C Félix-Brasdefer
- JC Félix-Brasdefer
El análisis de la cortesía comunicativa, categorización pragmalingüística de la cultura española
- H Haverkate
Speech Act Performance: Theoretical, Empirical and Methodological Issues. Language Learning and Language Teaching
- J C Félix-Brasdefer
- JC Félix-Brasdefer
- RJ Watts