Conceptualizations and evaluations of (im)politeness in Syrian Arabic

1 Introduction

Politeness research has seen a dramatic expansion over the past few decades since its beginnings with first-wave politeness theories (Brown and Levinson 1978/1987; Lakoff 1973; Leech 1983). The distinction between first- and second-order politeness, or politeness as practiced and understood by lay speakers as opposed to researchers’ theoretically-imposed notions, respectively (Eelen 2001: 30), has marked the start of the discursive turn in politeness research (Watts 2003; Watts et al. 2005) which takes a predominantly user perspective to examining politeness. The discursive approaches have emphasized the elusiveness of the concept of politeness (Watts 2003: 13) and its dyadic nature as a social and linguistic phenomenon that involves not only what the speaker says but also how the hearer evaluates it (Mills 2011: 28). This has resulted in a shift towards examining how users conceptualize and evaluate politeness rather than how they produce it (Barros García and Terkourafi 2014). Following this change of perspective, this research aims to examine first-order, lay conceptualizations and evaluations of (im)politeness in Syrian Arabic.

Haugh (2012) warns that users’ perspectives and that of the researcher/analyst may be in danger of being conflated. He further argues that any examination of (im)politeness involves multiple loci of understanding. The analyst’s perspective is rooted in understanding the interpretations of the participants by inferring them through systematic observations, which may be couched in theoretical epistemologies (Haugh 2012: 10–13). This research subscribes to this characterization; I take a first-order, user perspective in examining (im)politeness in Syrian Arabic. I also use theoretical frameworks, as discussed later, which guide my systematic analysis of participants’ understandings. Thus, this research is an example of contemporary approaches to (im)politeness that couch analyses in the perspectives of both users and analysts.

In addition to bringing to the fore the importance of examining politeness from multiple perspectives, recent approaches to politeness have also criticized the conceptual bias towards politeness in earlier theories (Eelen 2001: 87) in which impoliteness was considered a marginal phenomenon (Leech 1983: 105) or treated as the absence of politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987). However, since Culpeper (1996), there has been an increasing interest in impoliteness in its own right. In more recent developments, Culpeper (2011: 21) argues that impoliteness arises with respect to face-offenses and offenses that result from violations of social and moral norms. In a similar vein, Kádár and Haugh (2013: 67) discuss the role of social and moral norms and maintain that, in evaluating behaviors as (im)polite, people appeal to a set of moral and social norms, a moral order, that guides their evaluations of (im)politeness. Thus, given the importance of morals and norms in (im)politeness conceptualizations and evaluations, a major objective in this paper is to identify the moral foundations that underlie participants’ understandings of (im)politeness.

Based on this brief overview, this study explores conceptualizations of (im)politeness and their moral foundations in Syrian Arabic, which to my knowledge has not been researched from a first-order perspective before. By focusing on participants’ conceptualizations of (im)politeness rather than their production of (im)politeness, the study also contributes to (im)politeness research, which has been dominated by a focus on production studies (Sifianou and Tzanne 2010: 662). I examine the following question:

1. What are participants’ conceptualizations and evaluations of (im)politeness in Syrian Arabic? What are the moral foundations of such conceptualizations and evaluations?

The paper is organized as follows: in Section 2, I review lay and theoretical conceptualizations of (im)politeness. Section 3 tackles the role of social norms and morality in (im)politeness evaluations. Methodology and data are presented in Section 4. In Section 5, I discuss the research question and the results of the study and conclude in Section 6.

2 Conceptualizations of (im)politeness: from theoretical constructs to lay notions

As noted earlier, discursivists highlight the fluidity of politeness as a concept that is difficult to define. Fukushima and Sifianou (2017: 527) argue that this may be due to the multi-faceted nature of politeness; it is a social and linguistic phenomenon with both verbal and non-verbal manifestations, which may vary among members of the same culture. Nevertheless, classical politeness theories are replete with definitions of politeness, which they consider a universal phenomenon. For example, Lakoff (1979: 64) sees politeness as a “device to reduce friction in personal interaction”. Similarly, Leech (1983: 82) maintains that politeness is needed to uphold the belief that our interlocutors are being cooperative and to maintain social equilibrium. For Brown and Levinson (1987: 1), politeness is a strategic device used to mitigate face-threat and possible aggression. The overall picture in classical theories is that politeness is a strategic and intentional behavior used by the speaker to achieve personal and communicative goals, with the hearer relegated to a mere recipient.

Discursive approaches have dismissed such analyses as second-order theoretical constructs, imposed by researchers (Watts et al. 2005), and emphasized the relational nature of politeness as part of the work in which people engage in maintaining, constructing, and redefining their interpersonal relationships (Locher and Watts 2008: 96). Thus, politeness research should be couched in a first-order perspective and should examine how lay speakers understand politeness as an everyday concept (Eelen 2001: 32). One method towards this goal is to examine users’ (im)politeness metalanguage which reveals their awareness of (im)politeness as a social and linguistic phenomenon and allows us to “examine the conceptual underpinnings of politeness” (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 188). For example, Blum-Kulka (2005: 257) reports that Israelis associate politeness with restraint, tolerance, and good manners. For Greeks, politeness involves solidarity rather than distance and is characterized by love, generosity, optimism, discreetness, and selflessness (Sifianou and Tzanne 2010: 696).

Examining politeness metalanguage has also revealed that politeness in the lay sense involves behaving appropriately in accordance with “the expectations of the place” Blum-Kulka (2005: 259), which resonates with Barros García and Terkourafi’s (2014: 26) findings that politeness in Spanish and American English concerns adherence to social norms. Politeness is also understood as showing consideration and respect for others, which implies concern for and understanding of others (Fukushima and Sifianou 2017: 539; Haugh 2019). According to Travis (1997), consideration involves avoiding behaviors that reveal one has not thought of others, but Fukushima and Haugh (2014) argue that this is a narrow view of consideration which also involves empathy, attentiveness, and helping others. This has also been reported by Fukushima and Sifianou (2017: 534) who explain that Greek and Japanese informants conceive of politeness as consideration of others, conveyed through respect, help, empathy, and attentiveness.

Attentiveness as a form of consideration for others is a core aspect of lay conceptualizations of politeness especially in Japanese culture. Fukushima (2013: 279) defines attentiveness as a form of preemptive offering that shows concern for a beneficiary’s potential needs in a particular situation. The concept of “attentiveness” is found in politeness literature and is synonymous with a range of helping behaviors (Fukushima 2013: 280). For example, Sifianou and Tzanne (2010: 671–672) implicitly refer to attentiveness as manifested through helping others, which constitutes part of Greek participants’ understandings of politeness, and includes behaviors such as giving up one’s seat in public transportation, one’s turn in queues, and offering help to strangers in the streets.

The view of politeness as subsuming consideration and attentiveness contradicts classical views of politeness as a rational behavior and supports contemporary views that see it as a relational phenomenon; one cannot be considerate, attentive, and respectful in isolation from others. Overall, politeness is underlain by morality and emotion rather than mere rationality (Fukushima and Sifianou 2017: 546–547). As I will show in relation to Syrian Arabic, morals and norms are central to participants’ conceptualizations and evaluations of (im)politeness.

As for (im)politeness, there is not yet a consensus among scholars on what it subsumes (Bousfield 2010). “The lowest common denominator” is that “impoliteness is a behavior that is face aggravating in a particular context” (Locher and Bousfield 2008: 3). Culpeper’s (2005: 38) definition of impoliteness as face-attack that may or may not be intentional also centers on face as the target of impoliteness. Similarly, Culpeper (2008: 36–38) discusses the interaction between impoliteness, face, and power. He argues that impoliteness causes face loss in that an interactant attempts to “devalue” the positive values of another interactant or impinge on their right to freedom from imposition, their negative face. Impoliteness relates to power in that impoliteness restricts others’ freedom of action and pushes them to either accept face loss or attempt retaliation. Power is also manifested in other impoliteness behaviors such as insults, putdowns, and forcing a course of action on others. Culpeper (2008) concludes that negative face, or equity rights which I further discuss in the upcoming section, suffers as a result of such impoliteness behaviors. More recently, Culpeper (2021: 5) discusses parallels between impoliteness and hate speech which targets intrinsic characteristics of groups of people such as gender, ethnicity, and disability, and so damages their sense of identity, or group face, as described by Spencer-Oatey (2008) and discussed in Section 3. Hate speech and impoliteness both damage group face (Culpeper 2021).

In addition to face, Culpeper (2011: 21–23) incorporates social norms and expectations in his definition of impoliteness as “a negative attitude” towards certain behaviors that run contrary to people’s expectations in a given context. Culpeper and Tantucci (2021: 147–149) argue that part of what people expect is reciprocity, which is integral to the concept of (im)politeness, in that there is pressure on participants to reciprocate other participants’ (im)politeness, what Culpeper and Tantucci (2021: 150) refer to as the Principle of (im)politeness Reciprocity.^[1] Thus, polite behaviors such as greetings and thanks are expected to be reciprocated. Similarly, impolite insults give rise to counter insults. Violations of reciprocity as an expected behavior are abnormal, and abnormalities imply impoliteness (Culpeper and Tantucci 2021: 151). It follows from the preceding discussion that a behavior might be evaluated as impolite if it targets face or if it is seen as a breach of norms and social expectations about acceptable behaviors. As I show in the discussion, face considerations and violations of social norms turn out to be central to participants’ conceptualizations and evaluations of (im)politeness in this research.

According to Bousfield (2010), studies on lay conceptualizations of impoliteness are scarce compared to their politeness counterparts (Bousfield 2010). Thus, by targeting lay conceptualizations of impoliteness on a par with those of politeness, this paper addresses this gap in the literature by contributing to previous studies on lay understandings of impoliteness. One such study is Culpeper’s (2009) research on impoliteness metalanguage in which he examined the lexico-grammatical patterns associated with “rude” and “impoliteness” in a corpus of British English. He found that the patterns shed light on behaviors considered rude/impolite in lay usage such as pointing, staring, and unannounced visits. These actions reveal “the social underpinnings of behaviors regularly evaluated as IMPOLITE” (Culpeper 2009: 81). For example, pointing and being interrupted are underlain by concerns about unwarranted intrusion. Similarly, in public service contexts, it is considered impolite when people’s expectations of being entitled to public service are violated and they are denied service (Culpeper 2009: 83).

In Australian English, Waters (2012) explores the meanings of “rude” by analyzing the formula “it is rude to VP…” and the collocation “rude word”. The study reveals a number of behaviors and contexts deemed rude for Australians, which again include pointing and staring, in addition to interrupting, which suggests that these actions are recognized as rude in Anglo cultures. Waters (2012: 1056) notes that for something to be rude for Australians, it must cause others hurt, resentment, and offense, and for such negative feelings to lead to a negative evaluation of the person causing them. Thus, Waters (2012) implicitly defines impoliteness as a negative evaluation of others’ behaviors.

Sifianou and Tzanne’s (2010) study of impoliteness in Greek shows that impoliteness can be manifested in verbal behaviors such as swearing, interruption, sarcasm, failure to produce a polite response when expected, and issuing orders and demands. It can also be manifested in non-verbal behaviors which subsume pushing, jumping queues, and littering. As can be seen from the studies reviewed so far, face, consideration for others, and social norms and expectations about appropriate behaviors underlie much of layperson’s notions of (im)politeness. Consideration for others especially through respect also figures in studies on lay understandings of (im)politeness in Arabic dialects, which, despite being limited, take a contemporary, user-perspective.

For example, Al-Adaileh’s (2007) study compares politeness orientations in Jordanian Arabic and British English, through examining apologies. Using the Relational Work model (Locher and Watts 2005), Al-Adaileh (2007) offers empirical evidence that shows that Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model is unfit for capturing the complexities of politeness conceptions and expression. The study shows that apologies are not intrinsically negative politeness strategies, as Brown and Levinson (1987) claim, and that Jordanians use them as positive politeness strategies. Al-Adaileh (2007) concludes that politeness facts are best analyzed using the Relational Work model.

Kerkam (2015) also takes a discursive approach and examines (in)directness and (im)politeness in Libyan Arabic and British English. Regarding (im)politeness which is of more relevance to this research, Kerkam notes that both groups define politeness in terms of consideration for others but have different understandings as to how consideration is shown; the British see it as conforming to expectations and norms, the display of respect and patience, among other values, as well as using verbal politeness markers such as please and thanks. This latter aspect of politeness was not noted by Libyan informants, who otherwise emphasized the importance of honesty, truthfulness, respect for older people, and showing the moral teachings of religion in their behavior. Similarly, impoliteness is evaluated by both groups as lack of consideration. However, whereas the British seem to view it as the exact opposite of their definition of politeness, the Libyans add to that an extra layer of understanding of impoliteness as violating the teachings of religion and being a result of bad upbringing, thus, invoking the role of the social context in shaping (im)polite behaviors.

Also in Libyan Arabic, Asswae (2018) adopts Kádár and Haugh’s (2013) framework to explore the norms that underlie politeness and the interaction between politeness, religion, and rituals. She finds that politeness is underpinned by the social norms of hospitality, respect for elders and higher ranking individuals, and is characterized by the use of religious address terms and academic titles to index deference. The results also indicate that speakers employ relational rituals primarily through the use of elaborate religious formulae to enact politeness in various religious and secular contexts.

Based on this brief overview of the literature, this study is a contribution to (im)politeness research in that it investigates a dialect of Arabic that has not been examined before, taking a contemporary approach that combines the perspective of participants as lay users as well as the perspective of the analyst. The study also attempts to overcome the conceptual bias towards politeness (Eelen 2001) by equally focusing on politeness and impoliteness conceptualizations. As my role as analyst lies in systematically analyzing participants’ views on (im)politeness and their moral foundations, I do that by drawing on insights from Spencer-Oatey’s (2008) rapport management model and Spencer-Oatey and Kádár’s (2016) discussion of the foundations of morality. I present the details of these frameworks in the next section.

3 Evaluations of (im)politeness: social norms and moral foundations

As seen in the discussion above, researchers argue that (im)politeness involves an evaluation of others’ behaviors in a specific context. Different analyses have been proposed to account for how evaluations arise. Within the Relational Work approach, Locher and Watts (2008: 78) argue that evaluations of (im)politeness are made with reference to participants’ expectations of what behavior is expected and accepted in any given context. Similarly, in her rapport management model, Spencer-Oatey (2008) appeals to shared expectations and socially accepted behaviors, as well as to face, to explain how relationships prosper or suffer as a result of (im)polite behaviors. She argues that face is connected to one’s self-worth and is associated with a set of positive and negative attributes related to skills, physical qualities and personality traits. People are sensitive about these attributes and have a desire for others to recognize the positive qualities and ignore the negative. Face has three aspects: individual face, which refers to people as individuals, group face which is people’s affiliation with groups such as family, and relational face, which indicates the way people view themselves in relation to others, as in teacher/student relationships (Spencer-Oatey 2008: 14–15).

Sociality rights and obligations, which stem from people’s social expectations about “what frequently or typically happens in a given context” (Spencer-Oatey 2008: 16) are underlain by people’s concern with equity and propriety and have two types: on the one hand, people are concerned with equity and fairness; they expect people not to unduly impose on them and to respect their freedom of action. Reciprocity and the belief that the extent to which people impose on each other should be kept in balance are important aspects of equity. On the other hand, people expect to be entitled to association rights of involvement/detachment based on their relationship with different people. Rapport is also sensitive to interactional goals which people seek to achieve in their communication with others. If face, equity/association rights, or interactional goals are threatened, evaluations of impoliteness may arise and rapport suffers. For example, when we are disrespected or we are forced to do something, our face and sociality rights and obligations are threatened, respectively.

Kádár and Haugh (2013: 93) delve more into the nature of social expectations and explain that expectancies are informed by norms which include the behaviors that people approve or disapprove of in different contexts. These norms constitute a moral order that forms the backbone of (im)politeness evaluations; behaviors that contradict users’ expectancies are open to evaluations as impolite. Furthermore, orientation to norms differs according to whether users are insiders to a social group (emic perspective) or outsiders (etic perspective) (Kádár and Haugh 2013).

Spencer-Oatey and Kádár (2016: 82) address the values and norms that underpin the moral order by drawing on Haidt and Kesebir’s (2010) universal foundations of morality. The first two foundations, in-group/loyalty and authority/respect, are relational and concern people’s awareness of their obligations and loyalties as group members and their perspectives on respect and obedience in hierarchical relationships, respectively. The second two moral foundations are about treatment of others; whereas harm/care involves virtues of caring and compassion, fairness/reciprocity is concerned with unfairness, cheating, and justice. Finally, purity/sanctity is about personal morality and virtues of chastity and control of desire. Each of these foundations is important for (im)politeness evaluations and can form the basis of a group’s injunctive norms (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016: 82). These foundations have different emic manifestations. For example, within the category of in-group/loyalty, individualist and collectivist societies have different perspectives on in-group vs. out-group relations. Clashing orientations to any moral foundation may lead to evaluations of (im)politeness (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2016).

In the discussion of the data, I rely on concepts from Spencer-Oatey’s (2008) rapport management model and Spencer-Oatey and Kádár’s (2016) discussion of universal moral foundations. Rapport management provides a good synergy of core concepts in (im)politeness research such as face and social norms, capturing well how the latter are underlain by different social expectations. Similarly, the universal moral foundations form a restricted set of concepts that have clear parallels to (im)politeness-related notions such as consideration, power, distance, reciprocity, and cultural differences that give rise to different manifestations of (im)politeness. Thus, both frameworks can account for a wide range of (im)politeness data and shed light on the morals and norms that motivate lay conceptualizations of (im)politeness.

4 Methodology and data

5 Results and discussion

Questionnaire items one through four are customized in accordance with the research objectives as follows: items one and three are designed to elicit participants’ (im)politeness metalanguage. Participants provided a range of descriptors to talk about (im)polite people, which are key for establishing their (im)politeness conceptualizations and evaluations (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 188). Their responses also reveal the moral and social roots of their understandings of (im)politeness; as established, in their evaluations, participants invoke their respective moral orders, which enables me to identify the moral foundations of the moral order that gives rise to their (im)politeness evaluations. Items two and four ask participants to talk about their personal experiences in dealing with (im)polite behaviors, and in doing so, participants will fall back on the moral order(s) that guided their evaluations of the incidents they report, which further sheds light on the moral foundations of their (im)politeness understandings.

To analyze participants’ responses, I applied content analysis which involves the subjective interpretation and the systematic coding of identifiable patterns and themes in a text (Hsieh and Shannon 2005: 1278). After identifying key words and notions, I re-read the responses to classify them in groups based on similarities of concepts and key words. Through this process of coding and re-coding, I was able to establish major categories that captured participants’ conceptualizations of (im)politeness, mainly drawing on the categorization proposed in Fukushima and Sifianou (2017). In what follows, I outline the results of this analysis and attempt to address the main research question with reference to the identified categories in each questionnaire item.

6 Conclusion

The aim of this study has been to examine conceptualizations and evaluations of (im)politeness in Syrian Arabic and the moral foundations that give rise to lay notions of (im)politeness. In line with previous findings on lay conceptualizations of (im)politeness, the results show that politeness is viewed as consideration for others, expressed mainly through various forms of respect and attentiveness, in addition to avoiding hurting others’ feelings and non-imposition. Politeness also consists of appropriate behaviors such as avoiding taboos, inappropriate topics, sarcasm, as well as saying nice words and not interrupting others. These behaviors implicitly reveal participants’ expectations about acceptable behaviors in a variety of contexts. As for impoliteness, the results indicate that participants view impoliteness as inconsideration for others in the form of disrespect, bullying, and imposition. Impoliteness is also about inappropriate behaviors that violate equity rights, expectations of reciprocity, and face sensitivities. These include queue jumping, shoving, and usurping others’ turns at public service points, in addition to criticism, taboo words, shouting, and ignoring others.

The results also reveal that these views arise from participants’ orientation to hierarchical respect, face, equity rights, reciprocity, adherence to social norms, and the value of helping others. Based on Spencer-Oatey and Kádár’s (2016) discussion of the five universal moral foundations, it can be said that participants’ lay notions of (im)politeness are rooted in three moral categories: authority/respect in relation to respect and individual face, fairness/reciprocity with respect to equity rights, reciprocity, and group face, in addition to harm/care, which underlies participants’ evaluation of helping others and attentiveness as polite.

Two interesting findings emerge from these results. First, participants seem to view politeness and impoliteness as polar opposites, thus, lending support to first-wave theorization (Brown and Levinson 1987). Second, the results indicate, contrary to early approaches to politeness, that participants do not see politeness as a strategic, goal-driven behavior. Rather, similarly to Fukushima and Sifianou’s (2017) observation about Japanese and Greek politeness, it is based on concern and care for others, manifested through helping behaviors and the various qualities associated with a polite person, specifically love, care, generosity, understanding, kindness, and humbleness, which are relational in nature. All in all, then, this view is in tune with how politeness is viewed in discursive approaches as a relational behavior, invested in by both speaker and hearer to negotiate various aspects of their relationship, and not just a rational, face-saving behavior (Locher and Watts 2008).

This study contributes to (im)politeness research by offering insights into (im)politeness and its moral foundations in Syrian Arabic, thus shedding light on an under-researched dialect of Arabic. Additionally, by focusing on conceptualizations of impoliteness, the paper attempts to bridge a gap in the literature which is characterized by an abundance of politeness studies and a lack of impoliteness studies in comparison. Still, some important aspects remain unexplored. For instance, further research is needed to explore the co-constructed nature of (im)politeness and how evaluations of (im)politeness arise in real-life situations, which would further shed light on the role of social norms and context in giving rise to evaluations of (im)politeness in Syrian Arabic. Future research might also examine age-related differences in participants’ evaluations, which would also deepen our understanding of (im)politeness in Syrian Arabic.