Intentionality, communicative intentions and the implication of politeness
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Şükriye Ruhi
Abstract
Working within the relevance-theoretic paradigm (Sperber & Wilson 1995 [1986]), complemented with the cognitive linguistic approach (Johnson 1987; Lakoff & Johnson 1980), the paper proposes that politeness is an optional metarepresentation of an “interpersonal attitude” (Haugh 2007:91) that concerns the domain of intentionality. The paper first addresses the issue of “noticed” vs. “unnoticed” politeness with respect to utterance processing and argues that “unnoticed” (conventional) politeness can exist in interaction on the level of “background consciousness” (O'Driscoll 1996:1) and that processing of non-conventional utterances need not go through full-fledged inferential processing to achieve polite interpretations. Politeness is described as an implication that may result via the integration of the metarepresentation of (communicative) intentions and evaluative metarepresentations of the interlocutors' social acts.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- On the culture-specificity of linguistic gender differences: The case of English and Russian apologies
- Intentionality, communicative intentions and the implication of politeness
- (Non)Compliance with directives among family and friends: Responding to social pressure and individual wants
- Agents, roles and other things we talk about: Associative Semantics and Meta-Informative Centering Theory
- Conversational constraint of truthfulness on presuppositions
- Book reviews
Articles in the same Issue
- On the culture-specificity of linguistic gender differences: The case of English and Russian apologies
- Intentionality, communicative intentions and the implication of politeness
- (Non)Compliance with directives among family and friends: Responding to social pressure and individual wants
- Agents, roles and other things we talk about: Associative Semantics and Meta-Informative Centering Theory
- Conversational constraint of truthfulness on presuppositions
- Book reviews
