Volume 10, Issue 2

This paper explores how non-manual features are key to conveyinglinguistic politeness in British Sign Language (BSL). Data were collectedthrough five semi-structured interviews incorporating the elicitation of twospeech acts commonly associated with research on linguistic politeness: requestsand apologies. The data from this exploratory study suggest that nonmanualfeatures (including specific mouth gestures and movements of the headand upper body) are more crucial for linguistic politeness than manual signs.The data indicate a degree of commonality between the features used for politenessin BSL and those previously identified in American Sign Language (Roush1999; Hoza 2001, 2007). While non-manual features convey both linguistic andparalinguistic meaning in signed language (Sandler and Lillo-Martin 2006),their use in politeness highlights the complexity of the interaction betweenthese two functions and illuminates an aspect of politeness frequently overlookedin much research: the use of intonation. Analysis of the use of nonmanualfeatures for politeness also problematizes the categorization of politenessstrategies using existing frameworks developed on spoken languages,such as the internal modifications outlined by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989).

Within the impoliteness literature, an important distinction has beenmade between genuine and mock (or non-genuine) impoliteness (Culpeper1996, 2011; Bernal 2008, among others). Even though mock impoliteness hasgenerally been analyzed within an impoliteness framework, recent proposalssuggest that it is an essentially different pragmatic phenomenon that requiresa continuous conversational evaluation (Haugh and Bousfield 2012). Thepresent study had the goal of assessing the offline evaluation process of targetgenuine vs. mock impoliteness utterances, specifically the role the situational/discourse contexts, as well as prosodic and gestural patterns, play in their interpretation.A total of 97 participants were either asked to rate the degree ofimpoliteness of target genuine and mock impoliteness utterances in isolation(Experiment 1), or to rate the same utterances preceded with a set of matchedand mismatched situational/discourse contexts which favored either a genuineor a mock impoliteness interpretation (Experiment 2). The results of the twoexperiments show that (a) evaluations of intended mock impoliteness utterancesgenerate more uncertainty in listeners than intended genuine impolite utterances;and (b) mock impoliteness evaluations are characterized by a moreactive use of gestural cues. These results provide evidence that mock impolitenesstriggers a more complex evaluation procedure of a phenomenon that lieson the boundary between polite and impolite behavior.

The concept of group face has been used to explain facework thatrelates to members of in-groups. Hahn and Hatfield (2011) looked at situationsin which a family member of a Speaker commits a possible offense towards aHearer. They tested the prediction that collectivist Koreans would apologize forthe family member at a greater rate than individualist Americans who wouldbe focused upon individual face not group face. This prediction was not confirmedas the chance of an apology for the two groups was not significantlydifferent among the university students participating. Interpreting speaker responsesin such triadic interactions, however, was difficult because there wasno comparison point to classic dyadic interactions. Without this comparisonthe facework performed could be unrelated to group face. The current papercreates this comparison point by adapting the methods of Hahn and Hatfieldfor dyadic interaction. A Discourse Completion Task was given to 80 speakers.There was no significant difference in apology rates between the two countriesin either the triadic or dyadic studies, plus a complex interaction of each factorwith Gender. The results argue for the significance of face management of individualsand groups not in immediate interaction, which has implications forthe distinction of face and identity.

The aim of this study was to investigate the use of the native Finnishpoliteness marker kiitos ‘thank you/please’ compared to the borrowed politenessmarker pliis (from English please ). Pliis in Finnish is best characterized asa marked form which is mostly relegated to informal or spoken language. Thus,this stage of our study made use of a grammatical acceptability test to try toobserve social evaluation patterns. The test was presented as a web-based surveyconsisting of 12 grammatical acceptability questions and 6 demographicquestions. It was completed by 417 respondents from throughout Finland. Thehypothesis was that the function of kiitos could be changing grammatically andsemantically. However, the findings indicate that the use of kiitos is more orless unchanged, whereas the use of pliis is likely to be nativizing. The MANOVAanalyses indicate that pliis is associated (as a first order index) with young,urban women, and this is also the social group that is more likely to claim useof pliis . The most important finding of the study is that pliis and kiitos seem tobe complementary in their distribution; grammatically, pragmatically and interms of social distinctiveness. We claim that kiitos serves as a marker of negativepoliteness, whereas pliis serves as a marker of positive politeness.

This paper focuses on the notion of politeness formulae in linguisticpoliteness research. It argues that the formal make-up of politeness formulaeis crucially motivated by their function. The major claim of this paper is thusthat there is a link between form and function of expressions of linguistic politeness.The usefulness of this account will be illustrated by the analysis ofempirical data from Slavic languages and German. Reference to Roman Jakobson’smarkedness theory will show that the choice of linguistic means is notonly dependent on concrete contexts (as is usually claimed in linguistic politenesstheory) but also motivated by the language system itself.