Volume 11, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Politeness in Africa

This study demonstrates how and why interactants at a tyre fitment centre in Grahamstown, South Africa, manage discordant interpersonal relationships in strategic ways. Individuals in a post-apartheid small business respond to their social and economic context and exercise agency to their advantage in doing so. This study draws on linguistic ethnography (Rampton 2007) and the Rapport Management Framework (RMF, Spencer-Oatey 2000b, 2011), itself a development of politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1987). An initial RMF analysis ran into difficulties around interactions that at first glance appeared to be oriented toward Rapport Challenge and Neglect. Upon closer examination, it appeared that discordant rapport was being actively maintained in this business. This led us to address underdeveloped areas of RMF that were not responsive enough to describe naturally occurring small business interactions, and propose an Enhanced Rapport Management Framework to overcome its inadequacies. We conclude that people may deliberately maintain discordant relationships when it is in their best interests to do so. Thus, contrary to a common-sense belief that harmonious social relations are an intrinsic good, we found that promoting discordant social relations can be understood as a rational response to individuals’ social and economic contexts, particularly in conditions such as those in many postcolonial African societies.

This paper examines the conventional linguistic practices involved in everyday hospitality situations. We compare offers in Arabic and English and, rather than focusing on the differences between the ways interactants in these two cultures make offers, we challenge the notion that offering is in essence differently handled in the two languages. We argue instead that we should focus just as much on the similarities between the ways offers are made, since no two cultural/linguistic groups are diametrically opposed. Furthermore, no cultural or linguistic group can be argued to be homogeneous. Through a detailed analysis of four naturally occurring hospitality encounters, we explore the nature and sequencing of offering and receiving hospitality in each cultural community and discuss the extent to which offers and refusals are conventionalized in each language. In this way we hope to develop a more contextual discursive approach to cross-cultural politeness research. Drawing on Spencer-Oatey’s notion of sociality face, we examine the conventions for being hospitable in order to appear sincere. A qualitative analysis of the data reveals that, while there are similarities in offering behaviour in both English and Arabic, in Arabic, the interactional moves of insisting and refusing are slightly more conventionalized. This however does not constitute a radical difference between the offering norms of these two cultural groups.

This paper investigates, from a cross-cultural pragmatics framework, the motivations and reasons which induce Moroccans in particular, and Arabs in general, to invoke Qur’anic verses and religious lexicons in their daily politeness discourse. By focusing on the speech act of greeting, this study attempts to show that greetings are ordinary day-to-day events, which often encapsulate a lot of different cultural values that may cause misunderstandings. Based on data collected from natural interaction between Arabs and Germans, Arabs seem inclined to show politeness when greeting one another by using religious vocabulary and giving religious praises. In addition, the use of religion as a politeness strategy appears to function as a way of protecting the self-image of both the speaker and the hearer. Furthermore, the findings of this study also reveal that by resorting to the use of this politeness strategy, Moroccans seem to reflect their firm belief and the importance they attach to the Qur’an and, more especially, to the question of fate and destiny in Islam. As a result, it is not the linguistic expression itself but rather the pragmatic function of the utterance that seems to determine the use and interpretation of politeness strategies in (Moroccan) Arabic.

This paper explores (im)politeness and gender in a specific advice-giving practice of young Ghanaians online. The data is collected from the Facebook fan page of Mama Zimbi, a radio and TV personality from Ghana, and consists of a sample of 400 messages in response to two male and two female advice-seekers’ problem messages. The messages are analyzed according to form- and content-based categories, focussing on the directness and content of advice, the content of discursive moves other than advice, and address terms. The results indicate that very direct forms (i.e., imperatives) are the preferred way by both males and females to give advice. Directness, however, cannot be equated with impoliteness or politeness, which rather depends on a combination of the content of advice, further discursive moves and additional elements such as politeness markers. Although there are trends towards more cooperative advice by females and more negative responses directed at males, there are many exceptions to this and no clear gender differences are found. The high number of rude or sarcastic comments most probably serves the function of entertaining readers, while other users try to maintain politeness on the page by giving sincere advice and/or scolding those who insult advice-seekers.

This article examines linguistic politeness and pragmatic variation in the production of requests among Senegalese speakers of French in Dakar. Drawing on a framework of pragmatic variation (Schneider and Barron 2008; Barron and Schneider 2009) and a model of intercultural communication and politeness systems (Scollon and Scollon 2001), we analyze variation of request variants, internal modification, and variation in the selection of the T/V forms in formal and informal contexts, including solidarity politeness (−P, −D), deference politeness (−P, +D), and hierarchical politeness (+P, +D). The Senegalese French requests were compared to requests from French speakers from France in comparable situations. The realization of politeness and request performance in Senegalese French is influenced by the fact that use of French is normally limited to formal contexts, such as schools and government establishments, with Wolof serving as a lingua franca in informal settings for speakers of many national languages. The results are discussed in light of pragmalinguistic variation, including variation of address forms, request variants, and internal modification.