Volume 13, Issue 2

Even though in English-speaking cultural contexts a humorous reaction to teasing seems to be highly valued, jocularity can and does sometimes occasion evaluations of impoliteness. This paper aims to examine what makes the targets and/or other ratified hearers (the third party) evaluate teasing as impolite and to observe how impoliteness (as an evaluative situated phenomenon) functions in jocular interactions in two cultural contexts – Australian and British. The data comes from two national versions of the same reality gameshow – Big Brother Australia 2012 and Big Brother UK 2012. The results from both data sets reveal that teasing is often negatively evaluated when it is meant to amuse the hearers at the target’s expense or it is delivered in a non-affectionate way. Furthermore, some cultural differences have been noticed. While British housemates do not particularly appreciate jocular comments that target some personal characteristics or one’s personal items (i.e. seen as a personal attack), Australians tend to label jocular verbal behaviour as inappropriate when it is used to exclude the target or when it disrupts social harmony in general.

The relationship between irony and sarcasm has been much discussed and yet there is still little agreement on how the two relate at a theoretical level, as Attardo (2000: 795) notes “there is no consensus on whether irony and sarcasm are essentially the same thing […] or if they differ significantly”. The aim of this paper is to take a user-perspective and report on how participants in everyday conversations in the UK and Italy talk about irony and sarcasm and what kinds of authentic behaviors are described using these labels. These findings are discussed with reference to the academic concepts of irony and sarcasm to investigate how the lay and academic perspectives relate.

The present paper aims to re-investigate the status of Japanese honorifics in pragmatic principles, and attempts to see how various dynamic uses of honorific terms for different purposes can be unified with the idea of “the grammar of society” (Bicchieri 2006). To reach this conclusion, the paper is organised in the following way. First, I argue that honorifics, or more precisely honorific markings, function as the grammatical conversion of what has already been strategically constructed, and solely index a social or psychological distance between the interactants. This means that honorifics present a double layer of linguistic architecture: a strategically constructed unit and honorific marking on the unit. Second, the paper examines honorific terms used in speech (plus-) level shifts to see a parallel between them and the so-called ‘conventional’ honorifics, and to find similar attributes shared between them, which are in many ways derived from the origin of honorifics. Finally, by re-investigating and reinstating the term ‘social norm’, which Bicchieri (2006) compares to “the grammar of society”, I demonstrate how honorific terms as social norms are first employed, and then applied, manipulated and pragmatically expanded for various purposes.

Translation practice is a code interaction situation (Schäffner and Adab 1997; Cronin 2003; Heine and Kuteva 2005; House 2006), which can bring about change in target linguistic systems through the cumulative effect of hegemonic donor languages on reception ones. The study traces development of politeness-related features in English-Greek samples of translated political science discourse. A pilot study first identifies a set of shift types between the English and Greek versions of John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty (1869,1983) tracing a prevailing set of positive politeness shifts in the Greek target version, often balanced with some negative politeness ones. An experiment follows, examining a rendition of three politeness devices which are claimed to realize quality, social identity and relational aspects of facework (Spencer-Oatey 2007), in samples from two Greek versions (1990, 2005) of John Locke’s The Second Treatise . Results show that there is variation between retranslations in the treatment of these devices over the years. The study further examines a set of six parallel samples from different political science works and their translations into Greek, with a view to quantitatively verifying the hypothesis that Greek academic discourse is changing under the influence of English academic discourse. Results show that features are ‘degenerating’ as manifested through the translated versions of these works. Finally an experiment was conducted with translator-trainees, hoping to show the relative importance of these features (and aspects of facework) from an emic perspective. The study concludes that the relational aspect of facework, which is prioritized by native Greek informants, undergoes some ‘degeneration’ over the years, which seems to suppress the local balance of positive/negative politeness patterns in political science discourse. The finding is assumed to be an effect of globalization suppressing locally prioritized aspects of facework.

This study takes a discursive approach (cf. Watts 1989, 2008; Locher 2004, 2006, 2011, 2012; Locher and Watts 2005, 2008; Mills 2011; van der Bom and Mills 2015), to analyze online postings as social behavior for use in other/second language (im)politeness instruction. The criteria for inclusion are authenticity, complexity, diversity and feasibility. This means the postings need to (1) be created for a social purpose, not an instructional one; (2) be pragmatically rich and exemplify evaluations of (in)appropriate behavior; (3) illustrate variety in their underlying social norms and values; as well as (4) lend themselves to examination by learners and provoke reflection in conjunction with participatory learning activities. The analysis found that postings from online fora can meet these criteria and identifies (a manageable number of) posts for which participatory learning activities were developed. In combination the posts and the activities are used to enhance awareness of the complexity of (im)politeness in social encounters, especially in intercultural interactions, and the omnipresent and emergent nature of (im)politeness. They have been used in a university setting to sensitize the L2 learner to differences in the views, judgments and negotiations of what constitutes polite or impolite behavior between as well as within speech communities.