Volume 15, Issue 1

Communicating admiration and appreciation in public discourse are two important tasks for political actors who wish to secure relationships and advance models for civic behavior. Our goal in this study is to understand how political actors signal their desire to please addressees and advance political sociability by way of manifesting positive judgment towards others. On the basis of 241 utterances praising and complimenting others’ words and deeds, we identify the topics, patterns, and functions of these speech acts and the processes and struggles they evoke in Israeli public discourse. We conclude by discussing the role of positive evaluations in demarcating the boundaries of proper conduct in political communities and the ways the distinctive logic of politics is integrated with specific cultural speaking styles in influencing how members of the Israeli political community signal their appreciation and affect for other members’ skills, performances, and personalities.

This study investigates the nonverbal behaviors used in two interconnected relational practices in Korean: “doing deference” towards status superiors and “performing intimacy” towards status equals. We extracted 154 interactions from Korean televised dramas that represented these two relational practices, and annotated the data for various nonverbal behaviors, including body position and orientation, facial expressions, manual gestures, and touching. Our analyses showed that the protagonists in the dramas altered their nonverbal behavior between the two relational practices according to all of the categories that we annotated. Doing deference featured erect but constrained body positions, direct bodily orientation towards the status superior, and suppression of gestures and touching. These behaviors display decreased animatedness and freedom, as well as increased effort, and increased submissiveness. In contrast, performing intimacy displayed more relaxed and reciprocal body positioning, as well as frequent gestures and touching behaviors. The results call into question analyses of politeness phenomena that solely focus on verbal elements in previous descriptions of Korean deference. Ultimately, our results demonstrate the need for more multimodal studies in politeness research.

Examples of evasive answers frequently appear in discussions of non-literal meaning comprehension. A considerable amount of work on this topic has focused on how this kind of non-literal meaning is generated. Of the researchers who have dealt with speakers’ motives for using evasive answers, and how hearers’ awareness of these motives affects their interpretations, the majority have focused on evasive answers that are not intended to be recognized as such – in Gricean terms, those that violate the Maxim of Relation. Comparatively little research has dealt with answers that are blatant in their failure to answer the question – that is, those that flout Relation. This paper proposes that the majority of answers in the latter category can be understood using Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) model of politeness – in particular, that evasive answers are motivated by considerations for both speaker and hearer’s positive face-wants. Evasive answers are defined according to Roberts’ (2012) model of “the question under discussion” and characterized in terms of violating, infringing, or flouting Grice’s (1975) Maxim of Relation. Various contexts in which the latter category of evasive answers occur are identified and discussed with reference to their role in avoiding face-threatening acts. Potential exceptions to the proposition that blatantly evasive answers can be explained using Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) model of politeness are identified, and problems with treating violating, infringing, and flouting as clearly distinct categories are discussed.

This paper looks at the use and non-use of please in American and British English requests. The analysis is based on request data from two comparable workplace email corpora, which have been pragmatically annotated to enable retrieval of all request speech acts regardless of formulation. 675 requests are extracted from each of the two corpora; the behaviour of please is analyzed with regard to factors such as imposition level, sentence mood, and modal verb type. Differences in use of please between the two varieties of English can be accounted for by viewing this as a marker of conventional politeness rather than face-threat mitigation in British English and as a marker of relationship asymmetry in American English.

This study investigates whether international teaching assistants (ITAs), compared to American teaching assistants (ATAs), lack any rapport norms that may affect their teaching effectiveness and, if yes, what may cause their lack of those teaching rapport norms. Based on the rapport management theory from Spencer-Oatey (2000, 2008), teaching rapport in this study is delineated in terms of valued attributes as well as rights and obligations of both teachers and students. The data of this study consists of one-on-one interviews with 9 ITAs and 11 ATAs in regard to their self-perceived teaching rapport work and norms. The information from the ITA group was elicited in both the contexts of their country of origin and America and that from the ATA group was only in the American context. The comparison of self-perceived teaching rapport norms between the two groups shows that like ATAs, ITAs are familiar with the norms of teacher and student rights and obligations in American teaching. However, different from ATAs, ITAs do not value other teacher and student attributes beyond their perceived obligations for each role. The differences between ITAs’ self-perceived rapport work and norms in America and in their home country suggest that ITAs’ lack of these rapport norms may be caused by their resistance to the expected instructor identity and/or their mixed feelings about how invested they should be in the expected instructor identity. The findings have pedagogical implications for ITA training, second language acquisition, and English for specific purposes.