Volume 16, Issue 2

The study combines Brown and Levinson’s (1987) work on politeness techniques and Tannen’s (1981, 1993) work on indirectness and power-solidarity dynamics to extend research on workplace discourse. I examine how two female Russian-speaking chairs (one of Russian and another of Kazakh origin) differently perform face-threatening acts (FTAs) of criticisms and directives during teacher meetings at a community college in Kazakhstan. Specifically, the Russian chair employs fewer politeness techniques (e. g., hedging with “please”), issuing criticisms and orders with no mitigation, thereby foregrounding the power asymmetry within the group. The lack of mitigation surfaces through explicit usage of pronouns (“I” vs. “you”); action verbs inflected for the 2 nd person plural and imperative mood; words with a negative and moral connotation; and phonological modifications for emphasis. Differently, the Kazakh chair utilizes a larger number of politeness techniques, including hedging (e. g., “please”, “unfortunately”), impersonalizing negative actions (through indefinite pronouns and agentless verbs), and manipulating of tense and space. Thus, she performs indirect FTAs that highlight the solidarity aspect of group relations. I relate these findings to studies of management leadership in post-Soviet states that have revealed the tendency of Kazakh managers to use a nurturing leadership style.

Stance plays a salient role in communicating interpersonal meaning through language use. Understanding stance as co-constructed within dialogic interaction uncovers subtleties of how interlocutors use language to express their subjectivities and thus, negotiate their interpersonal relationship. The notion of face and facework, or relational work (Locher 2004), is therefore relevant to the understanding of stance in interaction. Drawing on Du Bois’ (2007) stance triangle, our study analyzes oppositional stance in a single, extended interaction and shows how two interlocutors in an academic setting jointly construct oppositional stance, each by drawing on their own interpretations. Our analysis indicates that this co-constructed oppositional stance is enacted throughout three broader stages, which we call initiation, negotiation, and resolution. We also demonstrate that expressing oppositional stance is a complex process where interlocutors employ various discourse strategies to express pessimistic evaluation, shifting positionings, and (dis)alignment. Meanwhile, instances of oppositional stance become face-maintaining and face-challenging at different stages in which directness and indirectness are variably employed.

This paper attempts to show different terms of address in Lori and how the non-existence of deferential ʃomɑ (V) compared to Persian leads to some misunderstandings. Deferential V substitutes with other terms of address such as fictive kinship terms, formal titles, religious terms, address inversion and indirect address. For this purpose, the data were collected via two methods: (i) interviews (18 informants); (ii) direct observations (27 different contexts). The results obtained from direct observations were collected to check the reliability of interviews. The results demonstrate that politeness is not always a matter of ‘non-solidarity’ and ‘power’, but sometimes solidarity plays an essential role in making terms of address politer. Furthermore, social factors such as gender, age and social roles are crucial in determining appropriate terms of address. Lastly, men and women used fictive kinship terms differently. While women addressed their older cousins and affinal relatives by means of fictive kinship terms, men used them for addressing total strangers. This behaviour means that women tend to make a distance from the addressee whereas men try to create solidarity.

Intercultural interaction may be complicated by differing verbal and nonverbal displays of (im)politeness. Yet cultural outsiders’ evaluations of (im)politeness have not been widely examined. To fill this gap, this study investigated perceptions of Finnish politeness among French people living in Finland and perceptions of French politeness among Finns currently or previously living in France. Focus groups were used in order to study culturally shared (im)politeness norms and their variations. Based on a dialogical discourse analysis of five focus group discussions, it is argued that personal space emerges as a salient factor for politeness in Finland, while verbal and nonverbal rapport is more important in France. These overarching themes - personal space and rapport - led to discussions about greetings, silence and holding doors open. Greeting and opening doors appeared more categorical in France, while silence was better tolerated in Finland. In addition to dominant norms, regional and individual variations were reported. Overall, (im)politeness norms appeared to be vaguer in Finland than in France. Building upon this study, future research should examine if changes emerge in Finnish (im)politeness norms related to rapport or if space remains more valued.

Face-giving is an understudied notion among the studies of face and facework. This article aims to enhance the understanding of the concept by exploring how the first-order concept of mianzi giving is understood by native members. By examining native discourses in which mianzi giving is explicitly mentioned, we find that in addition to being based on the actor’s intention or the recipient’s feeling, the interpretation of mianzi giving can also be based on the interpersonal consequence of an act grounded in the understanding of the (meta)participant, who takes the footing of the author in the Goffmanian sense. In the (meta)participant’s understanding, mianzi giving is understood as a marked and favorable alternative act with reference to the empirical or moral parameter evoked in the local interaction.