Volume 19, Issue 1

Recent cross-linguistic research has demonstrated that speakers use a prosodic mitigation strategy when addressing higher status interlocutors by talking more slowly, reducing the intensity and lowering the overall fundamental frequency (F0). Much less is known, however, about how politeness-related meaning is expressed multimodally (i.e., combining verbal and multimodal channels). The present study investigates how Catalan native speakers encode politeness-related meanings through facial and body cues. We test whether speakers apply a gestural mitigation strategy and use specific hedging devices in socially distant situations (e.g., when asking an older person of higher status for a favor). Twenty Catalan speakers were video-recorded while participating in a discourse elicitation task where they were required to produce requests in polite and non-polite contexts. In the resulting recordings, a set of 21 facial and body cues associated with speech were coded and analyzed. The results show that politeness-related meanings are expressed through gestural mitigation strategies that go hand-in-hand with previously reported prosodic mitigation strategies.

Recently, communicating admiration and appreciation in public discourse has become a subject of study since these acts play a very important role in shaping positive social relations not only on a micro scale, but also on a macro one. My goal in this study is to understand how public officials implement their intention to please addressees in an international arena, in contacts between different religious and national communities. In order to do this, 120 papal speeches delivered to representatives of different churches, religions and societies were analysed, identifying individual topics, functions and patterns of these speech acts, as well as their dependence on such parameters as the specifics of the sender, the addressee, the situation, and the discourse. The work demonstrates that the perlocutionary potential of praising and complimenting contained in papal speeches is strengthened by the linguistic exhibiting by the sender of his knowledge about the addressees and focussing attention on them. Furthermore, it becomes more powerful because of the use of lexical and stylistic measures to intensify positive evaluative expressions. The paper is concluded with the postulate of opening linguistic studies on politeness to other public discourses.

To date, there has been little attention for the factors that influence the perception of online complaints. We present two experiments in which we test the impact of the degree of linguistic (in)directness and the formal realization of complaint components on complaint perception. Our experimental stimuli are designed on the basis of French-language authentic Twitter complaints which have been coded in terms of the presence of four constitutive complaint components: the complainable, the negative evaluation of the complainable, the person/company responsible for the complainable, and a wish for compensation. In our experiments, participants are asked to read Twitter complaints, and they are invited to assess them in terms of perceived strength, dissatisfaction, (im)politeness, and offensiveness. Our results indicate that not only the number but also the type of component that is formally realized shape complaint perception. We also find a positive correlation between perceived complaint strength and impoliteness. In addition, different formal realizations of the negative evaluation of the complainable have a different effect on complaint perception; in particular, negative emoji make the complaints softer and more polite. We also discuss methodological issues that have arisen while designing the experiments and that have to do with the operationalization of face-threat.

This paper addresses how the realizations of different constitutive components of Twitter complaints shape the perception of these complaints by other customers. We present three experiments on French language in which we test how customer complaint perception is impacted by the realization of the complainable (Exp. 1), of the entity responsible for the complainable (Exp. 2), and of the customer’s wish for the complainable to be remedied (Exp. 3). The results of Exp. 1 indicate that the perceived likelihood that the complaint will be responded to by the company is highest when the complainable is realized as a combination of an assertion + question + picture. In Exp. 2, we found that, in comparison with the use of the discourse marker dites to refer to the entity responsible for the complainable, the use of a noun phrase or the absence of this component increases perceived politeness. Finally, our data from Exp. 3 reveal that, compared to the use of an imperative to voice the customer’s wish for the complainable to be remedied, “indirect” request forms, and preparatory interrogatives, in particular, are perceived as more polite, as expressing lower dissatisfaction, and as decreasing the likelihood of a response from the company.

Little research has related DMs to (im)politeness, and none in Jordanian Arabic (JA). This study provides evidence that (im)politeness can categorize interactive DMs into polite DMs and impolite DMs in JA. It aims to explore the use of DMs in JA in relation to (im)politeness dichotomy. Twenty-two episodes of three different Jordanian radio shows which use vernacular JA were recorded and transcribed. With the help of prosodic cues and native speakers’ judgement and comprehension of the relevant utterances, this study finds that DMs can be categorized into polite DMs and impolite DMs. For instance, ʕafwan عفوا ‘excuse me’ and ja:si:di : يا سيدي ‘sir’ are exclusively used as mitigating polite DMs whilst wbaʕdi:n maʕak وبعدين معك ‘hey stop!’ and eṯlaʕ min ra:si: اطلع من راسي ‘get out of my head’ are impolite DMs which are primarily used in complaints and expressions of state of anger. This is all interpreted as evidence that interactive DMs can be strongly flavored by politeness which regulates their distribution and manifestation. The study contributes to research on DMs by presenting a categorization based on (im)politeness and thus strengthening the link between discourse and pragmatics.

Whereas previous research on metapragmatic talk has tended to focus on  what people say about politeness, the current paper additionally explores how  people talk about politeness. More specifically, we extend our analysis to the embodied resources, including gestures and nonverbal behaviour, that people use when enacting politeness talk. The data comes from two semi-structured interviews that we conducted with South Korean participants, both of whom were middle-aged university professors. We subjected the data to three rounds of analysis. First, we thematically coded the content of the narratives, revealing important differences in how these two participants from the same language background conceived of politeness. Second, we analyzed the appearance of verbal and non-verbal markers of deferential politeness. This analysis revealed that the overall bodily comportment of the two participants closely matched the different politeness narratives that they inhabited. Third and finally, we examined how the participants used bodily movements when evoking specific embodied practices related to politeness, and used embodied behaviours to represent abstract politeness-related concepts and map them onto spatial locations. Overall, the analysis shows that metapragmatic talk about politeness is an embodied achievement and thus needs to be treated within the remit of the multimodal turn in politeness research.

Although linguistic politeness has been extensively theorized about, the role of nonverbal behaviour in managing politeness in interactions has been neglected until recently. In this analysis of natural conversations between female friends in dinner settings, I show how nonverbal hospitality can influence rapport management and the constructionist nature of politeness among Saudi and British female friends, and I compare the two cultures. I show how these nonverbal acts can be observed by looking at the sequences and turns taken in talking, exploring metapragmatic evaluations, and using second-order politeness concepts in interpreting politeness as situated in discourse. The combination of these analytical tools allows for an explanation of what is going on rather than a mere description of the interaction. The analysis demonstrates that nonverbal hospitality plays an important role in the management of rapport and discursive relations. I find that, although the motivation and role of nonverbal hospitality in the management of interactions in young female friendship groups in the two cultures are similar, there are remarkable differences in frequency, reactions, and complexity in the negotiation of nonverbal hospitality.

Address forms have been studied in various contexts, and it has been assumed that the determining dimensions are solidarity, including closeness and equality, and power, including distance and hierarchy. Solidarity is indexed with singular forms while power is represented with plural forms. Using ethnography of communication framework, this study enriches this discussion by examining the use of address forms by Bima people in a multilingual community in Bima, Indonesia, where Bima, Indonesian and other languages in contact have been used for centuries. Address forms including speaker reference forms were identified and classified in 1,250 h of data collected through observation, interviews, elicitation, and recordings of conversation. The study shows that address forms from languages in contact with Bima have been borrowed to represent dimensions within the solidarity-power continuum including intimacy, closeness, equality, hierarchy and respect. The Bima forms are used to exercise traditional solidarity-power relations, but the borrowed forms of Arab, Bugis, Chinese, English, and Makassarese origins are used to negotiate more intimate, close, equal and respectful relations within the social hierarchy. Using the native and the borrowed forms according to referent’s age, gender, status, and contexts, speakers construct different social spaces of intimacy, closeness, equality, hierarchy, respect, and power.

Digital discourse has emerged as a substantial focus of interest within the pragmatic field. Specifically, (im)politeness practices on social media have increasingly received scholarly attention in the last decade (Tagg, Caroline, Philip Seargeant & Amy Aisha Brown. 2017. Taking offence on social media. Conviviality and conviviality and communication on Facebook. Switzerland: Springer Nature, Palgrave McMillan; Tsoumou, Jean Mathieu. 2020. Analyzing speech acts in politically related Facebook communication. Journal of Pragmatics 167. 80–97). However, research combining COVID-19, Facebook and (im)politeness in a politically polarizing context is still scarce. This paper is an analysis of (im)politeness in Facebook comments posted as reactions to Giuliani’s COVID diagnosis. Thus, by combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, the aim of the present paper is twofold: On the one hand, it intends to further our understanding of the manifestation of (im)politeness practices on Facebook through an analysis of reactive comments to Giuliani’s Covid-19 diagnosis on BBC news Facebook page. On the other hand, the paper aims to examine how the struggle between impoliteness and politeness divides Facebook users between sympathizers and detractors of the patient. Through a metadiscursive analysis, the identified (im)politeness items are distributed in an uneven fashion, with impoliteness-oriented items prevailing as the dominant macro category against politeness-oriented ones. The findings suggest that users employ different strategies to express or intensify (im)politeness, favoring explicit expressions of impoliteness such as redress/agreement, insults, pointed criticisms/complaints, unpalatable questions and/or presuppositions over others like threats.