Volume 21, Issue 1

Politeness relies on interlocutors’ frames, which are cognitive concepts that include a linguistic expression and extralinguistic variables. Politeness research has highlighted the importance of extralinguistic variables on speakers’ linguistic choices. Despite many studies that touch on these topics, questions about the comparative importance of contextual variables and the joint effect of them on speakers’ utterances remain unanswered. To examine these questions, a quantitative approach using a conditional inference tree was employed to investigate the influence of power, distance, and imposition on the use of verb forms in requests in Italian. Verb forms were selected as the dependent variable because they are essential for performing speech acts and they can be placed on a politeness continuum. Considering the importance and hierarchical relationship of the predictor variables of power, distance, and imposition, the results indicated that the three variables were predictors of verb form. While power was the main predictor, the effect of distance and imposition depended on whether the other variables were considered, showing a varying and complex effect of contextual variables. The findings enhance the understanding of Italian politeness, and represent the complex calculations that speakers make when selecting linguistic forms by considering interacting contextual variables.

The present paper analyses self-reflexive opinions of 33 Estonians about small talk; it is based on interviews carried out in 2020–2022. The main topics covered in the paper are what participants consider small talk situations, how they feel in such situations, and what kind of topics they bring up or avoid. While silent Finns and silent Scandinavians appear in the literature almost as terms, research on Estonians and their behaviour has been scarce. The paper reveals that although Estonians might see themselves as silent, they often feel the need to break the silence. As it appears, it might result in a failed attempt, but the attempts are there. The article discusses various decisive factors in engaging in or refraining from small talk mentioned by the participants. It also sheds light on changes in time, which mainly seem to indicate that Estonians are opening up. Although small talk is not primarily connected with the notion of politeness in the interviewees’ views, it nevertheless belongs to what is considered appropriate behaviour.

Existing studies on responses to congratulations to date have displayed a general culturally-bound finding that Chinese speakers prefer to take a detour approach. However, the effect of social constraints on response strategies have not received the attention it deserves. Drawing on a variational pragmatic approach, this study explores the constraints of gender and social status on the pragmatic variation of Chinese WeChat users’ responses to congratulations. Building upon an integrative data set of congratulatory interactions in actual online messages, the findings suggest that gender and social status overlap in complex ways, but with a clear tendency: both men and women significantly tend towards an acceptance strategy when responding to congratulations on WeChat, while social status influences the sub-strategies used in accepting congratulations across both male and female groups. The findings challenge previous stereotypes about Chinese language variation in responses to congratulations. The current results suggest that Chinese speakers have already made a transition from following the Modesty Maxim to using the Agreement Maxim, and have also incorporated the Obligation Maxim. Chinese speakers also consider rapport and reciprocity when responding to kind congratulatory remarks.

In this paper, we compare conventions of offering food and alcohol in Chinese and English. We define offering as an interaction ritual because in many linguacultures, food and drink are offered by following certain conventions, the observing of which is a ritually sacred duty for the host. Foreign residents in China are often irritated by Chinese conventions of offering food and drink. We try to explain such irritations by investigating how Chinese and ‘Western’ offering conventions differ from one another. Our framework brings together speech acts and interaction ritual theory. We first present relevant experiences of English-speaking foreigners living in China. We then conduct a contrastive pragmatic study of English and Chinese food and alcohol offering conventions, followed by an interpretation of the irritations reported by our panel of foreigners through our contrastive outcomes.

Using a line-by-line analysis of the key conversational instances identified in an asynchronous rap battle between Eminem (in Killshot ) and Machine Gun Kelly (in Rap Devil ), this study investigates diss tracks as manifestations of impoliteness. As a framework for our analysis, we adopt an overlay of Spencer-Oatey’s rapport management model/principles and Culpeper’s framework of impoliteness strategies/formulae. The results show that both rappers tried to out-diss each other by verbalizing a multitude of insults, curses, dismissals, and more. The paper builds on the relationship between power and impoliteness, the concept of authenticity in rap, prescribed and proscribed language use in hip-hop culture, and displays of identity roles of the rappers. The findings and discussion offer novel contributions to impoliteness research, as the current study is the first to investigate impoliteness in an asynchronous rap battle between two White rappers. In light of the analyses, we define diss track exchanges as asynchronous rap battles characterized by the abundant use of coercive impoliteness for entertainment.

This study employs a computational method, together with qualitative analysis, to explore the metapragmatics of politeness lexemes that both scholars and laypersons fail to provide effective articulations for. We specifically choose two bewildering politeness lexemes – kyemson (‘modesty’) and kongson (‘politeness’) – in Korean, and use the computational approach to identify their metapragmatic differences by analyzing over 27,000 texts that feature their usage. Results show that, while kyemson is associated with speakers’ personal and interpersonal qualities, kongson is manifested in a range of normative semiotic practices. They both feature the concepts of lowering oneself and elevating others, but realize them at different levels. In addition, kyemson helps to achieve relational harmony regardless of social hierarchies, and kongson reinforces social hierarchies but speaks little of relational harmony. The findings make two important contributions – namely, providing a novel methodology to address the pitfall in analysing first-order and second-order politeness, and offering an insight into the underexplored politeness lexemes in Korean.

This paper furthers the literature on intercultural im/politeness by investigating the phenomenon of language choice in multilingual contexts. We investigate how choosing one language over another in contexts where two or more language codes are available can stem from concerns for maintaining or asserting politeness-related norms, and how unexpected or undesired language choices can lead to negative evaluations on the part of the interlocutor. We address these questions via the analysis of narratives collected in oral (76 narratives) and written (96 narratives) forms from members of the Korean community in Australia. The interviews focussed on participants’ experiences in service encounters where a Korean customer interacts with a Korean service provider. Despite both parties being Korean speakers, our analysis shows that participants are actively engaged in choosing whether to use Korean or English, and that such choices are motivated by complex and competing moral orders, linked to wider linguistic ideologies. Choosing Korean is tied up with moral orders connected to community membership and upkeeping Korean-style norms of social interactions. Meanwhile, English indexes notions of equality, and attempts to push back against traditional notions of Korean sociality. Ultimately, the negotiation of language choice ties in with the contested nature of im/politeness in intercultural contexts.

This systematic review explored self-denigration in research articles published across different disciplines in the past four decades. Following a comprehensive collection and screening of data (4,002 initial records) from four scholarly databases, 80 research articles that met our eligibility criteria were identified. In line with the objectives of this study, the publications were coded and analyzed for contextual, methodological, and theoretical dimensions. The review also adopted an in-depth synthesis of the research articles investigating the attitudes of individuals toward self-denigration, and probed the development of research foci in this area. Among other results, the study revealed that the participants in the vast majority of studies effectively employed self-denigration as a relational communication management strategy. Contrary to our expectations, findings provided evidence for the widespread popularity of research on self-denigration in Western contexts, most of which report a favorable account of using self-denigration in social interactions away from its face value. Accordingly, this area deserves further exploration in different disciplines and contexts, as the study has practical significance in managing different interactional predicaments.

One of the most popular online sites where advice interactions routinely occur is Reddit. As a predominately public platform, Reddit users presumably extend beyond only registered contributors. Thus, it is important to examine Reddit advice outside of the interactional or discursive level (e.g., exploring perceptions from other audience types). To bridge this gap, an experiment was designed based on a previous study on Reddit advice-giving, which investigated how audiences might perceive and evaluate the quality of advice-giving formulations. This experiment contained both qualitative and quantitative measures. Both components of the experiment yielded significant and interesting findings, with each meriting an in-depth discussion on their own. This paper reports on the qualitative aspects of the experiment, where results show that evaluations of advice invoke various aspects of Spencer-Oatey and Kádár’s (2021. Intercultural politeness: Managing relations across cultures . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) politeness evaluation model, highlighting the particular pragmatic issues that are important for the advice interaction. These results also show that the manipulation of rhetorical moves used during Reddit advice-giving have an effect on the saliency of different face sensitivities, with implications for how linguistic forms as realized in rhetorical moves might be connected to higher level pragmatic concepts (e.g., face), and cognitive perceptions of warmth and competence.

In this paper, we study honorification in Chinese from a diachronic perspective. Classical Chinese is found to exhibit a large number of lexical items used to elevate other in discourse. The aspects that are elevated are specific titles, positions/statuses, knowledge/expertise, age/generation, taste/appearance and addressee in general. In contemporary Chinese, we find that some of these lexemes have disappeared, some have remained, and others have become restricted in use. At the same time, new lexemes have come into being that better fit the changed (and still changing) society. As a politeness strategy – both positive and negative – and a reaction to the hierarchical social structure, honorification is very much alive, in the same way its corollary notion, self-denigration, is alive. Our study hence contributes to pragmatics by drawing researchers’ attention to an important aspect of language use that has been hitherto neglected.