Volume 5, Issue 2

Norms of what are considered appropriate and polite ways of communicating are situated in the cultural context in which interactions occur. This crucial role of culture is particularly apparent in a workplace setting: norms regarding appropriate ways of integrating the competing discourses of power and politeness at work are strongly influenced by wider cultural expectations. Drawing on naturally-occurring data recorded in business meetings in New Zealand and Hong Kong, and using Locher and Watts' (Journal of Politeness Research 1: 9–33, 2005) framework for analyzing relational work, this paper explores how leaders from two white-collar organizations achieve their various workplace objectives while simultaneously adhering to culture-specific politeness norms and expectations. The analysis focuses on just one of the discursive strategies which these leaders employ when performing relational work: humour. This strategy constitutes a versatile and multi-functional tool which assists leaders in achieving their various leadership objectives. It is particularly useful for building rapport with subordinates and mitigating the impact of negatively affective speech acts. The analysis explores how the leaders' use of humour is consistent with culturally specific politeness norms negotiated in the leaders' community of practice; and how by drawing on it the leaders also meet cultural expectations concerning the enactment of effective leadership.

This paper examines impoliteness in a discourse context marked by double articulation (i. e., broadcasting), specifically in the television show Dragons' Den (BBC2, UK). Like past work on impoliteness within ‘exploitative’ reality television, this study explores face-threatening behaviour by those involved in the interaction within the studio. Analysis of five hours of broadcast material reveals a number of patterns underlying both the interactional structure of impoliteness containing sequences and the linguistic realizations of impoliteness in Dragons' Den . These patterns point to a clear interactional power imbalance between the expert (‘the dragon’) and lay (the contestant) person in the studio. They also highlight the interactional power held by the show's presenter, whose voice-overs set the interactions against the contestant, dictate their development and, importantly, close off impoliteness containing sequences in such a way that the dragon invariably has the upper hand. In addition, and unlike any other study to date, this paper links the findings of the discursive realization of impoliteness in Dragons' Den to viewer interpretations of impoliteness within two representative samples from the corpus. Responses (N = 85) to a questionnaire on (im)politeness show high agreement levels regarding assessment of dragon and contestant behaviour. They also suggest, however, that isolated instances of marked face-threatening behaviour determine overall scores of impoliteness for given speakers and that individual speakers are seen as more or less impolite depending on their co-interactants' behaviour. What is more, respondents' reasons for their assessments reveal the importance of local and cultural norms in ascribing impoliteness to certain communicative behaviour.

This paper provides some (more) insights into cross-cultural variation in speech act realization by analyzing English, German, Polish and Russian requests. It aims to shows that the relationship between indirectness and politeness is interpreted differently across cultures. Hence, the analysis focuses on the difference between direct requests, which have been said to play a central role in Polish and Russian, and conventionally indirect requests, which are the most frequent request type in English and German. It further shows that the examined languages exhibit culture-specific preferences for syntactic and lexical downgraders modifying the illocutionary force of the request and, thus, reducing the threat to the hearer's face. The requests analyzed in this study have been elicited by means of a discourse completion task and constitute responses to a scenario frequently used in previous request studies, so that the results can be compared with those established for other languages. The strong agreement among languages on the use of conventional indirectness in this scenario allows for testing the restricted applicability of interrogative constructions claimed for the two Slavic languages.

Using Spencer-Oatey's (Journal of Politeness Research 1: 95–119, 2005) rapport management approach, this study analyzes the participation of Peruvian Spanish speakers in a rapport-challenging situation exhibiting social distance, strong power differential among interlocutors and high damage received by the participant; gender differences/similarities are explored. Results show that participants started and developed the interaction maintaining a rapport-challenging orientation in their pursuit of transactional goals and violated the interlocutor's identity and respectability face. When finishing the interaction, however, they showed a rapport-maintenance orientation; they continued violating the equity principle, albeit less strongly. Male and female differences were found throughout the interaction

This paper investigates invitations and invitation refusals in Greek and their relationship to politeness within Brown and Levinson's (Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge University Press, 1987) framework. On the basis of data drawn from role plays corroborated with informants' verbal reports, it is argued that age is a determining factor for both the format of the speech event of inviting/refusing and the politeness strategies preferred for its realization. It is shown that the younger age group conceptualize invitations as face-enhancing acts for the addressee, thus, they insist more and prefer positive politeness strategies. By contrast, the older age group conceptualize invitations as addressee face-threatening acts, so they hardly ever insist and appear to favour negative politeness strategies. This latter observation seems to challenge earlier findings regarding the positive politeness orientation of Greek society. However, a closer look at the data reveals that the negative politeness strategies employed are intermingled with positive politeness ones or they function as such in the specific context. These findings bring to the fore a number of issues relating to Brown and Levinson's theory, including the difficulty of drawing a clear-cut distinction between positive and negative politeness strategies and the caution that should be exercised when attributing type of politeness to decontextualized utterances. The findings are further used to offer suggestions for foreign language teaching.

This paper argues that identity theory can be a useful analytical tool for the scholar of relational work (Locher and Watts, Journal of Politeness Research 1: 9–13, 2005). By focusing on current news interviews broadcast in the USA, it shows how impoliteness is inextricably linked to the (co)construction of the identity of the hosts, the guests and the audience of an emergent “new” news genre; news as confrontation (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, The “new” news in America: emergence of a genre, 2007, International Review of Pragmatics, forthcoming). Impoliteness is defined as a negative identity practice (Bucholtz, Language in Society, 28: 203–223, 1999) used by the hosts to position themselves within their own community of practice. Applying Anton and Peterson's (Communication Studies, 54: 103–419, 2003) model of subject positions, an alternative definition is proposed that posits that impoliteness – and confrontation – may ensue when there is a mismatch between self asserted subject positions, i. e., the positions we temporarily choose to assume, and other asserted subject positions, i. e., the positions that others impose on us. By challenging our self asserted subject positions, the view of the world that comes along with them is questioned as well. Impoliteness is also used to forge the collective identity of one of the factions, here identified with the target audience of shows included in the study, currently waging the “Culture Wars”. This metaphor has long been used to claim that political conflict within the USA is due to a conflict between “traditional” and “progressive” values.