Volume 20, Issue 2

Compliments are often viewed within the framework of politeness theory. Work on politeness, such as that of Brown and Levinson (1987), has, however, often been infected with a western ethnocentrism, such that cross cultural variations are assumed to be captured within a single politeness model. Recent research on cultures such as Chinese and Japanese have challenged this ethnocentric perspective, and the present work extends the critique in relation to Egyptian Arabic. In the paper, we argue that compliments are culture specific objects. In the case of Egyptian Arabic, any understanding of compliment behavior must take account of such things as values, tact, courtesy, and general group, as opposed to individual, values. Working with a range of compliment behaviours we introduce a model of a ‘social contract of values’ which allows us to move beyond western ethnocentrism, and to capture more directly the process of Egyptian complimenting behavior.

Studies of personal reference to the speaker in Spanish have typically focused on the presence or absence and position when present of the personal pronoun and have taken place within the fields of theoretical syntax or variationist sociolinguistics. This study places the occurrence of the first person plural form within the framework of interactional pragmatics and investigates the potential effects of extralinguistic factors on the linguistic choices of speakers within a broad framework of Gricean pragmatics and politeness theory. It argues that the indeterminacy or ambivalence inherent in speaker–hearer reference functions as a strategic resource and that an awareness of the status of and relationship between participants (power and solidarity) and of their interactional goals as well as an awareness of the mechanics of ‘politeness’ itself can be crucial to the negotiation and maintenance of interpersonal relationships.

Although numerous studies have examined the way in which politeness operates in spoken exchanges, relatively few have focused on politeness in written language. This study adopts an interactional view of written texts and, drawing on Brown and Levinson's (1978, 1987) model, investigates the pragmatics of politeness in a corpus of French-language corporate brochures. One of the most important categories of face-threatening act (FTA) in such brochures is the making by the writer (the company) of self-evaluative claims – claims which praise the company's abilities, qualities, products, etc. To commit such an FTA ‘politely’, the writer may opt either for an off-record strategy or an on-record strategy with appropriate face redress. In the corpus there is evidence that his/her choice may be influenced by the position of the claim within the text, since this, it is suggested, affects the ‘weightiness’ of the claim. This is explained in terms of the evolving writer–reader relationship, particularly the variables of power and distance. The evolution of the text user relationship would appear, therefore, to be one of the key factors influencing the writer's choice of politeness strategy and hence the way in which s/he makes strategically important claims.

Yishai Tobin, Invariance, Markedness and Distinctive Feature Analysis . Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1994, xxii + 406 pp. (Alan S. Kaye) Stig Eliasson and Ernst Håkon Jahr (eds.), Language and its Ecology: Essays in Memory of Einar Haugen . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997. (Alan S. Kaye) Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Narrative Performances: A Study of Modern Greek Storytelling . Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997, 282 pp. (Laura Camargo Fernández) Dennis Kurzon, Interpreting Silence: Discourse of Silence (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998, VI +161 pp., hardback $53. (Patricia E. O'Connor) Keith Harvey and Celia Shalom (eds.), Language and Desire: Encoding Sex, Romance and Intimacy . London: Routledge, 1997, x + 249 pp. (Karen Tracy) Barbara A. Fennell, Language, Literature, and the Negotiation of Identity: Foreign Worker German in the Federal Republic of Germany . Chapel Hill/London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997, 167 S. (Inge Weber-Newth) Yishai Tobin, Aspect in the English Verb . London: Longman, 1993, xvii + 398 pp. (Alan S. Kaye) Martin Pütz (ed.), Language Choices: Conditions, Constraints, and Consequences . Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997, pp. xxi + 430. $127. (Alan S. Kaye)