Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 21, Issue 1, 2011

This paper aims to use Cantonese interview data to explore how (im)politeness is used as a discursive strategy and resource to attend to the perceived interactional goal and power relationship in the interview setting. It adopts a situation-oriented and ethnography-driven approach to study politeness as a situated action. In addition to investigating Cantonese-specific features of politeness, the study demonstrates that power relation in politeness should be analyzed at the level of the entire communicative event as well as at the turn-to-turn level. Findings of this study are significant not only for extending politeness research to less commonly studied languages like Cantonese, but also for expanding the application of politeness theories to other research areas such as institutional discourse and survey research.

Studies on politeness in Korean — an honorific-rich language like Japanese — have focused more on what Sohn (1995: 408) identifies as ‘normative’ (or discernment) politeness. Whilst these studies are illuminating, they have paid little attention to the ‘dynamic’ aspect of politeness. That is, they have focussed on ‘static’ or primarily dyadic interactions and have explored the speaker’s discursive intention but paid minimal attention to the addressee’s evaluation of certain utterances. The present study attempts to fill this gap by showing how multiple levels of politeness arise at ‘situational, institutional, and societal levels’ (Fairclough, 1989) in Korean institutional discourse. To this effect, it concentrates on the interaction between Korean Oriental medical doctors and their patients, which is a ‘fruitful epistemological site’ (Sunderland, 2004: 73) for the study of emerging and situated politeness in Korean. This is particularly so because in Korea traditional and Western medicine co-exist — Western medicine often being regarded as ‘dominant’ one — and consequently there is a ‘dual medical authority’ in Korean society. Employing Goffman’s (1981) ‘participation framework’ and Davies and Harré’s (1990, 1999) ‘positioning theory’, the present article demonstrates that the dual medical authority often obscures the ‘speaker’, ‘addressee’, and (im)politeness. of a speech act in patient–Oriental medical doctor interactions. An act that is apparently face-threatening at the situational level may not necessarily be face-threatening at the institutional level, where the ‘real’ addressee may be a non-present Western doctor or even Western biomedicine itself. The paper concludes that the dyadic, synchronic, and cross-sectional model of politeness on which most studies on Korean politeness rely is too simplistic and idealised. Instead, a multidimensional discursive approach to politeness should be adopted.

This paper examines data collected during an intra-organisational meeting in a Japanese company. It illustrates how, in a situation involving potential conflicts, some Japanese managers switch between different linguistic codes in order to construct situational meaning. The interlocutors’ code-switch indicates constant vertical and horizontal change of their footing by sometimes strengthening solidarity with subordinates and mitigating potential face threatening acts (FTAs). This finding indicates that the use of honorifics and other social indexical forms in Japanese is not pre-determined by existing social conventions; but rather it is subject to situational evaluation of the fluid local context where relationships are constructed and negotiated.

Oral communication is documented as the weakest link in air traffic control interactions and one of the primary causes of aviation accidents and incidents. The language of air traffic control communication is characterised by the use of prescribed phraseologies, and when these are missing, plain language becomes a dominant feature. During plain language use mitigation is recorded as a feature of communication and described as an attribute of communication in crews classified as high in safety performance. The present study departs from this observation and seeks to examine the linguistic features for rapport management in air traffic control in non-routine situations in the Malaysian context. Managing the pilot–controller relationship is categorised as one of the dominant communicative functions in air traffic control and a category that is associated with the use of politeness markers. An examination of the language functions in this category and their associated forms vis-à-vis features of politeness are considered useful for training in air traffic communication. Pragmatics is used in this study as the approach to discourse analysis and Spencer-Oatey’s (2000b) understanding of politeness as ‘rapport management’ is employed as the framework for data analysis. The study draws on both audio-recordings of radiotelephony communication in role-play situations involving expert Malaysian controllers taking on roles as pilot and controller, as well as transcripts of real-life radiotelephony communication between Malaysian controllers and international pilots. The findings show that the interactions are primarily oriented to rapport-maintenance. The linguistic devices for rapport management include justifications, terms of address, conventionally polite expressions such as ‘please’, modals, and conditional language use. Rapport management is shown to help foster shared mindfulness and team thinking between controllers and pilots.

Guided by the intergroup contact hypothesis, the authors examined the associations among Japanese sojourners’ (N = 94) perceived linguistic competence with English, communication accommodation of their most frequent American contact, relational solidarity with the contact, and their attitudes toward Americans as a cultural group. Results indicated that participants’ linguistic competence with English and perceptions of Americans’ communication accommodation positively predicted their relational solidarity with their most frequent American contact. In addition, relational solidarity mediated the relationships between both linguistic competence and communication accommodation and cognitive and behavioral attitudes. Results were discussed in light of communication accommodation theory, the contact hypothesis and prior literature in intergroup and intercultural communication.

This article analyzes how a group of Hong Kong students talk about people in other countries in an informal group discussion. The focus is on the discursive construction of outgroup stereotypes, and the analyses show that the attitudes discussed in the group are highly variable, even contradictory — across as well as within individual group members. Discursive Psychology is used as the theoretically informed analytic approach for the analysis, and Social Identity Theory (Tajfel) and Self-Categorization Theory (Turner) are proposed as the overall theoretical frameworks which seem to encompass the different themes uncovered in the analyses. The article argues that personal experience, rhetorical ends, and group dynamics are salient factors in terms of explaining the construction and nature of the stereotypes. Furthermore, it is argued that intergroup differentiation is important in accounting for the process of stereotype-construction, and that cognitive dissonance, as well as accusations of prejudiced identities, appear to have little noticeable effect on individual group members or intra-group harmony. Finally, the article argues that this group discussion could be seen as an example of predominant discourses and ideological positions about Western and Asian ‘others’ which exist in contemporary Hong Kong society.