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- Volume 18, Issue, 2008
Pragmatics - Volume 18, Issue 4, 2008
Volume 18, Issue 4, 2008
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The implications of studying politeness in Spanish-speaking contexts
Author(s): Diana Bravopp.: 577–603 (27)More LessIn the last decades, the studies on politeness have discussed central concepts stemming from Brown and Levinson’s work ([1978] 1987), such as face, threats, mitigations and strategies of politeness. One of the problems that the study of politeness presents for the analysis of a situated corpus of speech is that the use of the mentioned notions calls for a socio-cultural perspective. In other words, it is necessary to include extralinguistic factors in the analysis of politeness, as the phenomena is beyond the sphere of linguistics in strict terms. In this paper, I approach the challenge based on other studies that I have already done for different corpora of Spanish. I discuss the problem of using certain concepts (face, threats, mitigations and strategies of politeness) as methodological categories for the interpretation of communicative behaviours in situated interactions. In my analysis, I use categories that incorporate, both theoretically and methodologically, socio-cultural variation in the realisations of politeness. To achieve this, I evaluate the social effect that certain behaviours have in the interpersonal relations under study, so as to, from then on, classify those behaviours in terms of politeness, impoliteness or neutrality. Also, I use the categories of “autonomy” and “affiliation”, void of socio-cultural contents. Finally, I put forward extralinguistic elements in the analysis of corpora of Spanish by making explicit those “socio-cultural premises” that an analyst use to make his or her interpretations.
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Perceptions of (Im)politeness in Venezuelan Spanish
Author(s): Adriana Bolívarpp.: 605–633 (29)More LessIn this paper I shall use a test of social habits in order to unveil the different types of interactions and meanings observable in it: First, the interactions represented in hypothetical situations which reflect the expectations of a group of speakers concerning what they believe it is appropriate to say in particular situations, that is, mainly “politic behavior”; second, the interaction between participants (informants) and researchers as seen in the responses given to opinion questions, which reinforce and expand the perceptions of “politic behavior” and politeness; and third, evaluations that bring out the links with the “real” world in the wider Venezuelan social context.
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A matter of politeness? A contrastive study of phatic talk in teenage conversation
Author(s): Anna-Brita Stenström and Annette Myre Jørgensenpp.: 635–657 (23)More LessThis corpus-based article explores London and Madrid teenagers’ use of phatic expressions as a politeness device in their everyday conversations. The starting-point for the study is Leech’s ‘Phatic Maxim’, which he suggests as a supplement to the four maxims making up Grice’s Cooperative Principle. The purport of the maxim is to avoid silence by keeping talking, which may involve anything from loose formulaic talk to connectors and the use of taboo words, all of which are phatic devices with a strong bonding effect. The teenage talk studied here is largely void of the formulaic expressions that characterize conversational openings and closings in adult speakers’ casual encounters. Both groups are frequent users of turn-final appealers which trigger turn-initial uptakes and of reaction signals realized by interjections and taboo words, all with a strongly bonding effect. Boys in particular are not only allowed but even expected to use taboo language as a sign of camaraderie and a means to reinforce the phatic strength of an exchange. In both corpora, there is ample use of fillers that help the speaker to hold the turn, and hedges, which often act as fillers in addition to helping the speaker avoid self-commitment. And whereas the Spanish teenagers use certain vocatives as a purely conversational resource to establish and maintain contact, the English teenagers insert ‘unsolicited’ minimal feedback signals (for example, realized by mhm or mm) which encourage the current speaker to go on speaking.
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Interrogative allo-repetitions in Mexican Spanish
Author(s): Domnita Dumitrescupp.: 659–680 (22)More LessThis article is a contribution to discourse analysis from the viewpoint of recent developments in the study of verbal (im)politeness in the Spanish-speaking world. It analyzes the discourse functions of interrogative allo-repetitions in a corpus of oral Mexican Spanish from the perspective of both their conversational role as repair mechanisms and as linguistic strategies to convey politeness or impoliteness in interaction. The main findings of this research are that interrogative allo-repetitions fulfill different politeness (i.e. face-saving, face-flattering, or face-threatening) strategies depending not only on their conversational function (true vs. fictitious repair mechanisms), but also – and most importantly – on the type of verbal interaction and cultural settings in which they take place, as well as the relationship between participants.
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Politeness and other types of facework
Author(s): Nieves Hernández-Florespp.: 681–706 (26)More LessTV-panel discussions constitute a communicative genre with specific features concerning the situational context, the communicative goals, the roles played by the participants and the acts that are carried out in the interaction. In the Spanish TV-debate Cada día, discourse is characterized as semi-institutional because of having both institutional characteristics – due to its mediatic nature – and conversational characteristics. In the communicative exchanges the social situation of the participants is negotiated by communicative acts, that is, facework is realised. Facework concerns the speakers’ wants of face, both the individual face and the group face. In the present article face is described in cultural terms within the general face wants autonomy and affiliation and in accordance with the roles the speakers assume in interaction. In the analysis of an excerpt from the TV-debate Cada día two types of facework are identified: On the one hand politeness, that is, when an attempted balance between the speaker’s and the addressees’ face is aimed at and, on the other hand, self-facework, which appears when only the speaker’s face is focused on. No samples of the third case of facework, impoliteness, are found in this excerpt. The results of the analysis display the relationship between the communicative purposes of this communicative genre (to inform, to entertain and to convince people of political ideas) and the types of facework (politeness, self-facework) that are identified in the analysed data.
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Conversational silence and face in two sociocultural contexts
Author(s): Josefa Contreras Fernándezpp.: 707–728 (22)More LessThis article aims to examine the relation between conversational silence and face and to identify communicative behaviour related to silence in Spanish and German. To this end, I will first briefly explain the concepts of conversation, culture and silence, as well as the concept of face. Second, I will analyse verbal and non-verbal activities of silence in transactional and colloquial conversations in Spanish and German conversation. Perceptions and conceptions of conversational silence rely on the situational context and, especially, on the face of each speech community. Therefore, depending on the social context and the characteristics of face in each culture, silence is considered as forming part of conversation.
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Impoliteness in institutional and non-institutional contexts
Author(s): Silvia Kaul de Marlangeonpp.: 729–749 (21)More LessThe analysis of impoliteness has mainly concentrated on the relation between text and context itself rather than on the differences between types of contexts. The aim of this study is to compare impoliteness in both institutional and non-institutional contexts. The institutional contexts to be dealt with are: A) face-to-face political debate and B) army recruit training. The selected non-institutional contexts are C) the Tango lyrics of the 1920’s and D) the interaction among lower middle-class people who speak River Plate Spanish. In a previous paper (Kaul de Marlangeon 2005a), I proposed the category of fustigation impoliteness by refractoriness or exacerbated affiliation where refractoriness and exacerbated affiliation function as counterparts to Bravo’s categories of politeness, autonomy and affiliation. In the present paper and within the theoretical and methodological framework for the study of fustigation impoliteness, I deal with three of the above mentioned contexts A) , B) and C), and the type of fustigation impoliteness that characterises each of them. In my analysis I show that in face-to-face political debate and military recruit training impoliteness is public, bi-directional in the former and unidirectional in the latter. In the Tango lyrics of the 1920’s fustigation impoliteness is private and unidirectional. Finally in the context of interaction among lower middle-class people who speak River Plate Spanish, impoliteness is chronic, intra-group, private and multi-directional. For this kind of impoliteness the concepts of refractoriness and exacerbated affiliation do not apply because this impoliteness is about the relationship between an individual versus another individual within the same group rather than an individual versus the group.
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Influence of situational factors on the codification and interpretation of impoliteness
Author(s): Marta Albelda Marcopp.: 751–773 (23)More LessBy analysing the influence of situational factors, this paper aims to determine if all face-threatening acts indeed have an impolite effect. Two types of peninsular Spanish speech corpora (formal and informal) were examined, each with different situational features. The theoretical maxims applied to this study are based on Briz (2004), who distinguishes between codified (im)politeness and an interpreted (im)politeness. The initial findings reveal that the features of the communicative situation may neutralise the codified impoliteness in certain speech acts. These features include the relation of solidarity between the interlocutors, the subject or topic of the speech, the purpose and the social and common proximity among the speakers, among other things. Such features seem to influence to some extent the interpretation of those acts that conventionally could be considered as impolite. Thus, contrary to the principles generally accepted in Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness (1987), the findings of this analysis indicate that certain situational factors may, on occasion, lead the speakers to be less concerned about minimizing face offences even though this lack of concern does not actually involve damage to the other.
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Do insults always insult? Genuine impoliteness versus non-genuine impoliteness in colloquial Spanish
Author(s): María Bernalpp.: 775–802 (28)More LessThis study is based mainly on conversations extracted from a corpus of spoken Spanish gathered in the metropolitan area of Valencia, Spain (Briz and Val.Es.Co Group 2002). Adopting a socio-pragmatic perspective (Bravo and Briz 2004), our purpose is to describe the social effects produced by the use of certain strategies related to (im)politeness phenomena in face-to-face interaction with the ongoing negotiation of participants’ face (Goffman 1967). We will refer in this paper to Culpeper’s concept of authentic impoliteness (1996, 2003, 2005), aimed at describing the damage of a hearer’s face. For this author, insults constitute intentionally threatening acts. However, in our study we found that some expressions commonly used for insulting or mocking can, in certain contexts, produce an affiliative social effect, strengthening feelings of solidarity within a group and of closeness between interlocutors. We call this use non-authentic impoliteness. Kienpointner (1997) and Culpeper (op. cit.) identify this impoliteness as mock impoliteness. In turn, Zimmermann (2003) uses the term anti-politeness to refer to similar strategies of impoliteness. We follow Zimmermann’s concept but without restricting it to the function of creating male teen identity only. This is because in the Spanish society we observe other groups in which such identity feature is absent. We also take into account Bravo’s concepts relative to the crucial role of context to consider participants’ expectations and shared knowledge in a given society, such as Bravo’s socio-cultural hypothesis (2003: 104; Bravo, in this volume). In our analysis of colloquial interactions, we have registered different linguistic realisations that can be classified as insults in their unmarked form. This unmarkedness is not present in all instances: In certain cases, for example, insults can encourage an interpersonal affiliation between participants. The markedness of insults depends on certain contextual factors (such as interactions between close friends) and an adequate socio-cultural contextualisation and textual co-textualisation. As mentioned above, this markedness would constitute realisations of non-authentic impoliteness. It seems then that there would be a principle of no offence between participants that characterises the communicative exchange.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 35 (2025)
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Volume 34 (2024)
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Volume 33 (2023)
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Volume 32 (2022)
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Volume 31 (2021)
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Volume 30 (2020)
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Volume 29 (2019)
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Volume 28 (2018)
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Volume 27 (2017)
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Volume 26 (2016)
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Volume 25 (2015)
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Volume 24 (2014)
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Volume 23 (2013)
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Volume 22 (2012)
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Volume 21 (2011)
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Volume 20 (2010)
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Volume 19 (2009)
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Volume 18 (2008)
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Volume 17 (2007)
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Volume 16 (2006)
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Volume 15 (2005)
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Volume 14 (2004)
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Volume 13 (2003)
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Volume 12 (2002)
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Volume 11 (2001)
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Volume 10 (2000)
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Volume 9 (1999)
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Volume 8 (1998)
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Volume 7 (1997)
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Volume 6 (1996)
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Volume 5 (1995)
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Volume 4 (1994)
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Volume 3 (1993)
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Volume 2 (1992)
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Volume 1 (1991)
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