Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Pragmatics CL
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The Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.01.008
ABSTRACT
Despite featuring prominently in religions and legal frameworks, and being discussed by
anthropologists and sociologists in relation to rights and obligations in society, reciprocity has not
received the attention it deserves in the (im)politeness literature. This article proposes and defines
the Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity, which concerns the (mis)matching of (im)politeness
across participants in interaction – something which can be construed in terms of a debit-credit
balance sheet. We claim that this principle, driven by morality, is a fundamental mechanism in
shaping (im)politeness in interaction and triggering the search for (im)politeness implicatures. We
show how it impacts on various kinds of (im)politeness and interacts with context, especially
power. The latter part of the article, focusing on requestive exchanges, is more quantitative in
orientation, involving studies based on informant testing and corpus analysis. These reveal, for
example, that (im)politeness matching is by far the most common interaction, that mismatches are
perceived as clear deviations, and that certain kinds of (mis)matching are associated with specific
contexts (e.g. school classroom interaction is associated with downward shifts from polite to less
polite). Finally, we briefly discuss future research avenues.
Keywords: Impoliteness, Politeness, Power, Reciprocity, Requestive exchanges
INTRODUCTION
One of the most famous comedy sketches produced by the British Monty Python group is “The
Man who is Alternately Rude and Polite” (part of “Live from the Grill-O-Mat”, episode 18
of Monty Python's Flying Circus) (widely available on the Internet).
Langlotz and Locher (2017) analyze the same comedy sketch in their work on (im)politeness and
emotion, noting that the butcher's impoliteness breaks frame expectations for seller-buyer talk.
However, for us, the central aspect of this interaction is that reciprocity is violated with respect
to both politeness and impoliteness (i.e. a polite approach to someone sets up expectations of a
polite response and vice versa).
In this article, we offer the first full treatment of (im)politeness reciprocity. Section 2 introduces
the notion of (im)politeness and takes first steps towards reciprocity, whilst Section 3 focusses on
reciprocity and morality. Section 4 proposes the Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity (hereafter
PIR), and elaborates on some of its key aspects, the nature of the patterns it involves, issues of
pragmatic inferencing, and, importantly, the role of social context. Section 5 reports two studies,
one an informant-based study and the other corpus-based, exploring perceptions of (im)politeness
reciprocity in requestive exchanges and their contexts.
NO LITERATURE REVIEW
METHOD
We computationally extracted instances of the 12 requestive stems from the spoken section of the
(original) British National Corpus, manually identifying which occurred as a request of some kind.
Expectedly, some stems were much more frequent as requestive forms than others (e.g. normal
politeness formulas, including let me, are much more frequent than extra politeness ones like I
would be grateful). For stems used as requests that were more frequent than 200, a randomised
sample of 200 occurrences was retrieved. This was the case for let me, would you like and will
you. In total, our dataset amounted to 1141 exchanges.
Our coding scheme for mismatching responses of the requestees was that outlined in Section 5.1.
Regarding inter-rater reliability, 88% agreement was reached among three different annotators.
Anything uninterpretable was excluded.
FINDING AND DISCUSSION
This paper, having defined (im)politeness, laid out the background to reciprocity in terms of a
social debit-credit balance, and pointed to its importance in the moral order (as crystallised in
religions and legal frameworks), as well as in the rights and obligations of societies. Moreover, it
argued that its basis is in proto-morality, the basic substructure underlying cultural forms of
morality.
Framing the PIR as a sociopragmatic interactional principle, we defined it as: a constraint on
human interaction such that there is pressure to match the perceived or anticipated (im)politeness
of other participants, thereby maintaining a balance of payments. Maintaining reciprocity through
politeness matching is what people normally do, as evidenced by our study in Section 5. It is the
stuff of everyday, routine politeness. We argued that reciprocal impoliteness matching is the stuff
of tit-or-tat impoliteness, and gave evidence for this in Section 4.2. However, for practical reasons
(the lack of data in the British National Corpus (BNC)), this was not thoroughly explored; it could
benefit from further research. Conversely, deviating from reciprocity through mismatching
(im)politeness is abnormal and triggers further inferencing. Section 4.3 elaborated on this
inferencing with reference to Levinson's (2000) M-heuristic. Mismatching with a downwards shift
can trigger, context permitting, strong impoliteness implicatures (e.g. rejecting someone or
something); conversely, mismatching with an upwards shift can trigger, context permitting, strong
politeness implicatures (e.g. being magnanimous by turning the other cheek). Of course, as noted
with reference to Terkourafi (2003), the precise implicatures are dependent on the specifics of the
situation.
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Situated Impoliteness Revisited: Blunt Anti-Epidemic Slogans And
Conflicting Comments During The Coronavirus Outbreak In China
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.03.004
ABSTRACT
In this paper, blunt slogans used in China's health campaign against coronavirus are closely
examined and the public's conflicting comments on them are analyzed. These slogans, due to their
extreme effectiveness in making the public comply with the health preventive measures suggested
by the government, are called Yinghe or “hardcore” slogans by the Chinese people. Containing
harsh and taboo language, they convey threats of death and disease, insults or negative evaluation,
and harsh demands. Despite their impolite nature, “hardcore” slogans have received significantly
more positive judgment than negative judgment, especially when they made their debut in rural
areas in Henan, an agricultural province in China. Criticism towards these blunt slogans then
gradually increased after their initial appearance. Plausible factors contributing to the change of
judgment are analyzed. The public's conflicting judgment regarding the impoliteness of the slogans
may be related to the public's different positioning across time and space. This study shows that
impoliteness is a practice situated not only in discourse, genres, and institutions, but also in social,
cultural, and political contexts. More attention should be paid to impoliteness in special social
configurations (e.g., rural areas) and social emergencies, which not only contextualize a discourse
event but also define it.
Keywords: Impoliteness, Situatedness, Blunt slogans, Social emergencies, Positioning
INTRODUCTION
Propaganda posters have attracted a wide range of attention from researchers around the world
(Barnes, 2020; S. Landsberger, 1995; Landsberger, 2013; Li, 2018; Nowakowska et al., 2014;
Powell and Wong, 1997; Pretorius, 2019; Ranta, 2020; Seidman, 2008). China has had a long
history of employing propaganda posters.In this study, I look into the situatedness and pragmatic
features of a specific type of posters or banners in China's health campaign against the coronavirus
in 2020 and study civilians' response to anti-epidemic slogans printed on the banners. Throughout
the analysis, I focus on the situatedness of impoliteness, i.e., the processing and evaluating of
impolite meanings in discourse, genres, settings, and socio-political contexts. It aims to show that
(im)politeness is situated not only culturally and socially, but also temporarily and spatially.
NO LITERATURE REVIEW
METHOD AND PROCEDURE
In this study, data regarding the blunt slogans and the public's comments on them were collected.
All the data were open-access and available on the social networking site, Weibo. I identified the
twenty-two most frequently mentioned “hardcore” slogans that contained language with the
potential to aggravate the face of addressees or cause damage to interpersonal relationships such as
threats or dirty talk. These blunt slogans, initially observed in rural areas in Henan province but
quickly spread to other places outside the province, were all used by local governments to remind
people of the importance of taking preventive health measures during the coronavirus outbreak in
China. By examining the impoliteness strategies exhibited in these slogans, I then classified them
into different categories and explored how each category of impoliteness is situated in various
contexts. As for the public's reaction to the blunt slogans, I collected the comments below the posts
in relation to the blunt slogans. Most posts displayed readers' comments at the bottom.
DISCUSSION/ FINDINGS
The study has demonstrated the situatedness of the impoliteness in the blunt slogans. The blunt
slogans, widely used in many small towns and rural areas in China during the health campaign
against the coronavirus, displayed threats, insults, negative evaluation and harsh demands that were
situated in the cultural, social, historical and political contexts. Moreover, the analysis suggests that
about two-thirds of the comments were positive and that the blunt slogans were largely welcome.
The public's general welcoming gesture of the impoliteness in the blunt slogans can be ascribed to
not only the slogans' effectiveness in the prevention of the spread of the coronavirus, but also
people's acceptance of the autocratic leadership and high power distance to a certain extent.
Furthermore, people's evaluation was affected by both their positioning in time and in space. The
positioning of oneself as a moral referee or intellectual may have led to viewing the blunt slogans
as very rude and inappropriate, whereas the positioning of oneself as a common citizen anxiously
waiting effective actions to be taken would have led to reaching the opposite judgment.
This provides support to Kim's (2009) argument that the dyadic, synchronic, and cross-sectional
model of (im)politeness might be too simplistic and idealized. A diachronic perspective toward
impoliteness is an important complement to examining synchronic judgments. Impoliteness is fluid
instead of static. The subjective judgments of impoliteness can vary among people from the same
culture, depending on how they position themselves. This study has only been able to explore the
blunt anti-epidemic slogans and comments about them on social media. There were no interviews
with local residents of the areas where the blunt slogans were used. Quite a few comments about
the blunt slogans asserted that it was more effective to get things done using rudeness and
impoliteness than politeness in the rural areas in China.
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Interaction Ritual and (Im)Politeness
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.04.021
ABSTRACT
This paper provides insight into interaction ritual theory, by devoting special attention to the
interface between interaction ritual and (im)politeness. We focus on several key pragmatic features
of interaction ritual, illustrating their operation. We also describe different research approaches for
systematically studying interaction rituals. Finally, we present a case-study of Chinese university
military trainings to illustrate the operation of ritual in a morally loaded aggressive scenario. Our
study shows that interaction ritual theory provides an analytic focus on recurrent and as such
replicable aspects of language use. This sense of replicability is indispensable if we want to model
language use across linguacultures.
Keywords: Interaction ritual theory, (Im)Politeness, Aggression, Military training
INTRODUCTION
In this contribution to the Festschrift dedicated to Michael Haugh, we provide an overview of
interaction ritual theory, with a special focus on the interface between interaction ritual and
(im)politeness. Michael has conducted in-depth studies of a range of pragmatic phenomena and
concepts with intrinsic relationship with interaction ritual, such as teasing and jocular mockery
(e.g. Haugh, 2017), denunciation and inflicting shame (Márquez Reiter and Haugh, 2019), and the
Japanese emic notion of ‘place tachiba’ (e.g. Haugh, 2005). He has also conducted extensive
research on the concept of ‘moral order’ (see e.g. Kádár and Haugh, 2013), which is central to
interaction ritual (see Kádár, 2017).
In this paper, we first discuss interaction ritual theory, by examining why interaction ritual is
particularly relevant for (im)politeness research. We then overview the key pragmatic features of
interaction ritual. We also describe approaches by means of which this phenomenon can be
studied. Finally, we present a case study of morally loaded ritual aggression, a phenomenon
closely related to Michael's research.
NO LITERATURE REVIEW
METHOD AND PROCEDURE
Researchers following a top-down approach normally preset the context to be investigated,
followed by data collection and analysis. This approach provides a gateway to the relationship
between interaction ritual and the enveloping sociocultural context. A bottom-up approach
encompasses both social interaction and pragmalinguistic/corpus-based methodologies. Previous
social interaction research has pursued an interest in how an interaction reveals the existence and
operation of a certain interaction ritual. For instance, Horgan (2019) explored the Goffmanian
phenomenon of ‘civil inattention’, a ritual of fundamental importance which, however, emerges in
interaction only when it is clearly violated. The authors of this paper recently proposed a
pragmalinguistic, corpus-based and bottom-up approach to study the ways expressions indicate
ritual frames (see Kádár and House, 2020b).
The top-down and bottom-up approaches to interaction ritual can be combined into a multimethod,
cross-cultural pragmatic methodology (see House and Kádár, 2021).
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
In this paper, we have shown that interaction ritual theory is highly relevant to a variety of
pragmatic phenomena relating to (im)politeness. We have argued that research on interaction ritual
is of a very broad scope: it encompasses both mainstream interaction ritual theory and other areas
of pragmatic investigation. We have provided an overview of both the main pragmatic features and
research approaches to interaction ritual. Finally, we have provided a case study drawn from
Chinese, illustrating the link between ritual and aggressive behaviour, using the concept of ritual
frame.
We hope that interaction ritual theory will gain further momentum in pragmatic research because it
can provide new insights into a wide variety of pragmatic phenomena. Furthermore, interaction
ritual theory triggers an analytic focus on recurrent and as such replicable aspects of language use.
This sense of replicability is indispensable if we want to model language use across linguacultures
(see House and Kádár, 2021). As the case study presented in this paper has shown, interaction
ritual theory provides an approach to systematise certain everyday events which otherwise defy
systematisation. This potential for systematisation inherent in interaction ritual makes it a powerful
concept.
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The Climate of Climate Change: Impoliteness as A Hallmark of
Homophily in Youtube Comment Threads on Greta Thunberg's
Environmental Activism
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.03.003
ABSTRACT
This paper investigates impoliteness and value homophily (‘thinking alike’) in the context of
YouTube-based ideological discussions beneath the videos critical towards the Swedish
environmental activist – Greta Thunberg. Drawing on the idea of rapport management, the study
finds a remarkable scale of homophily as the postings follow recurrent patterns of face and
sociality rights attacks echoing the same point of view. Consequently, while impoliteness has been
recognized as widespread in social media for reasons such as anonymity and social detachment,
this paper offers an insight into how the phenomenon contributes to the process of consolidation
and homogenization of views through social comparison. As the study concludes, impoliteness in
ideological discussions on YouTube may serve as the glue to ad hoc social contact between like-
minded individuals –ultimately leading to social identification in relevant groups and formation of
homophilous online communities.
Keywords: Impoliteness, YouTube, Value homophily, Social identity, Ideological (dis)affiliation
INTRODUCTION
In order to account for potentially vague dichotomy, the current study adopts the extension to the
traditional notion of face as an ‘identity or self-image’ (Goffman, 1955), and Brown and
Levinson's (1987) division between positive and negative face, proposed by Spencer-Oatey (e.g.,
2008) as the model of ‘relational management’. This model establishes a relevant distinction
between self-value (face) and social value –the latter concerned with a person's sense of public
worth and his/her value in terms of social relationships. However, while it can be assumed that in
the current data, impoliteness against both face and social value of Greta Thunberg will be
identified, the analysis intends to deploy the tenets of Spencer-Oatey's model in line with Garcés-
Conejos Blitvich's (2010) argument that in the deindividuated context of intergroup
communication, attacks towards face should be perceived as addressed to an individual as a
member of a relevant group, and so to collective rather than individual face. Consequently,
impoliteness will be viewed here in terms of the resonance between the participants' efforts to
reinforce and (re)affirm (pre)existing ideological beliefs and their social identity claims.
To sum up: the goal of the paper is to analyze the relationship between value homophily and
expression of impoliteness towards Greta Thunberg's environmental activism in YouTube
discussion threads. The overarching question to ask, however, is whether the current data do
exhibit a homophilous profile.
NO LITERATURE REVIEW
METHOD
This study combined qualitative and quantitative methodologies, this study contributes to the body
of much-needed corpus research into impoliteness. The study offers corpus-informed, quantitative
(including an automatic technique for word clustering retreival; section 3.1 below) and qualitative
perspectives on how this process unfolds in discourse. As argued in the recent literature,
combining different methods and approaches (corpus analysis in particular) is a necessary step
towards understanding the nuanced and complex nature of impoliteness (Haugh and Culpeper,
2018).
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
The analysis has found the comment threads to exhibit a largely homophilous profile –validating
the ideological position of the video, reiterating alike beliefs, and approving of the conveyed
values. The general hypothesis that (re)affirmation of the user's (pre)existing beliefs may be a vital
incentive to actively contribute to the discursive content on the platform, and a gratifying tangent
point between the participants, seems therefore to be the case.
Further, the idea that impoliteness is a vehicle of the ad hoc social comparison between groups, has
also been confirmed. The adopted model of rapport management (Spencer-Oatey, 2008) has
proved useful identifying and assessing the categories of impoliteness in the data, which were
assumed to reflect certain value positions. The most important finding of this part of the analysis is
the prevalence of attacks toward Greta Thunberg's social worth, as opposed to face related
impoliteness – interestingly, each type turned out to be realized via quite different bottom-up
formulae. What this finding suggests is that the users share not only certain views, but perhaps also
the view on how to convey them.
The presence of value homophily in the data was further confirmed in the investigation of the
degree of acceptance of the point of view and impoliteness in the discussion threads. The analysis
indicated a general prevalence of endorsement– importantly – regardless of the impoliteness
category involved. As argued above, this finding pertains to the intricacies of ideological
(dis)affiliation in online intergroup interactions, where validation of the same values may outweigh
the rules of civility in public discourse.
Finally, potentially significant effects have been identified between the scale of agreement/
disagreement/ conflict and the video, which is likely related to the scope of diversity of the
involved audiences. A more robust picture of this factor could be captured in a large-scale
investigation of the ideological composition of the users’ personal networks.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abreu, Luis, Jeon, Doh-Shin,
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