- •Xford Introductions to Language Study
- •It furthers the .University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
- •No unauthorized photocopying
- •Readings
- •XII preface
- •XIV preface
- •4 Survey
- •The pragmatics wastebasket
- •Deixis and distance
- •10 Survey
- •14 Survey
- •Reference and inference
- •22 Survey
- •Presupposition and entailment
- •26 Survey
- •Cooperation and implicature
- •38 Survey
- •If the speaker goes on to describe those linguistics courses as in [13], then we can identify some more scalar implicatures.
- •Speech acts and events
- •46 Survey
- •56 Survey
- •Politeness and interaction
- •Self and other: say nothing
- •62 Survey
- •Say something: off and on record
- •I face saving act
- •Conversation and preference structure
- •72 Survey
- •74 Survey
- •Insertion sequence is provided, the second part (Ai) of the initial question (Qi) will follow. This pattern is illustrated in [13].
- •Discourse and culture
- •82 Survey
- •86 Survey
- •94 Readings
- •Text 10
- •Text 11
- •Text 12
- •Text 13
- •Text 14
- •Text 15
- •Text 16
- •Text 17
- •Text 18
- •Text 19
- •Text 21
- •Text 22
- •114 Readings
- •References
- •Il8 references
- •Indiana University Linguistics Club 1977
- •Chapter 6
- •122 References
- •126 References
- •128 Glossary
- •130 Glossary
- •13Z glossary
- •134 Glossary
- •Acknowledgements
Text 15
gabriele kasper: 'Politeness' in R. E. Asher (ed.):
The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Volume 6.
Pergamon 1994, page 3209
Some types of linguistic action are carried out more frequently in some cultures than in others. Hearer-beneficial acts such as complimenting and thanking occur more regularly in some Western contexts (e.g., the USA) than in some Asian cultures (e.g., mainland China), reflecting both the strong positive politeness orientation and reluctance to impose on others in mainstream American culture, on the one hand, and the assumption, in China, that participants act according to their social positions and associated roles and obligations, on the other. Also, hearer-costly acts such as refusals are perceived as being more socially offensive by Japanese and Chinese interlocutors and thus tend to be avoided, whereas it seems more consistent with American interlocutors' right to self-determination not to comply with another person's wishes.
0 Can you think of other 'hearer-beneficial acts' and other 'hearer-costly acts'? For example, what is an invitation or a complaint? Is it possible that the concepts of 'cost' and 'benefit' may be culturally determined?
t> There is a suggestion in this text that people in the USA are more concerned with their rights as individuals than with their social roles and obligations. What kind of evidence from language behavior would you look for in order to decide whether this suggestion is true or not?
I> Can you characterize the normal behavior of your own social group as having more 'hearer-beneficial' acts? What about 'hearer-costly' acts? Are there other social groups with whom you share the same language, but whose politeness strategies appear to be different?
D> Where does Lakoff's 'conventional camaraderie' (Text 14) fit into the distinction that Kasper is making here?
Text 16
penelope brown and Stephen levinson: Politeness. Cambridge University Press 1987, page 281
In language the constraints are more on form than on content (or at least form provides a more feasible area of study). The ways in which messages are hedged, hinted, made deferential, and embedded in discourse structures then become crucial areas of study. But such areas are also the concern of pragmatics, the study of the systematic relation of a language to context. The special interest of sociolinguistics in our view is in the differential use of such pragmatic resources by different categories of speakers in different situations. It is in this way that we derive our slogan 'Sociolinguistics should be applied pragmatics.'
t> Do you agree with the assumption that pragmatics comes first and then is 'applied' to the social use of language, or should it be the other way round?
t> Notice that the concepts of 'hedge' and 'hint' are used here. Recall the use of 'hedges' on implicatures in Chapter j, pages 38-9 (which themselves may be termed 'hints'); would such phenomena in the use of language be better analyzed as aspects of politeness? Is pragmatics really just the study of linguistic politeness?
Does the 'slogan' at the end of this text provide a better (or worse) perspective on pragmatics than those offered in Texts 1 and 2 earlier?
Chapter 8
Conversation and preference structure