New Perspectives On Im Politeness And Interpersonal Communication

New Perspectives on (Im)Politeness and Interpersonal Communication gathers eleven studies by prominent scholars, which explore issues related to (im)politeness in human communication. The study of linguistic (im)politeness is undoubtedly one of the central concerns in the field of pragmatics, as attested to by the numerous conferences and journals currently dedicated to the topic, the various theoretical models and approaches developed or developing so far, and the seemingly endless list of insightful and inspiring empirical studies tackling the topic from a wide variety of angles. This volume contributes to the subfield of social pragmatics by putting together works that review the state of the art of (im)politeness studies, analysing (im)politeness in media contexts like the Internet or dubbed films and other contexts, looking into the effects and consequences of some speech acts for social interaction, drawing implications for language teaching, and approaching some of the linguistic mechanisms which help to communicate (im)politeness. Resulting from the efforts made by specialists in the field, the chapters in this volume offer additional evidence that examining the complexity of interpersonal communication from different standpoints can benefit a more complete understanding of social interaction in general. Their scope and practical applications demonstrate the transversality and versatility of interpersonal communication. The editors hope that these works will retain scholars’ interest and attention for some time to come and spark off further research.

Being polite is an effective way to facilitate interpersonal communication. One of the key issues is how the human cognitive system perceives verbal politeness and deals with the cases in which politeness principles are violated. By using event-related potentials (ERPs), we aim to address the nature of real time processing of disrespectful reference in Mandarin utterance interpretation. The consistency between the social status of the communicating partners and the use of second-person pronoun was manipulated as a testing case. Participants read utterances in which the social status of the communicating partners was either consistent with the pronoun (e.g. respectful) or violated the pronoun (e.g. disrespectful), while undergoing the recording of electrophysiological activity on the scalp. Earlier research has demonstrated that semantic, syntactic and inferential pragmatic processing could be manifested in different ERP effects. Our ERP findings demonstrated that successful handling of disrespectful address may engage semantic-pragmatic mechanisms (as reflected by a N400 and late negativity effect), rather than a mechanism dealing with grammatical error. Moreover, the ERP responses were modulated by individual differences in tolerance to the disrespectful usage, gender, and social interactive ability. These ERP indices of real time processing of disrespectful utterances are consistent with the "conventionalization view" in im/politeness theory (Culpeper 2011; Terkourafi 2002, 2003, 2005).

This collection highlights new perspectives on the work of Erving Goffman, revisiting his place in contemporary social theory and interactional linguistics research and its impact in surfacing new insights in conversation analysis and our understanding of Goffman’s legacy. The volume outlines the theoretical foundations of Goffman’s research across linguistics and the social sciences. Bringing together a crossdisciplinary group of scholars, the book is organized around these themes, with sections on self and identity, participation, and bodily practices in social interaction. Each chapter comprises three perspectives— look back at Goffman’s original texts, their correlation in contemporary empirical research in conversation analysis, and a discussion of conceptual implications in relevant fields such as interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, critical sociolinguistics, and related disciplines. Taken as a whole, the book not only offers a comprehensive critical overview of Goffman’s legacy in empirical work in conversation analysis and the social sciences but also the conceptual grounding for new studies to investigate his continuing role in contemporary scholarship. This innovative collection will be of interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and critical discourse analysis as well as sub-disciplines of sociology and psychology.

This collection combines research from the field of (im)politeness studies with research on language pedagogy and language learning. It aims to engender a useful dialogue between (im)politeness theorists, language teachers, and SLA researchers, and also to broaden the enquiry to naturalistic contexts other than L2 acquisition classrooms, by formulating 'teaching' and 'learning' as processes of socialization, cultural transmission, and adaptation.

This handbook comprehensively examines social interaction by providing a critical overview of the field of linguistic politeness and impoliteness. Authored by over forty leading scholars, it offers a diverse and multidisciplinary approach to a vast array of themes that are vital to the study of interpersonal communication. The chapters explore the use of (im)politeness in specific contexts as well as wider developments, and variations across cultures and contexts in understandings of key concepts (such as power, emotion, identity and ideology). Within each chapter, the authors select a topic and offer a critical commentary on the key linguistic concepts associated with it, supporting their assertions with case studies that enable the reader to consider the practicalities of (im)politeness studies. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of linguistics, particularly those concerned with pragmatics, sociolinguistics and interpersonal communication. Its multidisciplinary nature means that it is also relevant to researchers across the social sciences and humanities, particularly those working in sociology, psychology and history.

This book presents overviews on the specific methods for the study of verbal politeness, which is deeply and constantly involved in our social life. The text offers an original and specific synthesis of traditional and innovative methods for the study of politeness as we conceive it today: as a complex system between the individual microcosm (psychological and cognitive) and the social macrocosm (cultural and relational). The author addresses theoretical and academic issues while exploring various critical points for the future of politeness studies. The reader is provided with a coherent network, which crosses between theory, methods and tools for research. The network results in a wide range of model research that facilitates the practical understanding of the potential for each data collection technique. This monograph offers representative examples of studies of various languages and cultures and appeals to students, researchers and professionals within the field.

This book reports the results of a linguistic analysis of reflective written texts, produced during medical education or practice. It explores the topics and communication skills the authors write about, how the narratives develop, how these texts are shaped, what genres influence their composition, how relational work surfaces in them and how the writers linguistically create their identities as experts or novices. It is clear that both experienced and trainee medics grapple with the place of emotions in their communicative acts, and with the idea of what it means to be a doctor. The book makes a valuable contribution to genre analysis, interpersonal pragmatics and the study of linguistic identity construction, and will be essential reading for those involved in teaching doctor–patient communication skills.

Corpus linguistic methods provide new avenues for (im)politeness scholarship to reflexively evaluate its understanding of communication and language use on the theoretical contributions of corpus linguistics to the linguistic sciences. In this sense, this volume is a unique contribution to (im)politeness scholarship. It showcases studies in the field which employ specialized and general corpora, with methodologies that range from the speech act to the discourse-analytic and conversation-analytic traditions. The book brings into closer contact scholarship that has hitherto remained in relatively different streams of the scientific investigation of (im)politeness. A unifying theme of the chapters here is that (im)politeness phenomena are situated within the institutional and genre-specific expectations of participants in an interaction. Each of the chapters identifies the situatedness of (im)politeness from varying perspectives. The chapters in the volume are sequenced from specialized to general corpora, and simultaneously move from conversation – and discourse – analytic perspectives to contributions that address issues surrounding the identification and extraction of (im)politeness in general corpora. In collating the chapters of the volume, care was taken to focus attention on languages that have been studied extensively in (im)politeness scholarship (varieties of English – British English and Englishes in Hong Kong – and Greek), and languages that are only recently gaining more visibility in the field (Slovenian and Turkish).