<p>The main purpose of this study is to establish a socio-pragmatic categorization of politeness and impoliteness activities in informal interactions. In doing this, we describe the communicative strategies related to (im) politeness phenomena and how they are used to produce certain <i>social effects</i> in face-to-face interaction through the ongoing negotiation of participants’ <i>face </i>(Goffman, 1967). This study is based on informal conversations extracted from a <i>corpus </i>of spoken Spanish gathered in the metropolitan area of Valencia, Spain (Briz and Val.Es.Co. Group, 2002). Focusing on methodology, this study combines a qualitative method inspired in CA with a DA interpretative approach that analyzes communicative acts (Allwood 1995; Bravo, e. p.1). <i>Face</i> contents such as <i>autonomy </i>and<i> affiliative face, role face, group</i> and <i>individual face, </i>are a resource for analyzing what happens during interaction along with the resulting interpersonal effects. The integration of the analysis of context, which includes the co-text, the situational context and the socio-cultural context (cultural settings and shared assumptions), is equally important in this study. The empirical analysis of both the conversations and a questionnaire on impoliteness bring us to propose a series of categories of (im) politeness. The categories are as follow: Strategic Politeness (within this category we find <i>attenuating politeness </i>and<i> reparatory politeness</i>), Enhancing Politeness, Group Politeness, Ritual Politeness (here we differentiate between meeting situations and visit situations) and Discursive Politeness (we divide this category into <i>conventional </i>and <i>thematic</i>). Concerning Impoliteness, we find situations in informal conversation in which impoliteness is expected (<i>normative impoliteness</i>) and when threatening acts (reproaches, criticism, etc.) do not imply directly, <i>per se</i>, a negative personal effect. We next find two types of impoliteness: one produced by threats to the <i>face </i>of the speaker which are neither mitigated nor amended and the other caused by a break from the normal rules of politeness. </p>

<p>The thesis explores the form, function and sociolinguistic distribution of explicit apologies in the spoken part of the British National Corpus. The sub-corpus used for the study comprises a spoken text mass of about five million words and represents dialogue produced by more than 1700 speakers, acting in a number of different conversational settings. More than 3000 examples of apologising are included in the analysis.</p><p>Primarily, the form and function of the apologies are examined in relation to the type of offence leading up to the speech act. Aspects such as the sincerity of the apologies and the use of additional remedial strategies other than explicit apologising are also considered. Variations in the distributions of the different types of apologies found are subsequently investigated for the two independent variables speaker social identity (gender, social class and age) and conversational setting (genre, formality and group size). The effect of the speaker-addressee relationship on the apology rate and the types of apologies produced is also examined.</p><p>In this study, the prototypical apology, a speech act used to remedy a real or perceived offence, is only one of a number of uses of the apology form in the corpus. Other common functions of the form include discourse-managing devices such as request cues for repetition and markers of hesitation, as well as disarming devices uttered before expressing disagreement and controversial opinions.</p><p>Among the speaker social variables investigated, age and social class are particularly important in affecting apologetic behaviour. Young and middle-class speakers favour the use of the apology form. No substantial gender differences in apologising are apparent in the corpus. I have also been able to show that large conversational groups result in frequent use of the form. Finally, analysis of the effects of the speaker-addressee relationship on the use of the speech act shows that, contrary to expectations based on Brown & Levinson’s theory of politeness, it is the powerful who tend to apologise to the powerless rather than vice versa.</p><p>The study implies that formulaic politeness is an important linguistic marker of social class and that its use often involves control of the addressee. </p>

The main purpose of this study is to establish a socio-pragmatic categorization of politeness and impoliteness activities in informal interactions. In doing this, we describe the communicative strategies related to (im) politeness phenomena and how they are used to produce certain social effects in face-to-face interaction through the ongoing negotiation of participants’ face (Goffman, 1967). This study is based on informal conversations extracted from a corpus of spoken Spanish gathered in the metropolitan area of Valencia, Spain (Briz and Val.Es.Co. Group, 2002). Focusing on methodology, this study combines a qualitative method inspired in CA with a DA interpretative approach that analyzes communicative acts (Allwood 1995; Bravo, e. p.1). Face contents such as autonomy and affiliative face, role face, group and individual face, are a resource for analyzing what happens during interaction along with the resulting interpersonal effects. The integration of the analysis of context, which includes the co-text, the situational context and the socio-cultural context (cultural settings and shared assumptions), is equally important in this study. The empirical analysis of both the conversations and a questionnaire on impoliteness bring us to propose a series of categories of (im) politeness. The categories are as follow: Strategic Politeness (within this category we find attenuating politeness and reparatory politeness), Enhancing Politeness, Group Politeness, Ritual Politeness (here we differentiate between meeting situations and visit situations) and Discursive Politeness (we divide this category into conventional and thematic). Concerning Impoliteness, we find situations in informal conversation in which impoliteness is expected (normative impoliteness) and when threatening acts (reproaches, criticism, etc.) do not imply directly, per se, a negative personal effect. We next find two types of impoliteness: one produced by threats to the face of the speaker which are neither mitigated nor amended and the other caused by a break from the normal rules of politeness.

Oggi, l'Italia è un paese multietnico. Dietro i movimenti migratori non vi sono però solo dati statistici, ma persone con culture e storie personali diverse, con cui gli operatori a contatto con gli immigrati devono confrontarsi. Ciò ha condotto alla nascita della mediazione linguistico-culturale, un settore sorto nella fase più acuta del fenomeno dell'immigrazione, gli anni Novanta, per rispondere alle esigenze specifiche di assistenza medica e legale degli immigrati. L'intento del presente lavoro di ricerca è quello di studiare l'interazione verbale e non verbale tra medico o infermiere e paziente straniero nel contesto della mediazione linguistica-culturale in una struttura socio-sanitaria. All'interno dell'interazione verbale si analizzeranno le teorie della cortesia linguistica applicate a un contesto socio-sanitario multietnico. Si andrà a verificare se esiste una lingua di mediazione, se la lingua inglese funge da lingua franca nell'interazione verbale medico o infermiere e paziente straniero e se esistano strategie empatiche comunicative verbali e non verbali comunemente utilizzate in corsia dal personale ospedaliero. Si studierà inoltre come l'analisi della conversazione, in particolare l'analisi delle strategie empatiche comunicative verbali e non verbali, possa essere utilizzata a fini didattici e pedagogici nella formazione linguistica e interculturale di studenti di medicina nel nuovo contesto sociosanitario multiculturale. / Italian society has undergone massive transformation, arising today as a true multiethnic society. Migration movements are not simply a phenomenon of statistical data but involve people from different cultures and personal backgrounds. Immigration is behind the onset of community interpreting in Italy at the beginning of the '90s. Community interpreters catered for all medical and legal needs of immigrants. Today, it is common practice in Italy that doctors and nurses interact with immigrant patients. The aim of the thesis is to study verbal and non-verbal strategies of communication between doctors or nurses and immigrant patients in this new multiethnic medical environment. The study will examine strategies of politeness theory, whether English is a lingua franca in the doctor or nurse and immigrant patient interaction and whether there are empathic verbal and non-verbal strategies of communication commonly used in the hospital ward by doctors and nurses. The study will also examine how conversational analysis, in particular the analysis of empathic verbal and non-verbal strategies of communication can be used for didactic and pedagogical purposes so as to prepare medical students linguistically and culturally to interact with their future patients in this new multiethnic medical environment.

La presente ricerca intende indagare alcune tendenze interazionali di discenti giapponesi e svedesi in relazione alla cultura dei parlanti e al processo comunicativo che ha luogo nell’insegnamento dell’italiano all’estero. Gli stili comunicativi e gli stili di apprendimento costituiscono lo sfondo della dinamica di rapporto fra docente e studente. Tali elementi si manifestano in interazioni interculturali attraverso una co-occorrenza di regolarità caratteristiche della comunità linguistica a cui i discenti appartengono. Osservando lo stile comunicativo degli studenti si nota che alcune strategie interazionali riflettono valori culturali a cui è legato il senso della politeness, così come percepito dalla loro comunità linguistica. Il trasferimento di strategie comunicative da una lingua all’altra può dare origine a dissonanze nelle interazioni tra docenti e studenti, inficiando il processo comunicativo che permette di attuare pragmaticamente l’azione didattica, compromettendone talvolta il buon esito. Le modalità interazionali degli studenti riflettono lo stile comunicativo della comunità linguistica di cui fanno parte, mentre la tradizione della didattica delle lingue straniere permette di comprendere gli stili di apprendimento dei discenti. Si comprende così la centralità che hanno la cultura dei parlanti e il processo comunicativo, ai fini dell’insegnamento e dell’apprendimento delle lingue all’estero. / The aim of the present research is to investigate some interactional features of Japanese and Swedish students as regards the culture of the speakers and the process of communication involved in the teaching of Italian as a foreign language. Communication styles and learning styles form the background of the dynamics in the relationship between the lecturer and the student. Such elements can be perceived in intercultural communications, especially by a co-occurrence of regularities that are distinctive of the language community the students belong to. By observing the communication styles of the students one can see that some interactional strategies reflect cultural values that are strictly connected to the sense of politeness, as perceived by a language community. Transferring communicative strategies from one language to another can produce dissonances in the interactions between the lecturer and the students; this in turn can affect the process of communication in its pragmatic application of the teaching, at times making it less successful. The communication styles of the students reflect those of the language community they belong to, whereas the foreign language teaching tradition allows one to comprehend their styles of learning. Thus one can rediscover the central role of culture and communication in the process of teaching a foreign language abroad.

This study examines the functions of phrases with the word missverstehen in any inflected form in German discussion groups. The corpus consists of about 600 different messages with a phrase containing the verb missverstehen from all kinds of discussion groups speaking the German language. The hypothesis is that those phrases do not always refer to a factual misunderstanding in the communication. There is no such thing as total understanding in communication, since people cannot fully know how other people are thinking. Instead understanding is a social construct. Misunderstanding occurs when a group member cannot interpret a message so that it correlates with what the sender has meant. This understanding contains both the discussed theme as well as the relation between the group members. Relevance occurs when interpretable information is communicated through contextualization cues. Some cues carry information about the discussed theme, others communicate face work. A misunderstanding is caused by missing contextualization cues, i. e. the message is irrelevant. The study shows how the communicators can construct a disagreement as a misunderstanding, which it in turn has an impact on face work. The phrase is then being used together with added contextualization cues in order to construct a common understanding. Thereby the communicators can influence the interaction. This is done in a sequence in the discussion group. Hence the script theory (Schank/Abelson 1977) aims to describe the phenomenon of how a phrase with the word missverstehen can be used for different purposes. One script is defined for each purpose. The difference between the scripts is being maintained by the contextualization cue that carries the information about how the relations between group members are interacted.

The main purpose of this study is to conduct a contrastive analysis on a corpus of Swedish and Spanish family conversations with respect to two adjacency pairs: opinion-agreement/disagreement (OADs) and offer-acceptance/rejection (OARs). On one hand, from a structural perspective, based on the methodology of Conversation Analysis, one of the objectives is to observe how (dis)preferred turns of the OADs and OARs are managed by the interlocutors. On the other hand, from a functional perspective, based on the methodology of Sociocultural Pragmatics, the intention is to study how face is constructed and how politeness is managed by the family members when expressing OADs and OARs. The structural analysis of OADs and OARs shows that the majority of agreements and acceptances follow the rules for preferred turns proposed by orthodox conversation analysts, i.e. they appear directly after the first part of the adjacency pair (opinion or offer), and they are brief and unambiguous. However, the structural analysis also reveals that 70% (Swedish corpus) and 72% (Spanish corpus) of the disagreements as well as 64% (Swedish corpus) and 70% (Spanish corpus) of the rejections have a tendency to not follow the proposed rules for dispreferred turns, i.e. they are not delayed or accompanied by hesitations, justifications, etc. and nor are they evaluated as dispreferred by the participants. This indicates that social perspective, especially face, has to be considered when deciding what is considered (dis)preferred. The functional analysis of the OADs indicates that the majority of the disagreements in both Swedish (68%) and Spanish (79%) corpus are not mitigated, but rather are expressed in a fairly direct manner. Swedes tend to avoid disagreements, and therefore we expected to find a major difference between the two groups. One explanation could be that family members enjoy close relationships, and therefore the Swedes feel free to express their disagreements. As for the impact on the family members face, in both groups, it is both autonomy face and affiliation face that are influenced when OADs are expressed. As for agreement, for example, it is usually autonomy face that is affected. We interpret this as a way for the participants to show that both speakers and listeners have valuable opinions that deserve to be both voiced and commented on. This reveals the more discursive (rather than ritual) nature of OADs. In addition, the functional study of OARs shows that acceptances and rejections in both corpora are expressed using both ritual and attenuating politeness according to the norms required by the situation. Concerning the impact on face, autonomy face has different requirements in the two cultures: in the Swedish conversations, it is important to offer food without insisting several times, and in the Spanish corpus, it is important to offer food more than one or two times, and there is also a tendency to refuse the offer several times before accepting it. Therefore, according to one’s situational role, one has to know how to both give and receive offers, which points to the more ritual nature of OARs. Finally, we want to emphasize that by adding a social perspective to the structural one, we can interpret the meaning of the conversations in a way that provides a broader understanding of what is being said as participants express OADs and OARs.

Alan Garcia, l’actuel président du Pérou, est un des politiciens les plus controversés dans l’histoire péruvienne. Le succès de sa carrière comme candidat est fort opposé aux résultats catastrophiques de sa première gestion présidentielle. Dans la culture populaire, les compétences discursives de Garcia, ainsi que le contraste entre son succès et ses pauvres performances en tant que président, l’ont élevé au rang de mythe. Ce travail de recherche présente une analyse pragmatique linguistique des stratégies discursives utilisées par le président Garcia dans son deuxième mandat (2001-2006). L’analyse sera centrée sur le rapport établi par Steven Pinker (2007) entre politesse positive et solidarité communale. Les travaux de Brown et Levinson (1978, 1987) et d’Alan Fiske (1991) sont notre base théorique. L’exclusion sociale d’une partie de la population électorale péruvienne, selon le point de vue de Vergara (2007), est l’élément clé pour mieux comprendre le succès de la stratégie discursive de Garcia. Vegara présente une analyse diachronique multi-variable de la situation politique péruvienne pour expliquer la rationalité de la population électorale péruvienne. À partir de cet encadrement théorique, nous procéderons à l’analyse lexicométrique qui nous permettra d’identifier les stratégies discursives utilisées dans le corpus des discours de Garcia qui a été choisi pour l’analyse. D’après le schéma de Pinker, les données obtenues seront classifiées selon la définition de politesse positive de Brown et Levinson. Finalement, nous évaluerons le rapport entre les résultats classifiés et le modèle de solidarité communale de Fiske. L’objectif est de démontrer que le style discursif de Garcia est structuré à partir d’une rationalité dont l’objet est de fermer la brèche sociale entre le politicien et l’électorat. / Peruvian President Alan Garcia is one of the most controversial politicians in Peruvian history. His successful career as a presidential candidate is opposed to the catastrophic results of his first presidential government. Garcia’s discursive skills and the high contrast between his political success and his poor performance as a president have become a myth in Peruvian popular culture.. In this work we will present a pragmatic-linguistic analysis of the discursive strategies used by Garcia in his second administration (2006-2011). The analysis will be focused on the relationship established by Steven Pinker (2007) between Positive Politeness and Communal Sharing. The works of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) and Alan Fiske (1991) will be our theoretical groundwork. Social exclusion in Peruvian electoral population, as explained by Vergara (2007), is the key factor to understand the success of Garcia’s discursive strategy. In his work, Vergara presents a diachronic multi-variable analysis of the Peruvian political situation that explains the rationality behind Peruvian elector’s decisions. Once established the referential political framework, we will proceed with the lexicometric analysis that will help us to identify the discursive strategies used in a previously selected sample of Garcia’s public discourses. In order to match Pinker’s scheme, we will classify these findings according to the positive politeness categorization of Brown and Levinson. Finally, we will associate these results to the Communal Sharing model of social relationship, as defined by Fiske. Our goal is to demonstrate that Garcia’s discursive style is rationally structured to reduce the social gap between the Politician and the Elector.

In this thesis. I have moved away from the general question of 'How do women and men behave linguistically?, (Sing and Bergvall. 1996:19) and have turned to investigate in particular how the speech act of apologies contributes to the production of people as 'women and men' (Sing and Bergvall, 1996:19). In other words, the investigation focuses on the effect of politeness strategies on the construction of gender identities. Using poststrucluralist feminist theory as developed primarily by Weedon (1987), this thesis investigates the politeness strategies employed by some Zulu students at the University of Natal, Durban, in their English-medium interactions with African international students. The speech act of apologies is the area of language investigated, with data being collected primarily by means of role-plays and focus groups. The focus of the analysis is limited to the performance of apologies towards non-Zulus by 12 Zulu male and female students. To this end, the various strategies employed by the respondents were analysed according to the framework developed by Holmes (1989, 1995). In addition, information gathered in the focus groups revealed to what extent politeness strategies are still being transferred from Zulu to English. The strategies employed by these men and women are considered as revealing some of the ways by which politeness contributes to the construction of gender identities, in the University context. On the basis of this limited sample, it is argued that traditional Zulu male masculinity, while still dominant, is now being contested in the University context by some students favouring a less tradition-oriented identity. The strategies employed by the female respondents, on the other hand, suggest that Zulu women students may be beginning to reject traditional Zulu femininity in favour of more westernized identities. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2000.

The subject of this study is language use in a special type of social activity: the exchange of goods, services and information in a commercial setting. The main aim is to gain an understanding of the work that shop assistants perform using language. In the analysis, the focus is on verbal routine work. One part of the analysis thus entails mapping the typical utterances and conversational sequences related to such activities. Another part involves investigating how much non-task-oriented interaction the various activities require or “tolerate”, for instance, in the form of “small talk”. A central theme in the study is the interactants’ conversational rights and obligations, from the perspective of politeness theory, especially Fraser’s theory of the conversational contract. The service encounters are categorised as activity types, according to Levinson’s activity theory. In the comparative parts of the study, the concept of pragmeme is used as a tool to examine different realisations of prototypical situated communicative acts. The empirical material consists of authentic conversations, analysed by methods borrowed from conversation analysis. The conversations were recorded at a supermarket checkout till, a deli counter with manual service and an information desk in a bookshop. It turned out that only a few of the customer conversations were without complications. At the supermarket till, for instance, only one out of four conversations was completely routine and unproblematic. Also presented is a diachronic investigation of the norms relating to service encounters that have been taking place in shops since the 1940s. The main sources here are manuals and study materials for shop employees, together with interviews and material gathered from role playing. In this part of the study, a number of features in the historical change process are described, for instance in the manner of addressing people and the use of politeness expressions.