The focus of this study is in the area of pragmatic-stylistics. The study argues that pragmatic tools such as (im)politeness theory and cooperative maxims can be applied to literary discourse to explain different dynamics in the conversation of dramatic and fictional characters in literary texts in relation to their sex, power, social distance, and interactive role. It also examines how these factors interrelate in explaining the tension in the characters’ dialogues. Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness and Culpeper’s framework of impoliteness, as well as Grice’s cooperative principle, have been used as a theoretical background to review critically the dialogues between the dramatic and fictional characters. The data of this study consists of four literary works. Two of them are written in English by Irish dramatists. These are Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw (1912), and The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (1895). The other two texts are Fate of a Cockroach (1966) by the Arab dramatist Tawfiq Al-Hakim. The second Arabic work is Palace of Desire by Egyptian novelist Najuib Mahfouz (1954). Each text is analyzed to see how sex, power, social distance, and interactive role affect characters’ use of (im)politeness. Following this analysis, a chapter on the discrepancies of the translation of (im)politeness formulas is presented. The aim is to discover whether characters’ (im)politeness utterances in English have the same pragmatic equivalence as the original Arabic texts. It has been found that, especially in the case of invocations; an exact English equivalent often does not exist, thereby causing a loss in meaning and degree of conveying of the politeness or impoliteness utterance. The dissertation concludes that the pragmalinguistic tools – politeness and impoliteness theories as well as Grice’s cooperative principles are useful in explaining the dynamics of characters in literay discourse, and in explaining the interactive role of characters in literary texts. This in turn can leave us with some evidence to the themes tackled by the writers such as presenting the female discourse to be stronger and more out spoken than the male discourse in the four selected texts to reflect on the themes in each text. The thesis also contemplates further areas of research, especially in Arabic literature and media discourse in the Arab world. By keeping this research’s findings in mind, it sheds light on the cultural aspect of language, hopefully drawing the focus away from the mere science of the language.

This thesis describes how the police apologise, primarily through lexical and syntactic analysis of explicit apology language in letters written by the Scottish police. The unique contribution of this thesis is the identification of two distinct speech acts using apology language; one is an act of payment for an evidenced failing and another is an act of validation of another person’s perspective. This thesis suggests that these two acts may have developed in police use of apology language to manage conflicting pressures on the police, such as to be polite to the multiple audiences for their apologies. Discursive approaches to politeness research often focus on immediate recipient responses as evidence that language is evaluated as (im)polite. This approach is not well suited to written language, where the recipient(s) may be at a distance in both time and space. I amend Terkourafi’s (2005) frame-based analysis, taking insights from scholarship on writing, to develop the application of politeness research to written language. I collected letters written by the Scottish police containing their final decision on complaints made about the police by members of the public. The first stage of my analysis, to detail the production of these letters, establishes that evaluation and opportunities for editing take place among the many writers involved in producing the letters; repetition of particular linguistic forms in particular contexts may be taken therefore as a police institutional understanding that such forms are a polite use of language in particular situations. My analysis of the letters identifies first that the police use apology language where they have been acquitted of wrongdoing, in contrast to public perceptions that the police do not apologise. They distinguish in linguistic form between such situations and where there is evidence of failings, leading me to delineate one act of validation of an addressee’s claim to respect and another in ritual payment for an evidenced failing. The form and function distinctions of these acts lead me to suggest that ‘apology’ needs to be reconsidered as a concept, not a single speech act but a cluster of related acts.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Texas at Arlington, 2008.

Thus far, politeness in Old and Middle French and in older languages in general has not been closely examined. This dissertation therefore presents a detailed linguistic analysis of politeness in Medieval French. Relying heavily on data from a wide range of texts from Latin to Middle French, this dissertation discusses several aspects of linguistic politeness that traditionally have been misinterpreted or not considered. First and foremost, the evidence indicates that polite and deferential speech existed from early Latin onward, although its representation could vary from one period to another. The analysis of the linguistic systems of Latin and Medieval French introduces non-pronominal linguistic devices used to express politeness, the role of the pronominal address system in polite speech, and the evolution of the pronominal address system after the emergence of the deferential pronoun vous. Moreover, a diachronic analysis of the data reveals the spread of conventionalized polite and formal language, which was an instrument representing upper class society, to middle class society and the generalization of the polite linguistic devices in Middle French. This observation shows that, paradoxically, in the Classical period, conventional polite language could no longer be associated merely with upper class society. Subsequently, in contrast to the majority of previous studies, it is argued that the alleged inconsistency in the use of the pronominal address system of Old French was not significant and that it in fact followed a regular pattern. As a result, the Old French pronominal address system did not represent an irregular or isolated system, but a system in evolution. Finally, from a sociolinguistic perspective, this study partially supports the theory of a universal view of politeness postulated by Brown and Levinson (1987), because some of polite linguistic devices put forth in their theory (e.g. honorifics, impersonal structures, hedges, etc.) are found in older languages. Yet, this dissertation emphasizes that strategies used to express politeness changed over time, indicating that politeness is culturally defined. / text

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No description available.

The research at hand maintains an emic approach to understanding (im)politeness1 (i.e. in its folk sense) within the meaning making processes involved in Turkish. With the intention of reaching an ethnopragmatic theoretical account of (im)politeness, this study investigates tacit knowledge native speakers of Turkish have on (im)politeness and their related perceptions and evaluations. The thesis explores the cultural-conceptual system of (im)politeness in Turkish utilizing three sources: (a) data from an open-ended metapragmatic conceptualization questionnaire probing Turkish native speakers&rsquo / politeness encounter narratives through seven key metapragmatic politeness terms (i.e. KiBAR, iNCE, NAZiK, D&Uuml / S&Uuml / NCELi, SAYGILI, G&Ouml / RG&Uuml / L&Uuml / , TERBiYELi) and eight key impoliteness terms (i.e. KABA, NEZAKETSiZ, D&Uuml / S&Uuml / NCESiZ, SAYGISIZ, G&Ouml / RG&Uuml / S&Uuml / Z, TERBiYESiZ, PATAVATSIZ, K&Uuml / STAH), and (b) corpus analyses for the lexical items KiBAR and KABA, (c) (im)politeness encounter narrative interviews with native speakers of Turkish. This research study has been designed mainly as an exploration of what Turkish people consider to be (im)polite, how they express they become (im)polite, and how (linguistic) (im)politeness is interpreted by others in everyday communication, as well as how Turkish native speakers evaluate (im)politeness through the key (im)politeness lexemes available in the language, what their &lsquo / bases of evaluation&rsquo / are and what views they hold concerning motivations underlying the want to be (im)polite in Turkish. The qualitative thematic analysis conducted on the questionnaire data yielded six bases of evaluation for (the total of 1211) politeness narratives, and eight bases of evaluation for (the 1306) impoliteness narratives. It was revealed that the bases of evaluation for a polite act in Turkish were primarily &lsquo / attentiveness to other&rsquo / s emotions, needs and goals&rsquo / and abidance by &lsquo / custom&rsquo / , whereas they were &lsquo / (quality) face-attack&rsquo / and &lsquo / (equity) rights violations&rsquo / for impoliteness. The corpus analysis and interview data also corroborated these findings. The quantitative cross-mapping of (im)politeness lexemes to (im)politeness themes suggested biases of lexemes for certain themes and themes for lexemes. The motivational and strategic uses of (im)politeness were related more to egocentric tendencies with politeness being motivated predominantly for self-promotion and image management, and goal attainment, and impoliteness motivated mainly by the desire to establish power and project power on to other, to perform an emotive reaction, to hurt other and to reciprocate others&rsquo / impolite acts to self. The relationship between (im)politeness and the concepts of sincerity, intentionality, historicity, reciprocity and public versus private domain influences are worth pursuing further research on for the Turkish culture. All in all, this study provides Turkish baseline data for later cross-cultural (im)politeness research and suggests that (im)politeness1 (lay) conceptualizations can aid the (scientific) theorizing of (im)politeness2 to a great degree.

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Teaching and learning online has become widespread but for some teachers there are a number of challenges involved.  This study looks at politeness strategies used in teacher-student and student-student interaction, to what extent they are used and what effects these politeness strategies have on the communication as a whole.

I examine the Brown and Levinson (1978) model of politeness. On the assumption that a model of face attention must involve impolite as well as polite interactive behaviour, I construct an analogous model to deal with what I term Face Attack Acts. I show that an extension of a politeness model in this way reveals serious flaws in some hypotheses central to Brown and Levinson's work. I apply the principles of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986)to the extended model, and show how the theory can offer an explanatory account of face attention, on a continuum from polite to impolite. Relevance Theory makes predictions about the interpretation of utterances in context, which explain how the face-oriented aspect of interaction is recovered by hearers. I show that Relevance Theory provides a motivated way of linking utterances with facts about power asymmetries and group-membership which are seen to be recoverable by the interpretive process. I apply the resulting face-attention model of utterance interpretation to examples of the use of language to encode power and communicate assumptions about social behaviour and status. In terms of previous accounts of utterance interpretation, particularly Grice's Cooperative Principle and maxims, the account of face attention which incorporates Relevance Theory has greater explanatory power. In practical terms, this application of Relevance Theory is shown to be illuminating in raising the assumptions underlying non-cooperative communication to a conscious level, at which their validity can be sustained.