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.

The use of the expectation marker actually in spoken conversation is an interesting topic. This study investigates the different functions of actually and the importance of context in eight spoken conversations from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. The chosen conversations are different when it comes to social factors like the participants’ age or gender. The interactions are studied using Karin Aijmer’s suggested functions of actually. Aijmer divides the expectation marker into two major functions: contrastive and emphatic. Basically, the contrastive actually functions as an opposition between points of views, and the empathic actually is used to justify or explain an earlier statement. The method used for the study is of a qualitative character as I study the interactions thoroughly both by listening to the conversations as well as studying the available transcript versions of the interactions. Overall, the study shows that emphatic actually is most common in the data used, and it is mainly used to explain or justify something or as a marker of a participant’s style of speech. In other words, actually is more often used as a way to underline an utterance rather than to correct or make a contrast to another participant’s statement. Actually is often used as a marker of style, a way for a speaker to signal or mark a specific style of speech. All of the conversations are taken from everyday life and should therefore be considered unprepared. When it comes to context it seems as if actually is more frequently used in conversations between participants close in age and who are involved in a closer sort of relationship, for example cousins or a couple in a love relationship. As for gender, actually is used by both women and by men.

Thesis (D.Phil.)--University of Oxford, 2007. / BLDSC reference no.: D240571/08. Supervisor: Professor Timothy Williamson. Bibliography: leaves 209-215.

Thesis--Gothenburg. Extra t.p. with thesis statement inserted. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 243-246) and index.

Thesis (M.Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-76) Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Psychology, December 1999. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1999. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-62).

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 29, 1994." Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: Dale A. Koike. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

abstract: Extensive cross-linguistic data document a wide gamut of semantic and pragmatic uses of the diminutive that revolve around the fundamental concepts of `small' and `child'. As typical inventory of informal registers, diminutives are utilized as pragmatic markers of politeness in a wide range of contextual meanings. This dissertation is intended to fill some major gaps in the systematic and empirical research on the formation and pragmatic uses of the diminutives in Macedonian and to explore the role of diminutivization in a broader linguistic framework, by examining the consistency of the field of diminutives, the core and peripheral meanings of the diminutive, their typology, as well as their pragmatic potential. The morphology and pragmatics of the diminutive is examined by combining data from electronic and printed sources, video recordings of natural conversations, as well as from material collected from participant and non-participant observations. At the level of morphology, it is argued that three fundamental semantic constraints underlie the formation of diminutives: [-big], [+ emotional], and [+ informal]. Furthermore, it is shown how diminutive combinability is rule governed in Macedonian by proposing sets of formal constraints for all grades of diminutives. At the level of pragmatics, the pragmatic functions of the diminutives proper and the related periphrastic diminutive malku are investigated in a variety of contexts involving child-directed speech (CDS) and adult communication. By analyzing the pragmatic functions of the diminutive in a series of speech acts, and drawing upon cross-cultural interpretations suggested by Wierzbicka (1991), it is argued that, in Macedonian, social bonding, cordiality, intimacy or affection are pragmatically more salient than personal autonomy in the Anglo-Saxon societies, realized through non-imposition, tentativeness, or similar pragmatic strategies for saving face. Additionally, it is contended that there exist cultural differences in the assessment of the concept of imposition between these societies. The analyses of the pragmatic potential of the diminutive proper and the periphrastic diminutive 'malku' give rise to the claim that Macedonian culture is predominantly founded on the pragmatic principle of positive politeness. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2012