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8 - The Metapragmatics of Consideration in (Australian and New Zealand) English

from Part II - Concepts and Cultural Norms Underlying Politeness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2019

By
Michael Haugh
Edited by
Eva Ogiermann  and
Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
Eva Ogiermann
Affiliation:
King's College London
Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Charlotte
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Summary

Haugh’s chapter aims to further understandings of the metapragmatics of consideration by Australian and New Zealand English speakers. He examines what the term considerate is taken to mean, and the broader semantic field in which it is constituted. To tease out the metapragmatics of consideration, both quantitative, corpus-based and qualitative, interactional methods are used, laying the groundwork for a comparative study of evaluations of (in)consideration among Australian and New Zealand speakers of English in praising and criticising in online settings. The findings show that concepts are constituted within complex semantic fields; studying them in isolation risks a reductive understanding. Participants invoked different senses of an evaluative concept to varying degrees of granularity, degrees which must be taken into account in metapragmatic analysis. Shared commonalities in speakers’ conceptualisations of consideration do not preclude systematic differential tendencies emerging across groups of speakers. Haugh’s analysis shows the importance of systematic metapragmatic studies of the various emic concepts that underpin evaluations of im/politeness in different settings.

Keywords

First-order politeness
Type
Chapter
Information
From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness
Multilingual and Multicultural Perspectives
 , pp. 201 - 225
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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