Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T02:48:01.177Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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
Get access

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Brown, P. (2001). Politeness and language. In Smelser, N. and Baltes, P., eds, International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier Science, pp. 11620–4.Google Scholar
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. (1987[1978]). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chang, W. and Fukushima, S. (2017). ‘Your care and concern are my burden’: accounting for the emic concepts of ‘attentiveness’ and ‘empathy’ in interpersonal relationships among Taiwanese females. East Asian Pragmatics 2(1), 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, J. (2009). The metalanguage of IMPOLITENESS: using Sketch Engine to explore the Oxford English Corpus. In Baker, P., ed., Contemporary Corpus Linguistics. London: Continuum, pp. 66–88.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, M. (2015). Introducing the 1.9 billion word Global Web-based English Corpus (GloWbE). 21st Century Text 5. Available at https://21centurytext.wordpress.com/.Google Scholar
Eelen, G. (2001). A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester: St Jerome.Google Scholar
Fellbaum, C. (2006). WordNet(s). In Brown, K., ed., Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 665–70.Google Scholar
Fukushima, S. (2009). Evaluation of politeness: do the Japanese evaluate attentiveness more positively than the British? Pragmatics 19(4), 501–18.Google Scholar
Fukushima, S. (2011). A cross-generational and cross-cultural study on demonstration of attentiveness. Pragmatics 21(4), 549–71.Google Scholar
Fukushima, S. (2016). Emic understandings of attentiveness and its related concepts among Japanese. East Asian Pragmatics 1(2), 181–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fukushima, S. and Haugh, M. (2014). The role of emic understandings in theorizing im/politeness: the metapragmatics of attentiveness, empathy and anticipatory inference in Japanese and Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics 74, 165–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gardner, R. (1997). The conversational object mm: a weak and variable acknowledging token. Research on Language and Social Interaction 30(2), 131–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garfinkel, H. (1956). Conditions of successful degradation ceremonies. American Journal of Sociology 61(5), 420–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haugh, M. (2013). Im/politeness, social practice and the participation order. Journal of Pragmatics 58, 52–72.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. (2015). Im/politeness Implicatures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haugh, M. (2016). The role of English as a scientific metalanguage for research in pragmatics: reflections on the metapragmatics of ‘politeness’ in Japanese. East Asian Pragmatics 1(1), 39–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, J. (1995). Women, Men and Politeness. New York, NY: Longman.Google Scholar
Horn, L. (2009). WJ-40: Implicature, truth, and meaning. International Review of Pragmatics 1(1), 3–34.Google Scholar
Hübler, A. and Bublitz, W. (2007). Introducing metapragmatics in use. In Bublitz, W. and Hübler, A., eds, Metapragmatics in Use. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 1–26.Google Scholar
Ide, S., Hill, B., Carnes, Y. M., Ogino, T., and Kawasaki, A. (1992). The concept of politeness: an empirical study of American English and Japanese. In Watts, R. J.Ide, S., and Ehlich, K., eds, Politeness in Language. Studies in its History, Theory and Practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 281–97.Google Scholar
Jakubíček, M., Kilgarriff, A., Kovář, V., Rychly, P., and Suchomel, V. (2013). The TenTen corpus family. 7th International Corpus Linguistics Conference (UCREL), Lancaster University, 22–26 July.Google Scholar
Kádár, D. Z. and Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kasper, G. 1994. Politeness. In Asher, R., ed., Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon, pp. 3206–11.Google Scholar
Kilgarriff, A., Rychly, P., Smrz, P., and Tugwell, D. (2004). The Sketch Engine. In Williams, G. and Vessier, S., eds, Proceedings of the EURALEX Conference, Lorient (France). Lorient: Université de Bretagne Sud, pp. 105–16.Google Scholar
Lebra, T. S. (1976). Japanese Patterns of Behavior. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lin, D. (1998). Automatic retrieval and clustering of similar words. In International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Association for Computational Linguistics (COLING-ACL), Montreal (Canada), pp. 768–74.Google Scholar
Maynard, D. (2013). Defensive mechanisms: I-mean-prefaced utterances in complaint and other conversational sequences. In Hayashi, M., Raymond, G., and Sidnell, J., eds, Conversational Repair and Human Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 198–233.Google Scholar
Mills, S. (2003). Gender and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mills, S. (2009). Impoliteness in a cultural context. Journal of Pragmatics 41(5), 1047–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mullan, K. (2010). Expressing Opinions in French and Australian English Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Obana, Y. and Tomoda, T. (1994). The sociological significance of ‘politeness’ in English and Japanese languages: report from a pilot study. Japanese Studies Bulletin 14(2), 37–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ogiermann, E. (2015). Direct off-record requests? ‘Hinting’ in family interactions. Journal of Pragmatics 86, 31–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pizziconi, B. (2007). The lexical mapping of politeness in British English and Japanese. Journal of Politeness Research 3(2), 207–41.Google Scholar
Ruhi, Ş. and Işık-Güler, H. (2007). Conceptualizing face and relational work in (im)politeness: revelations from politeness lexemes and idioms in Turkish. Journal of Pragmatics 39(4), 681–711.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sifianou, M. (1992). Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sifianou, M. (1993). Off-record indirectness and the notion of imposition. Multilingua 12(1), 69–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sifianou, M. (1997). Politeness and off-record indirectness. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 126, 163–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sifianou, M. (2011). On the concept of face and politeness. In Bargiela-Chiappini, F. and Kádár, D. Z., eds, Politeness across Cultures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 42–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sifianou, M. (2015). Conceptualizing politeness in Greek: evidence from Twitter corpora. Journal of Pragmatics 86, 25–30.Google Scholar
Sifianou, M. and Tzanne, A. (2010). Conceptualizations of politeness and impoliteness in Greek. Intercultural Pragmatics 7(4), 661–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Travis, C. (1997). Kind, considerate, thoughtful: a semantic analysis. Lexikos, 7, 130–52.Google Scholar
Trier, J. (1931). Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes: Die Geschichte eines sprachlichen Feldes: Vol. 1. Von den Anfängen bis zum Beginn des 13. Jahrhunderts. Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar
Ullmann, S. (1962). Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Verschueren, J. (2000). Notes on the role of metapragmatic awareness in language use. Pragmatics 10(4), 439–56.Google Scholar
Vine, B. and Marsden, S. (2016). Eh at work: the indexicality of a New Zealand English pragmatic marker. Intercultural Pragmatics 13(3), 383–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watts, R. J. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×