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-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T16:27:47.205Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Notions of Politeness in Britain and North America

from Part II - Concepts and Cultural Norms Underlying Politeness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2019

By
Jonathan Culpeper ,
Jim O’Driscoll  and
Claire Hardaker
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

Culpeper, O’Driscoll and Hardaker’s chapter probes into British people’s understandings of politeness and contrasts them with the understandings of people in North America. Such overarching generalisations, the authors argue, are commonly found in lay persons’ assessments of politeness and thus constitute fertile ground for studies of metapragmatic politeness. Furthermore, the results of a survey of studies focusing on either British culture or North American culture as reified entities indicated a scarcity of emic studies of these cultures in the field of politeness. The authors’ study aims to fill this gap. To that end, they apply corpus linguistic tools to the Oxford English Corpus and subject to scrutiny the lexeme ‘polite’ and the associated clusters of collocates. The results are then triangulated with geolocated Twitter data. Findings partly support both the British and the North American politeness stereotypes, but also show that, contrary to expectations, friendliness and involvement are an important feature of understandings of politeness in both the UK and the USA.

Keywords

Metapragmatic politeness
Type
Chapter
Information
From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness
Multilingual and Multicultural Perspectives
 , pp. 175 - 200
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

Allan, K. (2015). A benchmark for politeness. In Capone, A. and Mey, J. L., eds, Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society. Cham: Springer, pp. 397–420.Google Scholar
Anthony, L. and Hardaker, C. (2016). Applications of FireAnt in Forensic (Corpus) Linguistics: Identifying Angels on Ashley Madison. Invited lecture given at UCREL corpus research group, Lancaster University.Google Scholar
Bargiela-Chiappini, F. and Haugh, M., eds (2009). Face, Communication and Social Interaction. London: Equinox.Google Scholar
Bargiela-Chiappini, F. and Kádár, D. Z., eds (2011). Politeness across Cultures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, S. (1987). Indirectness and politeness in requests: same or different? Journal of Pragmatics 11, 131–46.Google Scholar
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bryson, A. (1998). From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cameron, D. (2007). Redefining rudeness: from polite social intercourse to ‘good communication’. In Gorji, M., ed., Rude Britannia. London and New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 127–38.Google Scholar
Cohen, R. (1987). Problems of intercultural communication in Egyptian-American diplomatic relations. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 11, 29–47.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. and Archer, D. (2008). Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings and play texts, 1640–1760. In Jucker, A. H. and Taavitsainen, I., eds, Speech Acts in the History of English, 2nd Edn, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 45–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, J. and Demmen, J. (2011). Nineteenth-century English politeness: negative politeness, conventional indirect requests and the rise of the individual self. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12(1–2), 49–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eelen, G. (2001). A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester: St Jerome.Google Scholar
Ehlich, K. (1992). On the historicity of politeness. 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. 71–107.Google Scholar
Fox, K. (2004). Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. London: Hodder & Stoughton.Google Scholar
Gablasova, D., Brezina, V., and McEnery, T. (2017). Collocations in corpus-based learning research: identifying, comparing, and interpreting the evidence. Language Learning 67: 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grainger, K. and Mills, S. (2016). Directness and Indirectness Across Cultures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Hickey, L. and Stewart, M., eds (2005). Politeness in Europe. Avon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Jaworski, A., Coupland, N., and Galasiński, D. (2004). Metalanguage: why now? In Jaworski, A., Coupland, N., and Galasiński, D., eds, Metalanguage: Social and Ideological Perspectives, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 3–8.Google Scholar
Jucker, A. H., Taavitsainen, I., and Schneider, G. (2012). Semantic corpus trawling: expressions of ‘courtesy’ and ‘politeness’ in the Helsinki Corpus. In Suhr, C. and Taavitsainen, I., eds, Developing Corpus Methodology for Historical Pragmatics. Helsinki: Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English. Available at www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/11/jucker_taavitsainen_schneider/.Google Scholar
Kádár, D. Z. (2007). On the interactional interpretation of deferential and rude vocatives in vernacular Chinese texts. Asian and African Studies, Special Issue: Languages and Realities of China and Japan 12(3), 1–20.Google Scholar
Kádár, D. Z. and Mills, S. (2011) Politeness in East Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kilgarriff, A. and Rundell, M. (2003). Lexical profiling software and its lexicographic applications: a case study. In Braasch, A. and Povlsen, C., eds, Proceedings of the Tenth EURALEX International Congress, EURALEX 2002. Copenhagen: Center for Sprogteknologi, pp. 807–18.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
Kilgarriff, A. and Tugwell, D. (2001). WORD SKETCH: extraction and display of significant collocations for lexicography. Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on COLLOCATION: Computational Extraction, Analysis and Exploitation, Toulouse (France). Toulouse: ACL, pp. 32–8.Google Scholar
Krek, S. and Kilgarriff, A. (2006). Slovene word sketches. Proceedings of the 5th Solvenian/First International Languages Technology Conference, Ljubljana (Slovenia). Available at http://nl.ijs.si/is-ltc06/proc/12_Krek.pdf.Google Scholar
Lakoff, R. T. (1973). The logic of politeness, or minding your p’s and q’s. Chicago Linguistics Society 9, 292–305.Google Scholar
Lakoff, R. T. (2005). Civility and its discontents: or, getting in your face. In Lakoff, R. T. and Ide, S., eds, Broadening the Horizon of Linguistic Politeness, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 23–43.Google Scholar
Leech, G. N. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.Google 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
O’Driscoll, J. (2017). Face and (im)politeness. In Culpeper, J., Haugh, M., and Kádár, D. Z., eds, The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 89–118.Google Scholar
Pinto, D. (2011). Are Americans insincere? Interactional style and politeness in everyday America. Journal of Politeness Research 7(2), 215–38.Google Scholar
Ronowicz, E. and Yallop, C. (2003). English: One Language, Different Cultures. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Sifianou, M. (1992). Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Sifianou, M. (1993). Off-record indirectness and the notion of imposition. Multilingua 12(1), 69–79.Google Scholar
Sifianou, M. (2001). ‘Oh! How appropriate!’ Compliments and politeness. In Bayraktaroğlu, A. and Sifianou, Maria, eds, Linguistic Politeness Across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 391–427.Google 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.Google Scholar
Sifianou, M. (2012). Disagreements, face and politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 44(12), 1554–64.Google Scholar
Sifianou, M. (2013). The impact of globalisation on politeness and impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 55, 86–102.Google 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
Taylor, C. (2015a). Beyond sarcasm: the metalanguage and structures of mock politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 87, 127–41.Google Scholar
Taylor, C. (2015b). Mock Politeness in English and Italian: A Corpus-Assisted Study of the Metalanguage of Sarcasm and Irony. Unpublished PhD thesis, Lancaster University.Google Scholar
Waters, S. (2012). ‘It’s rude to VP’: the cultural semantics of rudeness. Journal of Pragmatics 44(9), 1051–62.Google Scholar
Watts, R. J. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Watts, R. J., Ide, S., and Ehlich, K., eds (1992). Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory and Practice, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, A. (2006). English: Meaning and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@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
×