e-Σεμινάρια Τομέα Γλωσσολογίας ΕΚΠΑ - Μαρίνα Τερκουράφη (Leiden University)

Τετάρτη 01/06/2022, 19:00, διαδικτυακά

Ο Τομέας Γλωσσολογίας σας προσκαλεί στην ομιλία της Μαρίνας Τερκουράφη (Leiden University) με τίτλο "The strategic/non-strategic binary in im/politeness research". Η ομιλία θα πραγματοποιηθεί την Τετάρτη 01 Ιουνίου 2022 στις 19.00, στον παρακάτω σύνδεσμο:

https://uoa.webex.com/uoa/j.php?MTID=mba3a1ae63ebc078bbc163aabb8aaf5ef

Password: shGayrJt237

Η ομιλία πραγματοποιείται στα πλαίσια των e-σεμιναρίων που διοργανώνονται από τον Τομέα Γλωσσολογίας με τη συνδρομή του Εργαστηρίου Φωνητικής και Υπολογιστικής Γλωσσολογίας. Το πρόγραμμα όλων των ομιλιών (Μάρτιος – Ιούνιος 2022) βρίσκεται στον σύνδεσμο http://www.phil.uoa.gr/tomeis/tomeas-glwssologias/seminaria.html

Περίληψη

Some thirty years ago, Kasper (1990) highlighted the tension between strategic and non-strategic politeness as a "current issue" in politeness research. First identified in Ide's (1989) distinction between discernment and volition, this tension was also presaged in Brown & Levinson's (1987) noting of uses of politeness as a social accelerator or break as different from the normal (expectation-matching) uses of their strategies. A similar intuition underlies Leech's (2014) distinction between bivalent and trivalent politeness. Despite this early attention, this distinction has not been given the centrality it arguably deserves in more recent im/politeness work.

I explore the potential of the strategic/non-strategic distinction to shed light on a wide range of im/politeness phenomena and to link im/politeness with recent developments in pragmatics more generally. Starting with empirical aspects that align with this distinction, I show that these aspects concern not only the expressions used (frequent vs. less frequent, conventionalized vs. non-conventionalized) but also the inerlocutors themselves and how they are perceived by others (native vs. non-native, ). This in turn ushers in differences between the role of the hearer vs. the speaker in im/politeness assessments, i.e. the production vs. perception of im/politeness. A related distinction is that between politeness for the sake of the Other (a matter of calculation) vs. for the sake of the Self (a matter of self-presentation). But perhaps the most exciting parallel is with the notions of first-order polite speaker (S1) and higher-order polite speaker (S2) in Rational Speech Act models (Yoon & Tessler 2020), depending on the degree to which the speaker reasons not just about their own goals but also about what the hearer thinks of them. Considering these distinctions as facets of the strategic/non-strategic continuum helps us find points of contact between theoretical approaches that have developed largely independently of each other, thereby re-instating im/politeness as a driver of pragmatics research.

References

Brown, P. & Levinson, S.C. (1987). Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ide, S. (1989). Formal forms and discernment: Two neglected aspects of universals of linguistic politeness. Multilingua 8, 223–248.

Kasper, K. (1990). Linguistic politeness: Current research issues. Journal of Pragmatics 14:2, 193–218.

Leech, G. (2014). The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Yoon, E. J., Tessler, M. H., Goodman, N. D., & Frank, M. C. (2020). Polite speech emerges from competing social goals. Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science 4, 71–87.

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