Michael Haugh

The importance of "place" in Japanese politeness: Implications for cross-cultural and intercultural analyses

Abstract It has long been the contention of various scholars that Brown and Levinsons notion of face, in particular the concept of personal autonomy associated with negative face, is not appropriate for explaining politeness in Japanese. However, there has been little work on what might constitute a suitable alternative. In this paper, it is proposed that the concept of “place,” which has long occupied an important position in Japanese philosophy and language studies, is fundamental to instances of politeness in Japanese. It is suggested that Japanese politeness involves concern about both the “place one belongs” (inclusion) and the “place one stands” (distinction). Examples are then given to show how the concept of place can be useful in understanding politeness phenomena both cross-culturally and interculturally.

Intention in pragmatics

A significant amount of theorizing in Cognitive-Philosophical pragmatics, or so-called Anglo-American pragmatics, has been premised on the view that communication involves speakers expressing their intentions, and hearers attributing intentions to those speakers. If the intentions attributed by the hearers are roughly the same as those expressed by the speaker, then communication is considered to have been successful. One of the tasks of pragmatics, according to this view, then, is to explicate how exactly the hearer makes these inferences, as well as how speakers and hearers know the ‘‘correct’’ inferences have been made, and so determine what counts as (the speaker’s) meaning. Levinson (2006a, 2006b), for instance, has recently reasserted the centrality of (Gricean) intentions in postulating an ‘‘interaction engine’’ that he argues underpins human interaction.

When is an email really offensive? Argumentativity and variability in evaluations of impoliteness

Abstract The analysis in this paper centres on an email exchange between a lecturer and a student at the University of Auckland which resulted in the dismissal of that lecturer. This dismissal gave rise to significant controversy, both off- and online, as to whether the email itself was simply “intemperate” and “angry”, or more seriously “offensive” and “racist”. Through a close analysis of the interpretations of the emails by the lecturer and student, as well as online evaluations made on blogs and discussion boards, it becomes apparent that the inherent discursivity of evaluations of impoliteness arises not only from different perceptions of norms, but also from the ways in which commentators position themselves vis-à-vis these evaluations. It also emerges that the relative level of discursive dispute is mediated by the technological and situational characteristics of the CMC medium in which these evaluations occurred. It is concluded that research into various forums of online interaction provides a unique window into the inherent variability and argumentativity of perceptions of offensive behaviour, as a public record of discursive disputes surrounding particular alleged violations of norms of appropriateness can be (re)scrutinized in such forums.

Im/Politeness implicatures

This volume brings together two highly researched but also highly controversial concepts, those of politeness and implicature. A theory of implicature as social action and im/politeness as social practice is developed that opens up new ways of examining the relationship between them. It constitutes a fresh look at the issues involved that redresses the current imbalance between social and pragmatic accounts of im/politeness.

Jocular Mockery as Interactional Practice in Everyday Anglo-Australian Conversation

Teasing in everyday interactions, which combines elements of (ostensible) provocation and (ostensible) playfulness in a figurative cutting down or diminishment of a target, has been the subject of a growing body of studies. However, what has arguably not been as well studied to date is the interactional mechanics of the different kinds of social actions through which teasing is accomplished. In this paper, the way in which teasing as mocking/ridiculing can be accomplished within a jocular or non-serious frame, or what is here termed jocular mockery, is examined building on methodological and analytical insights from both interactional pragmatics and corpus-assisted pragmatics. It is argued based on this analysis that jocular mockery constitutes a recognizable and recurrent practice in everyday interactions amongst (Anglo-)Australian speakers of English. A framework for examining the dynamics of jocular mockery within everyday interactions is also proposed.

The discursive negotiation of international student identities

Research about identity has undergone a discursive turn in recent years, with a shift from conceptualising identity as an essentialistic, pre-existing construct that drives social interaction, to a more fluid and hybrid construct that is constituted through discourse. As a result, a number of recent studies investigating the construction of international student identities have supposedly adhered to this latter, postmodernist-inspired notion of identity in their analyses. However, upon closer examination, these studies appear to be premised on the assumption that what international students say can be equated with their identities, without critical attention being paid to the way in which identities emerge as a conjoint construct through interaction. In this paper, it is argued that identities are invariably jointly constructed by participants through discourse, even in interviews and focus groups where the researcher is ostensibly taking a neutral stance, and thus more attention needs to be paid to the ways in which identities are discursively negotiated through interaction.

Disentangling face, facework and im/ politeness

Abstract It is generally assumed in pragmatics that face is essentially a “socially attributed aspect of self”, and that politeness is one kind of facework, alongside other forms of facework such as impoliteness, mock impoliteness, mock politeness, self politeness and so on. In this paper, the assumed necessary link between face and im/politeness is questioned. Drawing from emic studies of face and im/politeness, it is argued that face and im/politeness should be studied, in the first instance, as distinct objects of study in their own right. It is also suggested that drawing from a wider range of emic conceptualisations of face and im/politeness opens up aspects of interpersonal phenomena that have been relatively neglected in pragmatics to date, namely, the importance of relationships as well as the sets of expectancies that underpin evaluations of im/politeness, as distinct areas for theorisation and analysis. It is concluded that while the Goffmanian face(work) paradigm has proven very productive in pragmatics, drawing from various other emic understandings affords further hitherto relatively under-explored analytical opportunities in the study of interpersonal phenomena. Resumen En general, se supone en pragmática que la imagen social es en esencia “un aspecto del yo atribuido socialmente”, y que la cortesía es un tipo de actividad de imagen, junto con otros tipos como la descortesía, la (des)cortesía simulada, la autocortesía y demás. En este trabajo, se cuestiona la asunción de un vínculo necesario entre imagen social y cortesía. A partir de los estudios émicos sobre imagen social y (des)cortesía, se argumenta que la imagen social y la (des)cortesía deben ser estudiadas, en primer lugar, como objetos de estudio distintos por sí mismos. También se sugiere que una base más amplia de nociones émicas sobre la imagen social y la (des)cortesía presenta aspectos sobre fenómenos interpersonales que, hasta la fecha, han sido relativamente desconsiderados en la pragmática, tales como la importancia de las relaciones y los conjuntos de expectativas que sustentan las evaluaciones de (des)cortesía, como áreas diferenciadas para la teorización y el análisis. Se con cluye que, si bien el paradigma goffmaniano de (actividad de)imagen social ha demostrado ser muy productivo en la pragmática, otras consideraciones émicas, hasta ahora relativamente poco exploradas, ofrecen también oportunidades de análisis en el estudio de los fenómenos interpersonales.

Intention(ality) and the conceptualization of communication in pragmatics

It is commonly assumed in (linguistic) pragmatics that communication involves speakers expressing their intentions through verbal and nonverbal means, and recipients recognizing or attributing those attentions to speakers. Upon closer examination of various pragmatic phenomena in discourse, however, it appears the situation is actually much more complex than the standard conceptualization of communication in pragmatics allows. In particular, it is suggested in this paper that the focus on expressing and recognizing/attributing (speaker) intentions underestimates the dynamic nature and complexity of cognition that underpins interaction. The notion of ‘dyadic cognizing’ is thus introduced as a way of reconceptualizing the inferential work that underlies communication. It is suggested that such inferential work is ‘directed’ and thus is inherently ‘intentional’ in the sense proposed by Brentano, but need not necessarily be ‘directed’ towards the ‘intentions’ of speakers.

Intention and diverging interpretings of implicature in the "uncovered meat" sermon

Abstract The standard model of communication in linguistic pragmatics is founded on the assumption that “successful” communication involves the addressee making inferences about the intentions of the speaker. Miscommunication of implicatures thus presumably arises when the addressee does not correctly infer the speakers intention. In this paper, however, it is argued that this view of the (mis)communication of implicatures does not adequately account for the manner in which intentions may become the subject of discursive dispute in interaction thereby giving rise to diverging interpretings of implicatures. Drawing from an analysis of the “uncovered meat” comments made by Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali and the ensuing controversy over what was implied by them, it is argued that to label such an incident as simply a misunderstanding of the speakers intentions is misleading. Instead, it is suggested that the way in which Hilalis comments were shifted from a specific audience in the Muslim community to wider Australian society by the media engendered discursive dispute over Hilalis intentions, and thus gave rise to the co-constitution of diverging interpretings of what was implied by Hilali. Building a model of the communication of implicatures must therefore move beyond the received view that it involves “correctly” inferring the intentions of speakers to encompass a broader view where both converging and diverging interpretings of implicatures emerge through their conjoint co-constitution in interaction.

Evaluations of im/politeness of an intercultural apology

Abstract This study examines variation in evaluations of im/politeness of a recording of a naturally occurring intercultural apology, focusing in particular on potential cultural differences in these evaluations across speakers of (Australian) English and (Mandarin) Chinese. We first closely analyze the apology itself as a form of social action, and suggest in the course of this analysis that evaluations of im/politeness are closely tied to converging and diverging interpretations of actions and meanings that are interactionally achieved in situated discourse. The results of a survey of evaluations of the apology and follow-up interviews with Australian and Taiwanese informants are then discussed. A comparison of ratings of im/politeness of the intercultural apology between Taiwanese and Australians suggests that there are indeed significant differences in evaluations of im/politeness between members of these two cultural backgrounds. We trace this through our analysis of metadiscursive commentary to differences in the ways in which “sincerity” is conceptualized in (Australian) English and Taiwanese Mandarin. In doing so, we propose a firmer empirical basis for the analyst to make inferences about whether the interactional achievement of diverging interpretations of meanings and actions in intercultural discourse is culturally motivated or simply idiosyncratic to the situation or individual participants. We conclude, however, that while evaluations of im/ politeness are indeed influenced by the cultural background of respondents, developing a more fine-grained understanding of cultural influences on evaluations of im/politeness is necessary.