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Pragmatic and Cross-Cultural Competences

Focus on Politeness

by Thomas Szende (Volume editor) George Alao (Volume editor)
©2019 Edited Collection 290 Pages

Summary

The L2 speaker is able to function in the target culture only when s/he is able to understand, anticipate and produce the choices that the said society makes. Being polite therefore means: knowing how to draw on the conventions of a society, taking into account the expectations of an interlocutor regarding social relations at any given point, and is based on the appropriate language register to the communication situation; being able to balance standard and non-standard features and to adjust one’s speech by moving it towards more or less familiarity, or formality. The learner therefore needs to be aware of the pragmatic flexibility of speakers – native and experts – who move from one register to another and juggle between respect and caution, first degree meaning and irony, exuberance and excess, with difference in levels, nature and degrees of politeness.
 
This volume contains contributions whose theoretical reflections, field work experiences and authentic data from diverse African, Asian and European languages, literatures and cultures as well as a variety of corpora shed new light on politeness as a central phenomenon in pragmatics, and on what is at stake when teaching or learning the subject. It also opens up a conceptual dialogue with a whole range of domains likely to enrich the debate: sociolinguistics, literature, translation studies, semiotics, cultural anthropology, social psychology, etc.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Table of contents
  • Introduction (Thomas Szende / George Alao)
  • Chapter I: Meta-pragmatic awareness and agency in language learners’ constructions of politeness (Anthony J. Liddicoat / Troy McConachy)
  • Chapter II: The topos of polite behaviour. Exploring thematic, narrative and discursive structures of a lexical field (Peter Stockinger)
  • Chapter III: Impoliteness as a part of pragmatic competence in L2 (Istvan Kecskes)
  • Chapter IV: When politeness is in the detail: the case of an imperative in Russian (Hélène de Penanros)
  • Chapter V: Teaching fictive kinship terms in Chinese as a Foreign Language (Junji Gong & Joël Bellassen)
  • Chapter VI: Expressing politeness with discourse particles in Myanmar language (San San Hnin Tun)
  • Chapter VII: Politeness and terms of address and reference in French and Yorùbá (Festus A. Soyoye)
  • Chapter VIII: Expression of politeness in Korean as a foreign language: diversity of linguistic means and order of acquisition (Jin-Ok Kim)
  • Chapter IX: Modelling a new approach to researching and teaching politeness in Vietnamese as an L2 (Viet Anh Nguyen)
  • Chapter X: Politeness and pragmatic competence in teaching Hungarian as a Second Language: successes and pitfalls (Orsolya Maróti)
  • Chapter XI: Should impoliteness be taught? (Marijana Petrović)
  • Chapter XII: L2 socialization, construction of bilingual pragmatic competence and the Persian politeness system “ta’ârof” (Shima Moallemi)
  • Chapter XIII: A contrastive analysis of politeness strategies in West African Francophone and Igbo commercial interactions (Festus A. Soyoye / Tajudeen A. Osunniran / Joy C. Nnabuife)
  • Chapter XIV: Critical thinking, cognitive presence and social languages in an LMOOC (Christelle Hoppe)
  • Chapter XV: Politeness or buzitú (“respect”) in Kikoongo (Laari) (Elise Solange Bagamboula)
  • Contributors

Thomas Szende and George Alao

Pragmatic and Cross-Cultural
Competences

Focus on Politeness

This publication has been peer reviewed.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photocopy,
microfilm or any other means, without prior written permission from the
publisher. All rights reserved.

© P.I.E. PETER LANG s.a.

International Academic Publishers

Brussels, 2019

1 avenue Maurice, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium

Brussels@peterlang.com; www.peterlang.com

ISBN 978-2-8076-0747-7

ePDF 978-2-8076-0748-4

ePUB 978-2-8076-0749-1

MOBI 978-2-8076-0750-7

DOI 10.3726/b15836

D/2019/5678/26

Bibliographic information published by “Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek”.

“Die Deutsche National Bibliothek” lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at
<http://dnb.de>.

About the author

Thomas Szende is Professor of Hungarian and Applied Linguistics at INALCO (Paris) and Director of the EA 4514 PLIDAM Research Centre. His academic interests focus on Second Language Acquisition as well as Hungarian grammar, bilingual lexicography, and translation. He has published several books including Second Culture Teaching and Learning, Peter Lang, 2014; The Foreign Language Appropriation Conundrum: Micro Realities & Dynamics. P.I.E-Peter Lang, 2016.

George Alao is Associate Professor of Yorùbá, and Language and Culture Pedagogy at INALCO), where he is Deputy-Director of the research team EA 4514 PLIDAM and co-convenes its Axis 1 (Language policies, multilingualism and representations). Keenly interested in all aspects of Language Teaching and Learning including the Pedagogy of African Languages, he has authored or participated in many books including Journey into Yorùbá language and culture, EAC, 2014 and Dispositifs éducatifs en contexte mondalisé et didactique plurilingue et pluriculturelle, Peter Lang, 2014.

About the book

The L2 speaker is able to function in the target culture only when s/he is able to understand, anticipate and produce the choices that the said society makes. Being polite therefore means: knowing how to draw on the conventions of a society, taking into account the expectations of an interlocutor regarding social relations at any given point, and is based on the appropriate language register to the communication situation; being able to balance standard and non-standard features and to adjust one’s speech by moving it towards more or less familiarity, or formality. The learner therefore needs to be aware of the pragmatic flexibility of speakers – native and experts – who move from one register to another and juggle between respect and caution, first degree meaning and irony, exuberance and excess, with difference in levels, nature and degrees of politeness.

This volume contains contributions whose theoretical reflections, field work experiences and authentic data from diverse African, Asian and European languages, literatures and cultures as well as a variety of corpora shed new light on politeness as a central phenomenon in pragmatics, and on what is at stake when teaching or learning the subject. It also opens up a conceptual dialogue with a whole range of domains likely to enrich the debate: sociolinguistics, literature, translation studies, semiotics, cultural anthropology, social psychology, etc.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Table of contents

Introduction

Thomas Szende & George Alao

Chapter I: Meta-pragmatic awareness and agency in language learners’ constructions of politeness

Anthony J. Liddicoat & Troy McConachy

Chapter II: The topos of polite behaviour. Exploring thematic, narrative and discursive structures of a lexical field

Peter Stockinger

Chapter III: Impoliteness as a part of pragmatic competence in L2

Istvan Kecskes

Chapter IV: When politeness is in the detail: the case of an imperative in Russian

Hélène de Penanros

Chapter V: Teaching fictive kinship terms in Chinese as a Foreign Language

Junji Gong & Joël Bellassen

Chapter VI: Expressing politeness with discourse particles in Myanmar language

San San Hnin Tun

Chapter VII: Politeness and terms of address and reference in French and Yorùbá

Festus A. Soyoye

Chapter VIII: Expression of politeness in Korean as a foreign language: diversity of linguistic means and order of acquisition

Jin-Ok Kim

Chapter IX: Modelling a new approach to researching and teaching politeness in Vietnamese as an L2

Viet Anh Nguyen←1 | 2→

Chapter X: Politeness and pragmatic competence in teaching Hungarian as a Second Language: successes and pitfalls

Orsolya Maróti

Chapter XI: Should impoliteness be taught?

Marijana Petrović

Chapter XII: L2 socialization, construction of bilingual pragmatic competence and the Persian politeness system “ta’ârof”

Shima Moallemi

Chapter XIII: A contrastive analysis of politeness strategies in West African Francophone and Igbo commercial interactions

Festus A. Soyoye, Tajudeen A. Osunniran & Joy C. Nnabuife

Chapter XIV: Critical thinking, cognitive presence and social languages in an LMOOC

Christelle Hoppe

Chapter XV: Politeness or buzitú (“respect”) in Kikoongo (Laari)

Elise Solange Bagamboula

Contributors←2 | 3→

Introduction

Thomas Szende & George Alao

EA 4514 PLIDAM, INALCO

(Université Sorbonne Paris Cité), France

A broad range of objectives requires that interest be shown for effective language use and for the immediate and wider context in which different elements come into play. Among these are: learning to communicate in a linguistically and culturally appropriate manner in a foreign language; knowing how to accomplish tasks in real-situation interactions; producing a discourse that is both authentic and coherent; effectively decoding one’s interlocutor’s discourse including their jokes and implicit meanings; interpreting the symbolic universe; anticipating the Other’s representations and conventions by linking them to one’s own referential system, etc. They all fall within the definition retained for “pragmatics” in this collection of essays, to wit: “study of language use in context from the point of view of speakers who use utterances (and non-verbal signals) to express communicative action at the discourse level, and how these utterances are interpreted by hearers” (Félix-Brasdefer & Koike, 2012: 25). Our main hypothesis is that pragmatic and cross-cultural competences, whether in L1 or L2 (Leech, 1983; Leech, 2014; Taguchi & Kim, 2014) are based on the close relationship between ‘pragma-linguistics’ (linguistic resources needed to perform language functions) and ‘socio-pragmatics’ (language user’s assessment of the context in which such resources are put into use).

A set of complex issues is being dealt with here: correctly apprehending the nature of a communicative situation, expressing oneself and reacting in an appropriate and coherent manner, understanding the intention of the interlocutor, interpreting presuppositions, choosing and identifying discursive strategies, respecting textual structures and socio-linguistic protocols, anticipating, regulating and organizing exchanges, identifying and articulating events originating from the target culture with its experiences, knowing how to indicate or compensate for one’s phonetic, lexical, grammatical inadequacies…

All language teachers know that acquiring a language is more than a simple task of assembling words in grammatically accurate sentences. Language education needs to play a leading role in the development of students’ cross-cultural communicative competence, i.e., combining language skills with the←3 | 4→ knowledge and attitudes that help them to become intercultural citizens, be able to think and act critically, and to negotiate the complexities of today’s world (Byram & Wagner, 2018).

Two of the problems that face the field of intercultural education are not only the multiplicity of ways of understanding the basic concepts that it addresses but also the diversity of terms used to name the field: intercultural, multicultural, cross-cultural, transcultural, etc. (Dervin & Liddicoat, 2013). And, as Kramsch (2010) has affirmed, some of the major facets of human interaction that cross-cultural communication has helped to define are: the socially conventionalised roles adopted by participants, their expected norms of interaction and interpretation, their non-verbal and para-verbal behaviour, the way they save their own and each other’s face, the way they structure their discourse to meet their communicative goals, the way members of different groups realise various speech acts (like making compliments, requests or apologies, in other words, politeness).

Koike (1989: 279) suggests that it is “the speaker’s knowledge and use of rules of appropriateness and politeness which dictate the way the speaker will understand and formulate speech acts”, and LoCastro (2012: 307) affirms that it is “knowledge that influences and constrains speakers’ choices regarding use of language in socially appropriate ways”. The practice of the most elementary speech acts is inseparable from politeness which means saying things without losing face (Goffman, 1967) and without threatening the other, while reducing the risk of confrontation. It consists of “minimising both one’s own merits and the other’s mistakes” (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2000: 27).

Details

Pages
290
Year
2019
ISBN (PDF)
9782807607484
ISBN (ePUB)
9782807607491
ISBN (MOBI)
9782807607507
ISBN (Hardcover)
9782807607477
DOI
10.3726/b15836
Language
English
Publication date
2019 (June)
Published
Bruxelles, Bern, Berlin, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2019. 284 p., 9 ill. b/w, 33 tab. b/w

Biographical notes

Thomas Szende (Volume editor) George Alao (Volume editor)

Thomas Szende is Professor of Hungarian and Applied Linguistics at INALCO (Paris) and Director of the EA 4514 PLIDAM Research Centre. His academic interests focus on Second Language Acquisition as well as Hungarian grammar, bilingual lexicography, and translation. He has published several books including Second Culture Teaching and Learning, Peter Lang, 2014; The Foreign Language Appropriation Conundrum: Micro Realities & Dynamics. P.I.E-Peter Lang, 2016.   George Alao is Associate Professor of Yorùbá, and Language and Culture Pedagogy at INALCO), where he is Deputy-Director of the research team EA 4514 PLIDAM and co-convenes its Axis 1 (Language policies, multilingualism and representations). Keenly interested in all aspects of Language Teaching and Learning including the Pedagogy of African Languages, he has authored or participated in many books including Journey into Yorùbá language and culture, EAC, 2014 and Dispositifs éducatifs en contexte mondalisé et didactique plurilingue et pluriculturelle, Peter Lang, 2014.

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