On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures
This book investigates how speakers of English, Polish and Russian deal with offensive situations. It reveals culture-specific perceptions of what counts as an apology and what constitutes politeness. It offers a critical discussion of Brown and Levinson's theory and provides counterevidence to the correlation between indirectness and politeness underlying their theory. Their theory is applied to two languages that rely less heavily on indirectness in conveying politeness than does English, and to a speech act that does not become more polite through indirectness.
The second edition of this collection of 13 original papers contains an updated introductory section detailing the significance that the original articles published in 1992 have for the further development of research into linguistic politeness into the 21st century. The original articles focus on the phenomenon of politeness in language. They present the most important problems in developing a theory of linguistic politeness
Politeness and Face in Caribbean Creoles is the first collection to focus on socio-pragmatic issues in the Caribbean context, including the socio-cultural rules and principles underlying strategic language use. While the Caribbean has long been recognized as a rich and interesting site where cultural continuities meet with new "creolized" or innovative practices, questions of politeness practices, constructions of personhood, or the notion of face have so far been neglected in linguistic research on Caribbean Creoles.
The book quickly makes it clear that there is no such thing as European politeness. In fact, although the book is organized by regions (Western Europe, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe), the editors themselves point out that this grouping was chosen more for convenience than for identification, and that a number of other classifications might have been possible. Indeed, it is impossible to generalize about Scandinavian politeness or Western European politeness or Southern European politeness. A Dane, it turns out, will prefer to get to the point, whereas a Finn will favor evasion at all costs. As far as politeness is concerned, an Estonian has more in common with a Finn than with a Pole, despite having a closer physical proximity.
Special dedication to all Contributors and shoutbox regulars: dealing constantly with various multi-cultural problems with understanding and politeness! Thank you all!
This collection of 19 articles comes out of the 1999 International Symposium of Linguistic Politeness, held in Bangkok, Thailand. The contributions span a wide geographical and linguistic array, ranging all the way from Ireland and England over Sweden to China and Japan, from Australia over Thailand to Greece and Spain. Also, the languages represented are quite untypical for studies in this field: more than half of the contributions (even if not counting the three plenaries) stem from people working in such fields as Chinese, Japanese or Thai.
