Politeness Markers
Revisited A Contrastive Pragmatic Perspective
Dániel Z. Kádár (Research Institute for Linguistics, MTA / Dalian University of
Foreign Languages)
Juliane House (University of Hamburg / Hellenic American University)
19th May, 2020 14 o'clock
zoom-meeting (details will be announced later)
Abstract
This paper revisits the concept of politeness
marker, by proposing the bottomup and corpus-based model of ritual frame
indicating expressions (RFIEs). Our central argument is that, in certain
linguacultures, the relationship between politeness markers and politeness
itself is significantly stronger than in others. Therefore, any theory which
argues that there is a definite relationship between form and politeness or
totally rejects this relationship is potentially problematic if it does not
take a contrastive pragmatic perspective, simply because this relationship is
subject to linguacultural variation. Thus, the contrastive pragmatic study of
RFIEs helps us to determine the relationship between forms and speech acts and,
indirectly, politeness. As a case study, we examine one-word and more complex
expressions which are commonly associated with the speech acts of request and
apology, drawn from the typologically distant Chinese and English
linguacultures.