THE FIRST STEPS TOWARDS THE FIRST-ORDER POLITENESS RESEARCH IN UDMURT

Abstract

The research is the continuation of my dissertation written at the Department of the Finno-Ugrian Philology of the University of Szeged. However, in this research I do not analyse politeness on my own like I did in my dissertation, as I include answers of native speakers of the language. They express their own ideas about the different answers I got during my PhD research. This study is based on interviews conducted with 10 native speakers of the Udmurt language. These speakers not only represent different age groups but they have different backgrounds as well: I included speakers of the southern and the northern dialects of the language, there are students and teachers of the Udmurt State University and there are two speakers who had been living abroad for at least two years at the time of recording. There were three main exercises to complete during the interview: in the first one they had to express their opinions about answers that I had acquired earlier in different politeness situations, in the second one they had to group answers based on which ones can belong to the same speaker and in the last one I showed them the correct groups of answers and they had to identify the age, the gender, the dialect and the place of origin of the speaker. Their answers can be really helpful to support my previous results or to open a new perspective in the research because, as native speakers, they are able to understand small differences that could be easily skimmed over by non-native speakers. This research has two main parts. In the first part the native speakers express their ideas about answers in given situations and in the second part they try to identify the age, the gender, the dialect and the place of origin of the speakers based on their answers. In the first part the answers usually matched with each other but the interpretation of the Udmurt second past in this situation led to the biggest contradiction in this research. Some of the speakers (as I expected) said that it makes the sentence more polite, but there were some speakers who felt exactly the opposite way about it because in their interpretation it means that the speaker used this tense to avoid responsibility. From the second part it draws out clearly, that there is no age, gender, dialectal or geographical group of speakers who could be easily identified by the given answers and the speakers mainly, but not exclusively, used stereotypes for identification. The result of this is that the answers were about as accurate as taking a blind guess.