You don't touch lettuce with your fingers:: Parental politeness in family discourse

Abstract

Family discourse is essentially polite, enacting its politeness in domain- and culturally specific ways. This study examines parental speech acts of control and metapragmatic comments, as issued from parents to children around the dinnertable in middle-class Israeli, American and American immigrant families. The prevailing style of parental control is both highly direct and richly mitigated. Three key notions combine to set the tone of family politeness: power, informality and affect. Asymmetrical power relations between parents and children license the high level of directness, and the level of informality expected in the family explains its non-offensiveness. The importance of affect is revealed by the salience of linguistic devices indexing positive affect. Yet in addition to the domain-specificity of the system, culture plays an equally important role. Culturally varied perceptions of children's face needs are reflected in differential styles, with Israeli parents drawing heavily on the emotively colored language of mitigation and nicknaming, and American parents paying homage to the child's independence by adherence to first names and the use of conventional forms. The groups differ further in aspects of pragmatic socialization emphasized, as shown by types of metapragmatic comments used. All parents attend to socializing children towards adherence to Gricean norms of conversation, but while American parents explicitly teach rules of conversational management, Israeli parents worry instead about correct language use. Three general implications are drawn for a general theory of politeness. First, there is a need to incorporate the hitherto neglected dimension of speech-events as a determinant factor in evaluating politeness values. Second, the relative importance granted different strategic dimensions in indexing politeness should be reassessed. For directives, mitigation should be considered on a par with choices on a directness continuum. Third, it is suggested that the scope of pragmatic phenomena studied for politeness move beyond specific speech acts to incorporate wider discourse phenomena, such as discourse management.