Perceptions Of Im Politeness Research Articles

Perception of impoliteness in refusal and response to it by native speakers of English and Persian

Impoliteness entails the employment of strategies oriented toward attacking face and bringing about social disruption. Although research on impoliteness has received great attention in the past two decades, how impolite utterances are perceived and what the recipients of impoliteness do in return has remained relatively under-addressed. The current study set out to examine native English and Persian speakers’ perceptions of and response to impoliteness in the production of the speech act of refusal. To this end, 90 native English speakers and 120 native Persian speakers were administered a written discourse completion task containing eight refusals that either observed politeness or contained various degrees of impoliteness. The results showed that native Persian speakers did not perceive any of the refusals to be impolite whereas three of the refusals were considered impolite by native English speakers. When reacting to impoliteness in refusals, native English speakers exploited a wider range of strategies than did Persian speakers. The results showed that social distance and power relations were of more significance for Persian speakers than for English speakers in perceiving the degree of impoliteness; however, in responding to an utterance perceived as impolite, English speakers were more likely to adopt offensive strategies to counter impoliteness, including positive and negative impoliteness strategies. These findings indicate both cross-cultural divergence and convergence in the perception of impoliteness and responses to impoliteness.

Online gaming and language aggression in a Tunisian Arabic context

Abstract This paper intends to examine the development of conflictual interactions, how they might be resolved, and the socio-cultural norms involved, by adopting an analytical framework in an online gaming context. The current paper was inspired by Kádár and Haugh’s framework as it enables me to investigate both the macro and micro aspects of (im)politeness. The study’s aim is to further examine how impoliteness, language aggression and conflict are realised in two online gaming platforms, namely Fortnite and PUBG Mobile. Thus, I will explore discursively how these phenomena are subjective in a Tunisian Arabic setting and discuss how participants reach their subjective perception of conflict in ways that do not always correspond to the supposed intentions of the ostensible offender. The results indicate that conflict is subjective as it is evaluated in different ways by different gamers and could be a result of a conflictual intention. The findings also reveal that conflict may also be created/ escalated as a result of a non-conflictual intention. Thus, this paper contributes to understanding of conflict, how impoliteness can lead to conflict and the various aspects of impoliteness/the perception of impoliteness.

Perception of impoliteness in disagreement speech acts among Iranian upper-intermediate EFL students: a gender perspective

Perception of impoliteness in disagreement speech acts among Iranian upper-intermediate EFL students: a gender perspective

Impoliteness strategies in Croatian and Serbian user comments on online news articles

This study examines readers’ perceptions of impoliteness in user comments on online news articles in two daily newspapers: Croatia’s Jutarnji list and Serbia’s Večernje novosti. The study considers judgments by four younger study participants that did not participate in the online discussions as posters. These readers evaluated impoliteness from their own point of view, identifying impolite utterances in 668 user comments. Participants’ judgments are categorized and analyzed drawing on Culpeper’s (2011a) taxonomy of impoliteness formulae and triggers. This study focuses on utterances and language means judged impolite by the majority — that is, three or four participants — with the aim of identifying frequent impoliteness formulae and language means that are judged to be impolite. Among the phenomena judged impolite by three or four readers, predominant are conventionalized impoliteness formulae with terms from the domains of sexual activities and mental health, and referential terms with a historical burden. Cursing was regularly judged impolite, as well as expressions with words from the semantic domain of scatology, words evoking animal metaphors, and name modifications (blends) resulting in taboo or derogatory terms. There seems to be a strong correlation between the phenomena judged impolite and discursive identity construction — that is, establishing the border between “us” and “them” — which in the data often involved negative, and even stigmatizing, descriptions of those considered to belong to another national group.

Cultural Variation in the Perception of Impoliteness by Korean and English Speakers

Cultural Variation in the Perception of Impoliteness by Korean and English Speakers

Reciprocity and epistemicity: On the (proto)social and cross-cultural ‘value’ of information transmission

Reciprocity is a (proto)social mechanism that involves (im)politeness as a balance of positive and negative actions among individuals: doing something good to someone is expected to be reciprocated in kind (cf. Culpeper & Tantucci 2021). The same applies for negatively charged behaviour (Culpeper & Tantucci 2021). The present study advances the theory of reciprocity both empirically and theoretically, as it extends the model to contexts of information transmission, i.e. cases where some news is being communicated from one interlocutor to another. What we found is that the way people react to ‘being informed of something’ remarkably involves (im)politeness and is mediated by two maxims of epistemic reciprocity: Engagement E (be interested) maxim and Knowledge exchange Ke maxim (be interesting in return). Our case study is centred on Chinese telephone conversations among family members and shows that the costs and benefits realised by an information giver are matched by the information receiver when a propositional contribution to the current flow of information is produced in return. Conversely, when responses occur via bare backchanneling or absence of informative contribution to the on-going interaction, then reciprocity is not properly maintained, and perceptions of impoliteness are more likely to arise. Despite the context-dependent nature of our data, we will further argue that this finding has cross-cultural significance. Our methods triangulate between Likert-scale judgments, large scale corpus-based analysis and multivariate conditional inference tree modelling (Levshina 2015; Tantucci 2021).

Impoliteness in Power-imbalance and Power-neutral Relational Contexts: Evidence from a Persian TV Drama

This study investigated impoliteness in relational contexts. Interlocutors analyzed the data from a Persian TV drama from two perspectives: intentionality and perception of impoliteness. Two relational contexts were identified: power-imbalance and power-neutral, each comprising two types of impoliteness: reciprocal and non-reciprocal. Reciprocal impoliteness occurred in hostile and conflictual situations where impoliteness was both intended by the speaker and perceived by the recipient as a direct face-attack. In non-reciprocal impoliteness, however, when power imbalance was due to family hierarchy, the recipient of impoliteness remained silent; in other situations, the intentional face-attack was tolerated, unless the recipient’s social identity face was directly attacked. In power-neutral situations, impoliteness was not reciprocated when intimacy existed between the interactants. It was neither intended nor perceived as face-threatening; however, direct face-attack was reciprocal in hostile situations. The findings of the present study point to the significant role of the relational context in the interpretation of impoliteness.

Effect-for-cause inferencing in the evaluation of loudness among Toba Batak people

The paper presents evidence for an effect-for-cause inferencing process underlying the general style of using loud speech voice among Toba Batak speakers (Indonesia). A subjective reaction test was conducted to find out their perception towards the use of loud voice in three relational settings having different combinations of bipolarity: 1) vertical social distance and horizontal social distance; 2) vertical social distance only; and 3) horizontal social distance only. The results showed that in contexts where horizontal social distance remains, the absence of vertical distance significantly weakens the perception of impoliteness and unacceptability towards the use of loud voice. This indicates that Toba Bataks assume a pseudo social proximity when they are speaking to people with whom they have no horizontal social closeness. This method of inferencing is consistent with an effect-for-cause relational structure, being metonymic in nature.

Impoliteness – a challenge to interpreters’ professionalism

This article examines interpreters’ perceptions of impoliteness in interpreter-mediated interactions in public sector settings in Norway. The analysis is based on a survey conducted in June 2014, involving 28 interpreters from/to Bosnian/Croatian/ Montenegrin/Serbian and Norwegian. The analytical method is based on the theory of impoliteness and the rapport management model. The study has a discursive, data-driven and bottom-up approach.The study is motivated by challenges described by interpreting students who already work as interpreters in the public sector in Norway. These students repeatedly reported to their teachers two types of challenges with “impoliteness”. The first challenge concerns their own experiences with impoliteness from public service users, public service employees, or both. The other type of challenge concerns the very act of interpreting impoliteness. Even though the Guidelines for best practices in interpreting, which define the interpreter’s role and function, address these issues indirectly, interpreters express a need for more specific knowledge and guidance. As no research has been conducted on impoliteness in interpreter-mediated dialogues in the public sector in Norway, a pilot project was set up in order to describe and analyze the phenomenon, as seen from interpreters’ points of view. This article concentrates on the following research questions: How widespread is impoliteness in interpreter-mediated interaction in public sector settings, according to interpreters?, How do interpreters define and exemplify impoliteness? and What strategies do interpreters use for interpreting impoliteness?The findings suggest that impoliteness in the public sector is more widespread than the author expected. The notion of “conflictive talk” playing a central role in various discourses is supported by interpreters’ examples of impoliteness in interpreter-mediated encounters. Interpreters’ examples indicate that impoliteness may create ambiguity on different levels and that being able to cope with it is crucial for doing a good job as an interpreter. Impoliteness is more than swearwords. It is context dependent – whether something is impolite depends on a participant’s evaluation of the situation. Impoliteness is experienced in a number of ways, and the consequences for interpreters of not managing impoliteness range from hurt feelings to a halt in communication. Interpreters use different interpreting strategies while interpreting impoliteness – from interpreting what is being said, to reporting that impolite language is being uttered, to ignoring impoliteness altogether. These strategies can have a direct influence on the outcome of interpreter-mediated institutional dialogues. Insight into interpreters’ as well as the other communication participants’ concerns leads to the next step: developing and systemizing strategies that can help them cope better with these work-related challenges.

Cross-cultural Perceptions of Impoliteness by Native English Speakers and EFL Learners: The Case of Apology Speech Act

This study investigated native English speakers’ and English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ perception of (im)politeness. Seventy-five native speakers and 177 EFL learners were administered a discourse completion task for the speech act of apology accompanied by responses violating politeness by various degrees. Participants were asked to assess the degree of (im)politeness embedded in each response and to write down their assessment comments. Content analysis of respondents’ comments indicated that both groups mentioned similar (im)politeness criteria. However, the analysis of frequency counts displayed significant differences between the two groups in their degree of preference for each (im)politeness criterion.

Cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness: A study of impoliteness events reported by students in England, China, Finland, Germany and Turkey

This paper investigates cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness. It is based on 500 impoliteness events reported by students in England, China, Finland, Germany, and Turkey. The main analytical framework adopted is Spencer-Oatey's (e.g. Rapport management: A framework for analysis, Continuum, 2000) “rapport management,” covering various types of face as well as sociality rights. We offer some clarifications of this framework, and explain and demonstrate how it can be operationalized for quantitative analysis. In general, it offers a good account of our data, though accommodating ambiguous cases proved to be a major challenge. Our quantitative analysis suggests that three of the five categories of Spencer-Oatey's framework are key ones, namely, quality face, equity rights, and association rights. Furthermore, differences between our geographically separated datasets emerge. For example, the England-based data has a preponderance of impoliteness events in which quality face is violated, whereas the China-based data has a preponderance where equity rights are violated. We offer some explanations for these differences, relating them where possible to broader cultural issues.