Universals In Language Usage Research Articles

Strategic politeness in Hemingway's ‘the short happy life of Francis Macomber’

This analysis uses the framework of linguistic discourse analysis of politeness strategies in ordinary conversation. My major analytic tool is Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, in which the authors argue that politeness strategies are used to lessen the threat of any act, verbal or otherwise, that potentially threatens the speaker or hearer's negative face (freedom) or positive face (personality). The framework of politeness strategies is especially well suited for literary interpretation, since the three determining factors for choice of politeness strategy - social distance, power and rank of imposition - are vital to the development of theme and character in literature. Power is naturally related to the theme of bravery or spurious bravery in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’. Francis puts himself into a situation in which he could be killed precisely because he does not have the power to control his positive face. His positive face is, in fact, controlled by his wife Margot and the hunting guide Wilson, as a detailed analysis indicates. Francis, Margot, and Wilson all use politeness strategies in a complex fight for the power to control Francis's positive face, or self-image.

Discourse and communication: New approaches to the analysis of mass media discourse and communication Edited by Teun A. van Dijk (review)

REVIEWS175 contact and linguistic diffusion—a deficiency in the contact literature diagnosed by Franklin Southworth as the need for a 'more precise sociolinguistic typology of outcomes of language contact' (1971:256). But actually, in this time of renewed and diverse interest in language contact phenomena (e.g. Dorian 1981, 1989, Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985, Thomason & Kaufman 1988), the Hills' book provides what is most clearly lacking—a detailed study that examines language contact in the context of the social lives of the speakers. REFERENCES Bakhtin, M. M. 1980. The dialogic imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen L. Levinson. 1978. Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena. Questions and politeness, ed. by Esther N. Goody, 56289 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dorian, Nancy. 1981. Language death: The life cycle of a Scottish Gaelic dialect. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ------ (ed.) 1989. Investigating obsolescence: Studies in language contraction and death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dozier, Edward P. 1951. Two examples oflinguistic acculturation: The Yaqui of Sonora and Arizona and the Tewa of New Mexico. Lg. 32.146-51. Ferguson, Charles A. 1959. Diglossia. Word 15.325-40. Gumperz, John J. 1982. Discourse strategies, Ch. 4: Conversational code-switching, 59-99. New York: Cambridge University Press. Haugen, Einar. 1953. The Norwegian language in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kroskrity, Paul V. 1982. Language contact and linguistic diffusion: The Arizona Tewa speech community. Bilingualism and language contact: Spanish, English, and Native American languages, ed. by F. Barkin, E. A. Brandt, and J. Ornstein-Galicia, 51-72. New York: Teachers College Press. Le Page, R. B., and Andrée Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts of identity: Creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scollon, Ronald. 1979. Variable data and linguistic convergence: Texts and contexts in Chipewyan. Language in Society 8: 223-42. Southworth, Franklin C. 1971. Detecting prior creolization: An analysis of the historical origins of Marathi. Pidginization and creolization of languages, ed. by Dell H. Hymes, 255-73. London: Cambridge University Press. Thomason, Sarah Grey, and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization , and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in contact: Findings and problems. The Hague: Mouton. Department of Anthropology[Received 16 October 1989.] 341 Haines Hall University of California Los Angeles, CA 90024 Discourse and communication: New approaches to the analysis of mass media discourse and communication. Edited by Teun A. van Dijk. (Research in Text Theory 10.) Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985. Pp. viii, 367. $104.00. Reviewed by Doris Payne, University of Oregon This volume aims to show how mass media (MM) texts can be analyzed in more systematic and explicit terms than has usually been done until now. Lin- 176LANGUAGE, VOLUME 66, NUMBER 1 (1990) guists should be forewarned that they will not find what they might have expected from the volume and series titles: the definition of 'discourse' here is generally broader than, if not different from, that assumed in linguistics. John D. H. Downing, for example, explicitly states, 'By "discourse" I mean "ideology -in-verbal-process-of-construction" ' (298). Most of the essays are influenced more by a sociological than by a linguistic perspective; they are concerned with social, economic, and political questions about the sources, recipients, and ideologies shaping MM. A primary claim made by several authors is that MM discourse invariably sides with the established institutional point of view, whether it be that of a news enterprise, a government institution, or a multinational corporation. With two notable exceptions (Schlesinger & Lumley and Hartley & Montgomery), they do not clearly acknowledge the impossibility of presenting a truly neutral point of view. The first nine essays and the introduction are theoretical, historical, and typological in tone; the remaining seven articles include actual analyses. In my view, only five to six of the seventeen papers deal in a carefully argued way with linguistic and cognitive structures found in MM discourse. I will depart from the organization which van Dijk provides for the papers in his 'Introduction : Discourse analysis in (mass) communication research' (1-9), and discuss the more linguistically oriented papers first. 'Structures of news in the press', by Teun A. van Dijk (69-93), provides a framework...

Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 4)

Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 4)

Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. PENELOPE BROWN and STEPHEN C. LEVINSON

<i>Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage.</i> PENELOPE BROWN and STEPHEN C. LEVINSON

Politeness in context: Intergenerational issues (Review article)

Brown and Levinson's 1978 extended chapter transformed politeness from an apparently peripheral sociolinguistic concern into a distinctive theory of social interaction. The reissue of their text in book form Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) reflects not only its enduring influence but also its development; the theory of politeness is becoming a virtual movement. A decade later, the authors can point to a vast array of empirical investigations and theoretical treatments of politeness in linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, psycholinguistics, and communication science triggered by the original account. Gumperz's foreword (xiv) suggests, the new introduction alone constitutes a good guide to current directions in sociolinguistics. Our review takes for granted the originality, insightfulness, and range of Brown and Levinson's approach. Now as in 1978, politeness theory offers a coherent predictive model of the sociolinguistics of interactional cooperation, and the concept of face as a ubiquitous explanatory dimension for discourse analysis. But the I987 edition is a reappraisal, concerned as much with the explanatory limitations as with the explanatory powers of the model. The new volume reproduces the original text verbatim but prefaced with more than fifty pages of new contextualization in the form of a critical assimilation of recent work (plus a much extended bibliography and an index). such, it is a reflexive, self-reviewing, and often self-critical book which invites a discussion of the current status of the politeness model, and its usability, rather than of its general quality. We hope to contribute to this reappraisal by pointing to some areas where the model-plus-critique still appears to present difficulties either intrinsically or in our own attempts to apply it. We cannot resist commenting first on the quirkiness of presentation that the new format imposes. In the new introduction, Brown and Levinson distance themselves conceptually from the earlier text. A minor consequence is an oddness of time-reference (of the sort, As we said, cf. below . . . ). More importantly, the status of claims made in the body of the text the original account is now unclear without constant cross-referencing to the introduction where, as we shall see, there are some significant retreats and reinterpretations. A new genera-