Politeness Across Cultures

283 Pages·2011·3.28 MB·English

by  Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini

Politeness Across Cultures
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Also by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini
THE HANDBOOK OF BUSINESS DISCOURSE (editor, 2009)
FACE, COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL INTERACTION (co-editor with
Michael Haugh, 2009)
BUSINESS DISCOURSE (with Catherine Nickerson and Brigitte Planken, 2007)
ASIAN BUSINESS DISCOURSE(S) (co-editor with Maurizio Gotti, 2005)
WRITING BUSINESS: GENRES, MEDIA AND DISCOURSES (co-editor with
Catherine Nickerson, 1999)
THE LANGUAGES OF BUSINESS: AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE (co-editor
with Sandra J. Harris, 1997)
MANAGING LANGUAGE: THE DISCOURSE OF CORPORATE MEETINGS (with
Sandra J. Harris, 1997)
Also by Dániel Z. Kádár
POLITENESS IN CHINA AND JAPAN (with Michael Haugh, forthcoming)
CHINESE DISCOURSE AND INTERACTION (co-editor with Yuling Pan, 2011)
POLITENESS IN EAST ASIA (co-editor with Sara Mills, 2011)
UNDERSTANDING HISTORICAL (IM)POLITENESS (co-editor with Marcel Bax,
2011)
POLITENESS IN HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY CHINESE (with Yuling
Pan, 2010)
HISTORICAL CHINESE LETTER WRITING (2010)
HISTORICAL (IM)POLITENESS (co-editor with Jonathan Culpeper, 2010)
MODEL LETTERS IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA: 60 SELECTED EPISTLES FROM
‘LETTERS OF SNOW SWAN RETREAT’ (2009)
IT’S THE DRAGON’S TURN: CHINESE INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSES (co-editor
with Hao Sun, 2008)
TERMS OF (IM)POLITENESS: A STUDY OF THE COMMUNICATIONAL
PROPERTIES OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE (IM)POLITE TERMS OF ADDRESS
(2007)
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Politeness Across Cultures
Edited by
Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini
Honorary Associate Professor, University of Warwick, UK
and
Dániel Z. Kádár
Research Fellow, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Associate Professor, Asia University, Taiwan

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Selection and editorial matter © Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and
Dániel Z. Kádár 2011
Foreword © Chris Christie 2011
Epilogue © Sandra Harris 2011
Chapters © their individual authors 2011
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-23648-6
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
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permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2011 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Foreword by Chris Christie ix
Notes on Contributors xi
1 Introduction: Politeness Research In and Across Cultures 1
Dániel Z. Kádár and Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini
Part I: Face in Interaction
2 Some Issues with the Concept of Face: When, What,
How and How Much? 17
Jim O’Driscoll
3 On the Concept of Face and Politeness 42
Maria Sifianou
Part II: Im/politeness in Intracultural Interaction
4 Im/politeness, Rapport Management and
Workplace Culture: Truckers Performing Masculinities
on Canadian Ice-Roads 61
Louise Mullany
5 Why Are Israeli Children Better at Settling Disputes
Than Israeli Politicians? 85
Zohar Kampf and Shoshana Blum-Kulka
6 Korean Honorifics and ‘Revealed’, ‘Ignored’ and
‘Suppressed’ Aspects of Korean Culture and Politeness 106
Lucien Brown
7 Modern Chinese Politeness Revisited 128
Yueguo Gu
8 Modes of Address Between Female Staff in Georgian
Professional Discourse: Medical and Academic Contexts 149
Manana Rusieshvili
v
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vi Contents
Part III: Im/politeness and Face: Intercultural and
Crosscultural Perspectives
9 Indirectness in Zimbabwean English: A Study of
Intercultural Communication in the UK 171
Karen Grainger
10 On Im/politeness Behind the Iron Curtain 194
ń
Eva Ogiermann and Małgorzata Suszczy ska
11 Conflict, Culture and Face 216
Yasuhisa Watanabe
12 Cultural Variability in Face Interpretation and Management 237
Ewa Bogdanowska-Jakubowska
Epilogue by Sandra Harris 258
Index of Names 267
Index of Subjects 272
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Acknowledgements
We would like to express our gratitude to the following colleagues who
generously acted as reviewers: Kate Beeching, Ronald Carter, Chris
Christie, Jonathan Culpeper, Bethan Davies, Holly Didi-Ogren, Sandra
Harris, Michael Haugh, Thomas Holtgraves, Kathryn M. Howard,
Noriko Inagaki, Alan H. Kim, Kenneth Kong, Miriam Locher, Leyla
Marti, Andrew Merrison, Sara Mills, Shigeko Okamoto, Annick
Ş
Paternoster and ükriye Ruhi. We are particularly grateful to Chris
Christie and Sandra Harris for agreeing to write the Preface and the
Epilogue, respectively.
We would also like to thank Priyanka Gibbons and her colleagues at
Palgrave Macmillan for their support in completing this project.
vii
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Foreword
In recent years there has been an urgent need for a volume that focuses
on politeness phenomena across cultures that goes beyond the more
heavily studied European languages but that, in doing so, also critically
engages with the theoretical developments in politeness research that
have proliferated during this time. Although the postmodern turn, in
particular, has acted as a corrective to the flattening out and sometimes
erasure of key aspects of cultural difference in some of the projects that
adopted earlier models of politeness, recent theoretical developments
have presented other problems for research in the field, such as difficul-
ties in adequately operationalising some of the analytical concepts new
frameworks have made available. Indeed, there has been a danger of a
new, sometimes insufficiently questioned, orthodoxy overtaking polite-
ness research that has had the potential to close down rather than open
up the scope of politeness scholarship. The richness of the data and the
analysis presented in this volume is therefore particularly welcome
because it offers an evidence-based body of work that is used by the con-
tributors in this volume – or else has the potential to be used in future
scholarship – to direct important questions at these newer paradigms. As
such, the volume provides both the grounds and the impetus for the
current debates to move on so that new and previously unconsidered
questions can be asked about what is meant by the terms ‘culture’, ‘face’
and ‘politeness’ and what is the relationship between them.
In particular, many of the chapters in this volume prepare the ground
for a more informed engagement with the debates about first and sec-
ond order notions of politeness and of face that have been generated by
the recent politeness frameworks. These are key issues for any engage-
ment with interactions across cultures: if there is not some sense that
related phenomena are being addressed within and across a cultural
divide, the comparisons or contrasts that scholarship brings into view
can have no relevance. While evaluations of the relative merits and
validity of etic and emic accounts of politeness phenomena are still
being played out in the literature, for politeness research to take place at
all it is necessary to be able to use the abstract term ‘politeness’ as
though writer and reader were able to assign a meaningful concept to
that term. At some level, then, a tacit acceptance of a second order
notion of politeness is a necessary precondition of any politeness
ix
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x Foreword
research, and in particular of politeness research that engages with cul-
tural difference. This may actually mean that research into politeness
across cultures, in resting on such a precarious axiom, is itself a pre-
carious enterprise. However, the extent to which the authors in this
volume are able to articulate a case for seeing, in the specific cultural
contexts they are addressing and in other contexts, a sufficient corres-
pondence between conceptualisations of behaviour and how that
behaviour is evaluated indicates that there are solid grounds for accept-
ing such a precondition. And the pay-off for accepting it is that the
studies here are able to bring into view a wealth of ways of understand-
ing culture-specific perceptions and behaviours that do not underplay
variation in either the cultures under discussion or the conceptualisa-
tions of face and politeness they are engaging with.
The editors of this volume, in bringing together chapters that fore-
ground heterogeneity in the conceptualisation and realisation of face
and politeness and a willingness to engage with all of the attendant
issues that this raises, offer a very welcome addition to existing polite-
ness scholarship, and a gift to future scholarship in the field.
Chris Christie
Loughborough University
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