Politeness and paradigms of family: A perspective on the development of communicative competence in the Japanese ESL speaker

This thesis examines the issue of linguistic politeness in English with specific reference to Japanese ESL speakers. It develops a theoretical framework that sees shared assumptions concerning the marking of social-power and social-distance differentials as crucial. Developing the notion that linguistic politeness is a function of a status-dependent and context-dependent variety of language usage, it argues that there are four fundamental types of utterances, and that speech acts conforming to any of the power and distance configurations by means of which these four utterance types are defined can be considered to be polite if-but only if -both speaker and hearer have similar conceptions of their role-relationship within a given speech event. It argues further that perceptions of role-relationships -for both native speakers of Australian English and for Japanese ESL speakers-result from culturally codified understandings of family, and that these understandings provide the primary conceptual template for social actors manufacture and maintenance of social reality in extra-familial face-to-face interaction. As these conceptual templates are not congruent across cultures in the ways in which familial power and distance variables are codified, however, neither are the role-relationships in terms of which extra-familial social encounters are framed; and this, in tum, can lead to Japanese ESL speakers using politeness strategies in contextually inappropriate ways. From this theoretical perspective, the research uses a custom-designed interactive multimedia software package to compare choices of utterances with verified power and distance configurations made by Japanese ESL speakers with choices made by native speakers of Australian English in a variety of everyday speech situations

Satirizing habits in Victorian fiction: novelistic satire, 1830s-1890s

"This dissertation argues for a significant presence of satire within Victorian novels from the 1830s to the 1890s - the very decades in which many influential critics, from the early twentieth century to the present day, discern a marked, general decline in the practice of satire. As early as the eighteenth century, writers valued amiable humour over wit and satire; continuing this trend, countless Victorian writers and critics attempted (in David Worcester's words) to ""pus[h] satire into the dunce's comer"" (32). Nevertheless, regardless of their theoretic disavowal of satire, many novelists embraced, in their narrative practice, its mild Horatian, philosophical Menippean, and even stringent Juvenalian possibilities. Charlotte Bronte's words to Elizabeth Gaskell may be applied to many Victorian writers: ""'Satirical you are - however; I believe a little more so than you think""' (Letters 3: 4 7). Current studies of satire in the Victorian novel tend to restrict themselves to individual analyses of substantially satiric novels such as Martin Chuzzlewit or The Way of All Flesh; more generic assessments are deferred. In terms of broader engagements, Frank Palmeri' s view that satire is a form of writing that disappears ""underground or into eclipse"" (""Thackeray"" 770) in the mid-Victorian period, only to emerge in the late decades of the period, is representative. In this dissertation, however, I demonstrate a distinctly Victorian satiric focus on society as the source of moral ills by identifying habit as a dominant, encyclopaedic subject of novelistic satire. The belief that human character is substantially a social creation is exemplified by George Henry Lewes's observation: ""To understand the Human Mind we must study it under its normal conditions, and these are social conditions"" (PLMJ 128). As well, inspired by Athena Vrettos's enterprising work on the prevalence of Victorian debates concerning habit and its relevance to psychological realism in terms of Dickens's Dombey and Son, I trace the relations of culturally embedded discourses on habit to the period's novelistic satire. Satirists' preoccupation with habit is strikingly illuminated by Mikhail Bakhtin's social-formalist assessment of the novel's steadfast roots in ancient serio-comical literature and Menippean satire - a dialogic form that defamiliarizes habit. Cultural systems - ""all the habitual matrices [sosedstva] of things and ideas"" - are exposed in ""the menippea"" through voracious parody of literary and non-literary genres, and through the ""creation of ... unexpected connections"" (Dialogic 169). Victorian novelists, I argue, continued the traditions of satire (as an evolving mode or genre) through an engagement with omnipresent theories of habit. Although authoritative nineteenth-century discourses (both of natural science and of moral/social science) implicate habit in the forces of determinism, contradictory theories inveterately identify habit as a locus of moral hope (through habits of sympathy, self-control, free will, and free thought). I examine in detail the confluence of satire and this dual discourse of habit through close readings of canonical Victorian novels. The novels I discuss, from Cranford (1851-53) and Silas Marner (1861) to The Way of All Flesh (written between 1873 and 1884, published 1903) and New Grub Street (1891), demonstrate either Horatian optimism or Juvenalian cynicism with regard to habit as a source for good or ill. It is a trajectory encapsulated by Edward Bulwer-Lytton's transition from optimism and faith in habits of sympathy in Pelham ( 1828) to his cynicism concerning the assimi1ating powers of habit in The Coming Race (1871). Importantly, Dickens's novels of the 1850s and 60s, which target habit in ""lines of blood and fire"" (30) (to borrow James Hannay' s epithet for Juvena1ian satire), foreground the theoretical issues be1eaguering satire's relations with the novel. The satura of Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) is characterized by unrestrained metaphor that targets all forms of institutional (social) and individual (psychological) bad habits. Finally, I investigate misogynist theorizations of both satire and habit, by analyzing the satiric machinery of Charlotte Bronte's Shirley (1849) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72). With satiric irreverence, both novels pose a question that is crucial to historic and Victorian theories concerning female mental inferiority: ""'[D]o you seriously think all wisdom in the world is lodged in male skulls?''' (Bronte, S 328). Despite the era's ambivalence to satire, which I explore at length, Victorian novelists were profoundly engaged with its literary and social possibilities. Dissociating and dissenting from the ""habitual matrices"" of their culture, and engaging with complex moral discourses affirming the ""familiar fact, the power of habit"" (Mill, Utilitarianism 10: 238), novelists wrote philosophically probing and culturally critical Menippean, Horatian, and Juvenalian satire.

Impoliteness in Children’s Fiction: Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Aspects

The concept of linguistic impoliteness has gained importance in recent research (see e.g. Culpeper 2011). While research interest has focused on diverse aspects and areas of application, such as impoliteness in the media (e.g. Culpeper 2005; Dynel 2016; Lorenzo-Dus 2009), or impoliteness in dramatic texts (e.g. Culpeper 1998; Rudanko 2006), the question of how and in which ways impoliteness is expressed and conceptualised in fiction for young readers has so far remained a research desideratum. This analysis aims at closing this gap in research and addresses the importance of understanding the use of impoliteness in fiction from an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing together methodologies and results from diverse disciplines, such as linguistic pragmatics, translation studies, and literary science. The data for this study consists of four contemporary English-language children’s books and book series for readers aged 9 to 12 years of age. The analysis begins on an impoliteness2-level, applying a third-wave sociological impoliteness model (Culpeper 2011) to the data that was adapted to children’s fiction. This analytical step shows how and in which ways, i.e. with the usage of which strategies, impoliteness is expressed by characters in contemporary children’s fiction. The focus of the analysis then shifts to an impoltieness1-level, and to an analysis of the metalanguage surrounding impoliteness events, on the level of the characters as well as the narrator. As young readers are yet to be socialised into their cultures and the preferred usage of impoliteness, metalanguage helps the reader conceptualise impoliteness events. Finally, what is understood as impolite differs in various speech communities and cultures. Thus, it opens the question as to how impoliteness is translated in popular children’s fiction. In a final analytical step, then, a case study of the translation of impoliteness events in the Harry Potter series is presented. This answers the question whether German pragmatic preferences such as greater directness (e.g. House 2010) are accommodated, i.e. whether the translation follows the translation strategies of domestication (Oittinen 1993) or foreignization (Klingberg 1986). In all, the analysis gives a concise overview over how impoliteness is expressed, commented on and translated in contemporary children’s fiction

Mobilizing The Collective: Helhesten And The Danish Avant-Garde, 1934-1946

This dissertation examines the avant-garde Danish artists\u27 collective Helhesten (The Hell-Horse), which was active from 1941 to 1944 in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen and undertook cultural resistance during the war. The main claim of this study is that Helhesten was an original and fully established avant-garde before the artists formed the more internationally focused Cobra group, and that the collective\u27s development of sophisticated socio-political engagement and new kinds of countercultural strategies prefigured those of postwar art groups such as Fluxus and the Situationist International. The group and its eponymous journal involved the Danish modernists Asger Jorn, Ejler Bille, Henry Heerup, Egill Jacobsen, and Carl-Henning Pedersen, as well as anthropologists, archeologists, psychologists, and scientists. Helhesten\u27s twelve issues from April 1941 to November 1944 featured essays on art theory, non-Western artifacts, literature, poetry, film, architecture, and photography, together with exhibition reviews and profiles of contemporary Danish artists. The group appropriated certain stylistic traits from German Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism. Yet rather than partaking in a retrograde modernist nostalgia, the Helhesten artists radically reformulated the tactics of these movements into what they called a living art, or new realism, which emphasized subjectivity, indeterminacy, and a fundamental anti-essentialism that rejected the Nazi obsession with purity as much as it did the prescriptive manifestos of the historical avant-gardes. What emerged was purposefully unskilled, brightly colored painterly abstraction and naïve styles that were humorous and disarmingly child-like on the surface but trenchant and sophisticated underneath. Helhesten consciously challenged Nazi racist propaganda and its conception of Volk, caricatured the idealized Aryan body, defied Hitler\u27s attempts to assert a common Nordic heritage, and critiqued the National Socialist obsession with historical continuity and order. Moreover, as a fundamental link between pre- and postwar vanguard art movements, Helhesten\u27s living aesthetic celebrated quotidian existence through play, disruption, and heightened awareness in a manner that presaged the postwar avant-garde\u27s engagement with everyday life

Emotional persuasion in advertising – analyzing dialectal language, visual images and their interplay in TV commercials

Emotions are gaining ever more traction in marketing research and researchers now broadly recognize the benefits of emotional persuasion. Marketing scholars have become interested in emotions as an aspect of consumer behavior because they are important components of consumers’ responses in pre- and post-purchase buying behavior, in consumer satisfaction, and in shaping attitudes to products, services, and brands. The appeal to emotion is also a central topic of advertising research because the practice targets the consumers’ psychological, social, or symbolic needs to evoke an emotional response. This study investigates emotional persuasion in television commercials and provides insights into consumer persuasion from the respondent’s perspective. Advertising seeking to arouse emotions and interest is intended to make the audience process the message more thoroughly, create a vivid and enticing memory of the brand, and ultimately persuade the consumer to purchase the company’s products or services. The purpose of this study is to investigate emotional persuasion in advertising, more specifically how appeals to emotion are mediated in TV commercials. Television advertising is an important part of modern economies and paid media. Multimodal commercials can simultaneously transmit visual and audio stimuli, which makes them especially persuasive in shaping viewer’ emotions. However, there is a dearth of knowledge of how appeals to emotion are mediated through the interplay of language and moving visual components. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by exploring the emotional persuasion of the joint interplay of language in the Swiss-German dialect and moving images in television commercials. By analyzing such language and images this study provides three interconnected perspectives on emotional persuasion: dialectal language, visual moving images, and their interplay. Accordingly, this cross-disciplinary study touches on the theoretical fields of marketing, linguistics, and psychology. To date, research results have shown positive outcomes of the use of local dialects in the process of persuasion in advertising. However, this study is among the first to investigate how dialectal language can be used in advertising to appeal emotionally to a fragmented target audience. In addition, this thesis is among the first studies to focus on the filmic mediation of appeals to emotion, that is, the joint interplay of language in the Swiss-German dialect and moving images. The data for the empirical study consist of 32 television commercials in the spoken Swiss-German dialect placed by the Swiss cooperative Migros operating in the retail segment and specializing in fast-moving consumer goods. The research is based on a mixed-methods approach and the empirical aspect is conducted in two phases by analyzing commercials quantitatively and qualitatively. In the first phase, content analysis is used as a quantitative method to organize the stream of images and language. In the second phase, the qualitative analysis, the appeals to emotion of the language, images, and their interplay are investigated. The qualitative analysis of the data is divided into two stages: linguistic analysis and semiotic analysis. The linguistic analysis is conducted to study the emotional appeal of the language in the Swiss-German dialect. The semiotic analysis is conducted to uncover the emotional meanings of the images at the connotative level and the emotional meanings of the images in the interplay with the language. The outcome of the study is a framework of emotionally persuasive advertising in emotionally appealing dialectal language, emotionally appealing images, and the interplay of language in dialect and images. The framework can open new perspectives on understanding emotionally appealing advertising. From the managerial point of view, being able to appeal to customers on an emotional level can cut through the noise inherent in advertising, something that is becoming more difficult in today’s media environment filled with messages. Since consumers are exposed to numerous commercials, those that carry an emotional appeal can stand out from the crowd. As a practical implication, the framework is applicable to multimodal advertising in several media channels, including online advertising. The framework can help those designing advertising for fragmented target audiences and help marketers respond to the challenges of localization.-- Tunteisiin vetoava markkinointi on keskeinen aihe niin akateemisessa tutkimuksessa kuin käytännön markkinoinnissakin. Kuluttajien tunteiden on osoitettu olevan keskeisiä tekijöitä tuotteista, palveluista ja brändeistä muodostuvissa asenteissa. Tunteita on pyritty ymmärtämään myös osana ostokäyttäytymistä ja koettua asiakastyytyväisyyttä. Tutkimustulokset osoittavat, että tunteisiin vetoava mainonta on tehokas tapa puhutella katsojia. Vetoamalla kohdeyleisön psykologisiin, sosiaalisiin tai symbolisiin tarpeisiin katsojissa pyritään herättämään tunteita ja saamaan heidät ostamaan mainostettuja tuotteita. Tutkimusten mukaan tunteisiin vetoava mainonta herättää hyvin huomiota ja saa vastaanottajat käsittelemään mainosviestejä syvällisemmin. Näin brändeistä pystytään luomaan eläviä ja mieleenpainuvia muistikuvia. Lisäksi on todettu, että kohdeyleisön puhutteleminen heidän omalla murteellaan vetoaa vahvemmin tunteisiin. Käsillä olevan väitöskirjan tarkoitus on tutkia tunteisiin vetoavaa televisiomainontaa vastaanottajan näkökulmasta. Televisiomainonta on tärkeä osa taloutta ja maksettua mediaa. Televisiomainokset välittävät viestejä sekä näkö- että kuuloaistia hyödyntäen, mikä tehostaa mainosten vetoavuutta ja vaikuttavuutta. Vaikka monesta merkkijärjestelmästä koostuvaa multimodaalista mainontaa on tutkittu aikaisemminkin, aiempi tutkimus ei ole osoittanut, kuinka tunteisiin vetoavien mainosviestien kokonaismerkitys muodostuu sekä kielen että liikkuvien kuvien vuorovaikutuksessa. Käsillä oleva väitöskirja pyrkii täyttämään tämän tutkimusaukon tutkimalla tunteisiin vetoavan mainonnan kolmea toisiinsa kytköksissä olevaa näkökulmaa eli puhuttua kieltä, liikkuvia kuvia ja niiden vuorovaikutusta sveitsinsaksan murteella tuotetuissa televisiomainoksissa. Tämä poikkitieteellinen tutkimus onkin yksi ensimmäisistä, joissa selvitetään sekä puhutun kielen että liikkuvien kuvien yhteistoimintaa mainonnassa. Työn teoreettinen viitekehys kytkeytyy markkinointiin, kielitieteeseen ja psykologiaan. Paikallismurteiden ja mainonnan vaikuttavuuden välisestä yhteydestä on olemassa jonkin verran aiempaa tutkimusnäyttöä. Käsillä oleva väitöskirja on kuitenkin yksi ensimmäisistä tutkimuksista, joissa selvitetään, miten mainosten murteellisella kielellä pyritään puhuttelemaan fragmentoitunutta kohdeyleisöä tunnetasolla. Tutkielman empiirisen osan tutkimusaineisto koostuu 32 televisiomainoksesta, joissa puhutaan sveitsinsaksan murretta. Mainosten julkaisija on sveitsiläinen vähittäiskaupan alaan kuuluva osuuskunta Migros, joka on erikoistunut päivittäis- ja käyttötavaroihin. Tutkimusmetodologisesti työ edustaa monimenetelmätutkimusta, jossa yhdistetään sekä määrällisiä että laadullisia tutkimusmenetelmiä. Ensimmäisessä vaiheessa mainosten puhuttua murteellista kieltä ja liikkuvia kuvia tutkitaan määrällisen sisällönanalyysin avulla. Sisällönanalyysi selvittää kielen ja kuvien määrää mainoksissa. Toisessa vaiheessa tunteisiin vetoavaa murteellista kieltä, liikkuvia kuvia ja näiden vuorovaikutusta analysoidaan laadullisin menetelmin. Tutkimuksessa hyödynnettyjä laadullisia menetelmiä ovat lingvistinen ja semioottinen analyysi. Lingvistisen analyysin avulla selvitetään, miten murteellisella mainoskielellä pyritään vetoamaan katsojien tunteisiin. Semioottisessa analyysissä tutkitaan kuvien tunteisiin vetoavia konnotaatioita sekä tunteisiin vetoavan kielen että liikkuvien kuvien välistä vuorovaikutusta. Väitöskirjatutkimuksen tieteellinen kontribuutio esitetään tunteisiin vetoavan mainonnan mallina, johon tiivistyy murteellisen kielen, liikkuvien kuvien ja näiden vuorovaikutuksen keinot vedota kuluttajiin tunnetasolla. Näin ollen tuotetaan uutta tietoa markkinoinnin ja kielitieteen tutkimukseen. Mallista voi olla hyötyä käytännön markkinointityössä, sillä tunteisiin vetoava mainonta erottautuu paremmin kilpailevien mainosten täyttämästä mediaympäristöstä. Mallia voidaan soveltaa käytettäväksi eri viestintäkanavissa, esimerkiksi verkkomainonnassa. Lisäksi tutkimustulokset voivat auttaa markkinoijia kohdentamaan mainontaa paikallisille kohdeyleisöille ja vastaamaan lokalisoinnin tuomiin haasteisiin

Mitigation in Prime Minister’s Questions of the British Parliament

This study draws on theories and methodologies from the fields of pragmatics and parliamentary discourse studies to explore the role of mitigation as a form of politeness in the British Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) in the House of Commons (2016-2017). Using a dataset of exchanges between the Leader of Opposition (LO) and the Prime Minister (PM), this work investigates the use of mitigation in question-response sequences; the ways in which leadership style and identity can be (re)presented, enacted and maintained by using mitigation features and strategies with respect to appropriate parliamentary language. Therefore, qualitative and pragmatic approach is adopted building on insights from traditional approaches to politeness and from the discursive approach of relational work to identify the form and function of mitigation in PMQs. The findings reveal two kinds of mitigation: routinised and non-routinised linguistic features which are represented by a variety of formulaic lexicogrammatical features and discursive/ stylistic strategies. However, the use of mitigation is impacted by the confrontational interaction of PMQs, which is governed by institutional norms and conventions. Consequently, mitigation is used strategically as a means of displaying politic, appropriate behaviour to refrain from unparliamentary language. It provides an institutionally acceptable polite packaging to attenuate the negative impact of inevitable face threatening. In other words, mitigation serves to disguise the offensive effect of the leaders’ messages while making requests or responding to critical comments to show the orientation of face concerns. This allows them to project effective leadership style and leadership qualities, and thus contribute to establishing a positive image and enhance their own face among colleagues and supporters. For the questions that are addressed by the LO to the PM, the dataset represented a variety of question types that build on presupposition and implicature, which embed FTAs in the propositional content of these questions. This results in different response strategies to deal with potential threats. The findings suggest that incorporating insights from traditional with post-modern approaches contributes to uncovering the role of mitigation strategies in PMQs interaction as an excellent pragmalinguistic resource for performing indirect FTAs to the addressee while adhering to the institutional norms of conduct

An Oral History of the Special Olympics in China Volume 2

This open access book contains the oral histories that were inspired by the work of the Special Olympics in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of its founding. The foreword and prefatory materials provide an overview of the Special Olympics and its growth in the People’s Republic of China. The sections that follow record interview transcripts of individuals with intellectual disabilities living in Shanghai. In addition to chronicling the involvement of these individuals and their families in the Special Olympics movement, the interview transcripts also capture their daily lives and how they have navigated school and work

Real purchasing: deference and discourse at work

Available from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DXN059694 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Afropolitan satire: a critical investigation and Volta: a novel

This thesis investigates satire as a mode for expressing the African diasporic experience, using a synergy between creative and critical research. The critical research probes the intersections of satire and African migration, termed Afropolitanism, by examining what it means to posit the following Afropolitan novels as satirical creations: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013) and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (2016). The study analyses the different kinds of satiric devices in these novels, drawing on principles from the various western satiric traditions, showing these writers’ relationships to other twentieth-century satirical writers (western and African), and also exploring the origins of these Afropolitan novels in African oral traditions. The research scrutinises these novels’ treatment of economic inequality, unsafe political climates, shaky racial relations, thorny class boundaries. It argues that relocating overseas squeezes Africans into new behaviour, culture, and perspectives that necessitate them to modify their identities and beliefs which have hitherto underpinned their existence. This new frame of mind upsets the foundations of their moral reasoning. Furthermore, it contends that these unexpected changes lend themselves to a kind of satire that fluctuates artistically and multiculturally. The creative strand (“Volta,” a novel) is interwoven with the findings from the critical aspect, using the architecture of satire to construct a novel that explores a protagonist fraught with unexpected displacements in circumstances, physical and psychological. It extends the critical research by exploring the question of globalisation when identity and belonging are fractured, and migrants struggle for acceptance and validation but are constantly hampered by many shades of prejudice and obstacles. “Volta” delves into the harrowing effects of a forced escape from home, the abandonment of an opulent past to embrace a prickly transformation in a foreign society that offers only a marginal compensation for every effort