Linguistic Politeness Beyond Modernity. A Critical Reconsideration of Politeness Theories

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The interactional achievement of speaker meaning: Toward a formal account of conversational inference

Dominant accounts of ‘speaker meaning’ in post-Gricean contextualist pragmatics tend to focus on single utterances, making the theoretical assumption that the object of pragmatic analysis is restricted to cases where speakers and hearers agree on utterance meanings, leaving instances of misunderstandings out of their scope. However, we know that divergences in understandings between interlocutors do often arise, and that when they do, speakers can engage in a local process of meaning negotiation. In this paper, we take insights from interactional pragmatics to offer an empirically informed view on ‘speaker meaning’ that incorporates both speakers’ and hearers’ perspectives, alongside a formalisation of how to model speaker meanings in such a way that we can account for both understandings – the canonical cases – and misunderstandings, but critically, also the process of interactionally negotiating meanings between interlocutors. We thus highlight that utterance-level theories of meaning provide only a partial representation of speaker meaning as it is understood in interaction, and show that inferences about a given utterance at any given time are formally connected to prior and future inferences of all participants. Our proposed model thus provides a more fine-grained account of how speakers converge on ‘speaker meanings’ in real time, showing how such meanings are often subject to a joint endeavour of complex inferential work

A cognitive-pragmatic perspective on apologies in English and Ukrainian discourse

Apologies are interactional social-cultural discourse rituals rooted in intersubjectivity. Their corrective and preventive cognitive-pragmatic types have different scenarios. As conventional hybrid expressive-and-requestive speech acts, they have pragma-semantic subtypes, which realize negative politeness. English and Ukrainian apologies share common cognitive-pragmatic types but differ in pragma-semantic subtypes and linguistic realization

The Pragmatics of Blackmail in English and Iraqi-Arabic

Verbal offences are language crimes that are committed by mere utterances of certain words or expressions whether they are accompanied by physical acts or not. One of those crimes is blackmail. This crime has been studied and compared legally but its linguistic aspect has not been given much attention. This study tries to emphasize this crime pragmatically and contrastively in English and Arabic. No study has shed light on such aspects concerning the study under investigation. The researcher has not found any previous related study to get a benefit from about this topic. There is an attempt to achieve the following aim which is shedding light on the similarities and differences in strategies of blackmail between English and Arabic in terms of speech act, implicature and impoliteness theories. The present study hypothesizes the following: English and Arabic are different from each other in expressing blackmail in terms of speech act theory, implicature and impoliteness. To support or refute the hypothesis of the study, data consisting of 20 complaints in English and Arabic were collected from Courts of Appeal in Iraq, Britain and the United States. They are analyzed in terms of an eclectic model. The results arrived at are: English and Arabic are different in blackmail in terms of the locutionary acts and illocutionary acts. Concerning impoliteness, the same strategies are applied to the verbal offence in both languages. As far as implicature is concerned, the two languages are different in blackmail

The Linguistic Politeness Having Seen on the Current Study Issue

The current issue is overviewed in this paper about the linguistics politeness. Positive politeness strategies seek to minimize the threat to the hearer\u27s positive face. These strategies are used to make the hearer feel good about themselves, their interests or possessions, and are most usually used in situations where the audience knows each other fairly well. In sociolinguistics and conversation analysis (CA), politeness strategies are speech acts that express concern for others and minimize threats to self-esteem ("face") in particular social contexts. Being polite means being aware of and respecting the feelings of other people. Politeness can and will improve your relationships with others, help to build respect and rapport, boost your self-esteem and confidence, and improve your communication skills. Importance of Politeness in Life. Politeness is a great virtue. But a polite person will always please others with his polite behavior and good manners. Politeness means consideration for the feelings of others. Politeness is one of the central features of human communication. It is a human phenomenon, yet expressed differently in different cultures. Positive politeness refers to an atmosphere of inclusion and mutuality created by linguistic means such as compliments, encouragement, joking, even the use of "white lies.