Politeness in Teams

Politeness Orientation in Social Hierarchies in Urdu

The present research is aimed at investigating how the politeness of the speakers of Urdu is influenced by their relative social status in society. The researcher took politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) as a model. To observe politeness of Urdu speakers, speech act of apology with different strategies was selected. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was used as an instrument to...

A Benchmark for Politeness

K. Allan () Monash University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] Abstract (Im)politeness is never a depersonalized, decontextualized absolute but always a perception or judgement of appropriate behaviour on a given occasion—what one expects oneself and others to do in a particular social interaction. Nevertheless, it is normal for most tabooed words and phrases to be castigat...

Understanding of linguistic politeness

Communication is an act of cooperation between two or more partners (Grice, 1975), and people normally assume that their communicators would speak in a way that is maximally truthful and informative. Imagine two people in a conversation, Tom and Sally, who are talking about pets they own. Tom says to Sally: “I have two dogs.” Assuming that Tom is a cooperative speaker, and that Sally also belie...

Anticipated versus Inferred Politeness

A number of researchers have recently argued that politeness is not always inferred in the form of an implicature as claimed by Brown and Levinson (1987), but rather can be anticipated by addressees when it involves expected behaviour. The distinction between anticipated and inferred politeness is thus an important area for further development of politeness theory. In this paper, the way in whi...

Culture, Politeness and Directive