(DOWNLOAD) "Speech Act Disagreement Among Young Women in Iran (Report)" by CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Speech Act Disagreement Among Young Women in Iran (Report)
- Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 204 KB
Description
The phenomenon of politeness occurs when and where one interlocutor wants to disagree with what the other interlocutor has just mentioned. When one disagrees with what a person is saying or doing, one might, in one way or another, threaten that person in his/her face. Erving Goffman, based on the work of his predecessor Emile Durkheim, introduced this concept and since then it has had an enormous impact on scholarship in the fields of pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Goffman defined face as "the positive social value a person effectively claims by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact" (Goffman 5). One of the greatest impacts of Goffman's concept was on Penelope Brown and Steffen Levinson, who extended Goffman's social emphasis on the nature of face towards an individualistic and cognitive model (see Bargiela-Chiappini). They combined Goffman's notion of face with Paul Grice's framework, which was proposed for the analysis of conversations, and came up with their own model of politeness. In this way, they entertain the idea that some basic aspects of politeness are universal; and, as a result, they contend that face is invested in the individual and can be lost and, therefore, it must be constantly attended to in the course of interaction. Brown and Levinson distinguish between two universal aspects of face, namely positive and negative ones. They define the former as "the want of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some others" and the latter as "the want of every competent adult member that his actions be unimpeded by others" (62). The authors believe that each utterance might impose a threat to the other interlocutor's face. In this regard, they contend that the assessment of the seriousness of face threatening acts (FTAs) involves the following factors in many and perhaps all cultures: 1) the social distance (D) of the speaker and hearer, 2) the relative power (P) of the speaker and hearer, and 3) the absolute ranking (R) of impositions in the particular culture (Brown and Levinson 74). Although this individualistic and cognitive model of politeness has been widely accepted, it has also been criticized on the grounds that politeness is not a universal concept but a form of social interaction which is determined by sociocultural norms of a particular society (see, e.g., Bargiela-Chiappini; Blum-Kulka; Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper; de Kadt; Edstrom; Felix-Brasdefer, Decline, Mitigation; Haugh, Revisiting; Ladegaard; Nwoye; Olshtain and Cohen; Mao; Watts). In other words, although it seems that politeness is a universal concept, at least its realization will vary from culture to culture. Therefore, the use of varying strategies of politeness across different languages and cultures has been the topic of intensive research in recent years. In fact, scholarship of intercultural pragmatics has investigated how one culture uses one strategy rather than another in order to save face in a given situation. But although these strategies have been investigated in many languages, they have remained untouched in some other languages and cultures (see Haugh, Importance; Felix-Brasdefer, Indirectness, Linguistic). Ronald Scollon and Suzanne Scollon, for example, tried to avoid the confusion that might surface as the result of using the terms "positive" and "negative" and they use the term "involvement" instead of the former and "independence" instead of the latter. They argue that this substitution emphasizes the fact that politeness is not only the result of cognitive, individualistic factors but also of group factors. Their face system includes the following determining facets: 1) deference, 2) solidarity, and 3) hierarchy. In a system of deference politeness, although none of the interlocutors exerts power over the other (- Power), the relationship is distant (+ Distance). In a system of solidarity politeness, still none of the interlocutors exerts power over the other (- Power); but, unlike i