Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Politeness studies

Modern university students are expected to participate in online discussions as part of their course work as well as write emails to professors requesting meetings and explaining late paper submissions. These online written interactions require students to demonstrate advanced written pragmatic competence in English to effectively manage their relationships and studies at English medium of instruction (EMI) universities. It is therefore important for undergraduate English as second language (L2) learners to understand how politeness is expressed in online communication. However, politeness is a facet of language use which is often difficult to master because it is dependent on the relationship between the interactants and is culturally and contextually bound (Haugh, 2007). This paper discusses politeness theory and research and considers how politeness is expressed and interpreted in computer-mediated communication (CMC) in EMI university contexts.

This paper deals with politeness phenomena which are general to all human societies, but draws many examples from Korea as understood by the writer (who is Australian). The emphasis in this analysis is on the problem of decoding politeness. It is noted that even within a culture, politeness signals can be manipulated, and that interlocutors calibrate their meaning according to knowledge of individual personalities. In Korean society, the requirement for formal politeness signals is very strong, both in body language and in fixed linguistic markers (such as verb endings). However, the pragmatic meaning of these signals is calibrated in ways that are difficult for foreigners to decode. The paper also considers the dilemma of that minority of Koreans who attempt to interact within the linguistic and social codes of English. It is noted that these attempts often go astray, both because the speaker misunderstands English politeness coding conventions and because listeners in English, almost by definition, come from radically different cultural backgrounds to the Korean.

En este trabajo se analizan las estrategias de atenuación que utilizan los hablantes de un barrio de clase media-alta de Madrid (España). El concepto de atenuación que aquí se ha seguido tiene su fundamento en el principio pragmático de la cortesía: conversar es negociar para el acuerdo y mediante la atenuación reducimos el desacuerdo con nuestro interlocutor, contribuyendo con ello a lograr la aceptación lingüística y social del otro. En este análisis se verá cómo en la entrevista semidirigida los tipos de atenuación que se recogen difieren de los que caracterizan la conversación coloquial. Asimismo, se comprueba que hombres y mujeres emplean de distinta manera sus estrategias conversatorias, y en particular la atenuación, como resultado de la distinta manera en que unos y otros han sido socializados.

This examination illustrates weaknesses in the traditional research paradigm in cross-cultural studies of linguistic politeness – the use of elicited data, and the model tacitly underlying the construction of elicitation tools. This is done by discussing insights gained in a quantitative cross-linguistic study of situated, naturally occurring requests and proposals, which could not be gained using elicited data. After indicating the scale on which the current elicitation paradigm has been applied in cross-cultural pragmatics, the article summarizes the main critical points highlighted by previous research and introduces new points, such as a social pressure on the respondents to produce the kind of data expected by the researcher, and the researcher's lack of insight into the context models construed by the respondents. Finally, it is discussed how the choice of elicitation tasks is tacitly based on a dyadic model of interaction, in which the addressee is a single person and the speaker acts on his or her own behalf and only represents him- or herself. There follows a discussion of a corpus-based study of requests and proposals that compares data from British, German, and Polish versions of the reality TV show Big Brother. It is shown how quantitative study of natural data not restricted to dyadic interactions demands new categorizations of interaction parameters considered, and provides new insights into language-specific impact of contextual factors upon politeness strategies.