This book attempts to bring in the perspective of situational variation in analyzing linguistic politeness, and looks at politeness in the larger framework of social context. It outlines the way into the problem of politeness in Chinese culture and the steps taken in the application of politeness strategies in verbal interaction.
This is the first edited collection to examine politeness in a wide range of diverse cultures. Most essays draw on empirical data from a wide variety of languages, including some key-languages in politeness research, such as English, and Japanese, as well as some lesser-studied languages, such as Georgian.
This collection of 19 papers celebrates the coming of age of the field of politeness studies, now in its 30th year. It begins with an investigation of the meaning of politeness, especially linguistic politeness, and presents a short history of the field of linguistic politeness studies, showing how such studies go beyond the boundaries of conventional linguistic work, incorporating, as they do, non-language insights. The emphasis of the volume is on non-Western languages and the ways linguistic politeness is achieved with them. Many, if not most, studies have focused on Western languages, but the languages highlighted here show new and different aspects of the phenomena.The purpose of linguistic politeness is to aid in successful communication throughout the world, and this volume offers a balance of geographical distribution not found elsewhere, including Japanese, Thai, and Chinese, as well as Greek, Swedish and Spanish. It covers such theoretical topics as face, wakimae, social levels, gender-related differences in language usage, directness and indirectness, and intercultural perspectives.
This book offers an alternative approach in focusing on the ways in which face is both constituted in and constitutive of social interaction, and its relationship to self, identity and broader sociocultural expectations.
Pan and Kadar's exciting research compares historical and contemporary Chinese (im)polite communication norms and maps the similarities and differences between them. Considering the importance of China on the world stage, understanding Chinese politeness norms is pivotal, to both experts of communication studies and those who have interactions with the Chinese community.
This book draws on a number of disciplines, including sociology, cultural anthropology and political science. It examines how Chinese native speakers in the People's Republic of China, Melbourne, Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries formulate face-to-face requests. In the Chinese socio-cultural context, both li and mianzi play a prime role in the perception and conceptualization of politeness. Unlike the West, where directness is considered impolite, Chinese speakers place greater emphasis on the use of terms of address which mark relative social distance and relative power. Failure to use appropriate terms of address constitutes impoliteness. Directness is neither face-threatening nor imposing. Rather, it serves to signal ingroup solidarity. Effective communication in China demands cultural sensitivity - sensitivity to distinguish between norms and strategies in politeness.
The aim of this book is to study how politeness, and particularly face negotiation, is dealt with when subtitling between Chinese and English. Face negotiation refers to the process of managing relationships across different cultures through verbal and nonverbal interactions. This research specifically investigates how British and Chinese audiences respond to face management through a study focused on film subtitling and viewers' reception and response. The book offers a survey of the developments in research on face management in Far East cultures and in the West. The author then presents a composite model of face management for analysing face interactions in selected Chinese and English film sequences as well as its representation in the corresponding subtitles. Support for the research is provided by audience response experiments conducted with six Chinese and six British subjects, using one-on-one interviews. The audience responses show that viewers who rely on subtitles gain a significantly different impression of the interlocutors' personality, attitude and intentions than those of native audiences. The results also demonstrate that the nature of the power relations between interlocutors changes from the original to the subtitled version.
This book proposes a new theoretical and methodological approach to the investigation and explanation of intercultural differences in conflict management strategies and relational (politeness) strategies in workplace settings, taking the Chinese workplace as its focus.
This volume looks at politeness phenomena in a culture and country that is becoming the most influential in the world. It is the first book to survey politeness variations across different genres in Chinese and fills a gap in both politeness research in general and in Chinese politeness research in particular.Unlike existing studies which treat Chinese politeness phenomena as non-varying this study provides systemic evidence for how linguistic polite behaviour varies across genres in China. These intracultural variations which are investigated in the volume include addressing, backchanneling, identity construction and rapport management which are subject to the influence of genre differences such as formality of occasion, media and channel of communication, presence or absence of interlocutor or third party and role-configurations. The volume offers those who read or write Chinese texts or engage in Chinese conversation an enriched knowledge of how politeness as the most important type of interpersonal meaning is communicated in different genres in that language.