Politeness Across Cultures 11/18/2010 5:08:25 PM Also by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini THE HANDBOOK OF BUSINESS DISCOURSE (editor, 2009) FACE, COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL INTERACTION (co-editor with Michael Haugh, 2009) BUSINESS DISCOURSE (with Catherine Nickerson and Brigitte Planken, 2007) ASIAN BUSINESS DISCOURSE(S) (co-editor with Maurizio Gotti, 2005) WRITING BUSINESS: GENRES, MEDIA AND DISCOURSES (co-editor with Catherine Nickerson, 1999) THE LANGUAGES OF BUSINESS: AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE (co-editor with Sandra J. Harris, 1997) MANAGING LANGUAGE: THE DISCOURSE OF CORPORATE MEETINGS (with Sandra J. Harris, 1997) Also by Dániel Z. Kádár POLITENESS IN CHINA AND JAPAN (with Michael Haugh, forthcoming) CHINESE DISCOURSE AND INTERACTION (co-editor with Yuling Pan, 2011) POLITENESS IN EAST ASIA (co-editor with Sara Mills, 2011) UNDERSTANDING HISTORICAL (IM)POLITENESS (co-editor with Marcel Bax, 2011) POLITENESS IN HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY CHINESE (with Yuling Pan, 2010) HISTORICAL CHINESE LETTER WRITING (2010) HISTORICAL (IM)POLITENESS (co-editor with Jonathan Culpeper, 2010) MODEL LETTERS IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA: 60 SELECTED EPISTLES FROM ‘LETTERS OF SNOW SWAN RETREAT’ (2009) IT’S THE DRAGON’S TURN: CHINESE INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSES (co-editor with Hao Sun, 2008) TERMS OF (IM)POLITENESS: A STUDY OF THE COMMUNICATIONAL PROPERTIES OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE (IM)POLITE TERMS OF ADDRESS (2007) 9780230_236486_01_prexiv.indd ii 11/18/2010 5:08:25 PM Politeness Across Cultures Edited by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini Honorary Associate Professor, University of Warwick, UK and Dániel Z. Kádár Research Fellow, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Associate Professor, Asia University, Taiwan 9780230_236486_01_prexiv.indd iii 11/18/2010 5:08:25 PM Selection and editorial matter © Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Dániel Z. Kádár 2011 Foreword © Chris Christie 2011 Epilogue © Sandra Harris 2011 Chapters © their individual authors 2011 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-23648-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-31456-0 ISBN 978-0-230-30593-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230305939 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Transferred to Digital Printing in 2012 9780230_236486_01_prexiv.indd iv 11/18/2010 5:08:26 PM Contents Acknowledgements vii Foreword by Chris Christie ix Notes on Contributors xi 1 Introduction: Politeness Research In and Across Cultures 1 Dániel Z. Kádár and Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini Part I: Face in Interaction 2 Some Issues with the Concept of Face: When, What, How and How Much? 17 Jim O’Driscoll 3 On the Concept of Face and Politeness 42 Maria Sifianou Part II: Im/politeness in Intracultural Interaction 4 Im/politeness, Rapport Management and Workplace Culture: Truckers Performing Masculinities on Canadian Ice-Roads 61 Louise Mullany 5 Why Are Israeli Children Better at Settling Disputes Than Israeli Politicians? 85 Zohar Kampf and Shoshana Blum-Kulka 6 Korean Honorifics and ‘Revealed’, ‘Ignored’ and ‘Suppressed’ Aspects of Korean Culture and Politeness 106 Lucien Brown 7 Modern Chinese Politeness Revisited 128 Yueguo Gu 8 Modes of Address Between Female Staff in Georgian Professional Discourse: Medical and Academic Contexts 149 Manana Rusieshvili v 9780230_236486_01_prexiv.indd v 11/18/2010 5:08:26 PM vi Contents Part III: Im/politeness and Face: Intercultural and Crosscultural Perspectives 9 Indirectness in Zimbabwean English: A Study of Intercultural Communication in the UK 171 Karen Grainger 10 On Im/politeness Behind the Iron Curtain 194 ń Eva Ogiermann and Małgorzata Suszczy ska 11 Conflict, Culture and Face 216 Yasuhisa Watanabe 12 Cultural Variability in Face Interpretation and Management 237 Ewa Bogdanowska-Jakubowska Epilogue by Sandra Harris 258 Index of Names 267 Index of Subjects 272 9780230_236486_01_prexiv.indd vi 11/18/2010 5:08:26 PM Acknowledgements We would like to express our gratitude to the following colleagues who generously acted as reviewers: Kate Beeching, Ronald Carter, Chris Christie, Jonathan Culpeper, Bethan Davies, Holly Didi-Ogren, Sandra Harris, Michael Haugh, Thomas Holtgraves, Kathryn M. Howard, Noriko Inagaki, Alan H. Kim, Kenneth Kong, Miriam Locher, Leyla Marti, Andrew Merrison, Sara Mills, Shigeko Okamoto, Annick Ş Paternoster and ükriye Ruhi. We are particularly grateful to Chris Christie and Sandra Harris for agreeing to write the Preface and the Epilogue, respectively. We would also like to thank Priyanka Gibbons and her colleagues at Palgrave Macmillan for their support in completing this project. vii 9780230_236486_01_prexiv.indd vii 11/18/2010 5:08:27 PM Foreword In recent years there has been an urgent need for a volume that focuses on politeness phenomena across cultures that goes beyond the more heavily studied European languages but that, in doing so, also critically engages with the theoretical developments in politeness research that have proliferated during this time. Although the postmodern turn, in particular, has acted as a corrective to the flattening out and sometimes erasure of key aspects of cultural difference in some of the projects that adopted earlier models of politeness, recent theoretical developments have presented other problems for research in the field, such as difficul- ties in adequately operationalising some of the analytical concepts new frameworks have made available. Indeed, there has been a danger of a new, sometimes insufficiently questioned, orthodoxy overtaking polite- ness research that has had the potential to close down rather than open up the scope of politeness scholarship. The richness of the data and the analysis presented in this volume is therefore particularly welcome because it offers an evidence-based body of work that is used by the con- tributors in this volume – or else has the potential to be used in future scholarship – to direct important questions at these newer paradigms. As such, the volume provides both the grounds and the impetus for the current debates to move on so that new and previously unconsidered questions can be asked about what is meant by the terms ‘culture’, ‘face’ and ‘politeness’ and what is the relationship between them. In particular, many of the chapters in this volume prepare the ground for a more informed engagement with the debates about first and sec- ond order notions of politeness and of face that have been generated by the recent politeness frameworks. These are key issues for any engage- ment with interactions across cultures: if there is not some sense that related phenomena are being addressed within and across a cultural divide, the comparisons or contrasts that scholarship brings into view can have no relevance. While evaluations of the relative merits and validity of etic and emic accounts of politeness phenomena are still being played out in the literature, for politeness research to take place at all it is necessary to be able to use the abstract term ‘politeness’ as though writer and reader were able to assign a meaningful concept to that term. At some level, then, a tacit acceptance of a second order notion of politeness is a necessary precondition of any politeness ix 9780230_236486_01_prexiv.indd ix 11/18/2010 5:08:27 PM x Foreword research, and in particular of politeness research that engages with cul- tural difference. This may actually mean that research into politeness across cultures, in resting on such a precarious axiom, is itself a pre- carious enterprise. However, the extent to which the authors in this volume are able to articulate a case for seeing, in the specific cultural contexts they are addressing and in other contexts, a sufficient corres- pondence between conceptualisations of behaviour and how that behaviour is evaluated indicates that there are solid grounds for accept- ing such a precondition. And the pay-off for accepting it is that the studies here are able to bring into view a wealth of ways of understand- ing culture-specific perceptions and behaviours that do not underplay variation in either the cultures under discussion or the conceptualisa- tions of face and politeness they are engaging with. The editors of this volume, in bringing together chapters that fore- ground heterogeneity in the conceptualisation and realisation of face and politeness and a willingness to engage with all of the attendant issues that this raises, offer a very welcome addition to existing polite- ness scholarship, and a gift to future scholarship in the field. Chris Christie Loughborough University 9780230_236486_01_prexiv.indd x 11/18/2010 5:08:27 PM