Understanding (im)politeness in context
Although it is axiomatic that (im)politeness needs to be studied in context, people tend to think about words out of context and generalize whether they are appropriate or not. For example, politicians often take their rivalsâ campaign speeches out of context and respond with endless malicious slander that derails meaningful discussions of potential solutions. Lawyers tend to provide their own interpretations of utterances taken out of context for the purposes of defending clients and winning cases. In everyday life, ordinary people may jump to conclusions about their interlocutorâs attitude and get into a fight based on their perception of the interlocutorâs intended meaning without considering the context of words. Some linguists might study sentences out of context and propose universal grammatical patterns and pragmatic norms across cultures. In contrast, many empirical studies have disclosed the essential role of context in how people use and view language. We, however, need more research on what exactly comprises context. As Bunt and Black (2000: 2) argued, âa clarification of what constitutes context, and of the relation of utterances to context, supplied by research in pragmatics, may provide much better analytic tools for the study of language in social contexts.â
Researchers have not reached consensus about what context is. Blommaert (2005) asserted that context refers to all the circumstances in which language users construct and construe text or talk. Young (2009) contended that context is a comprehensive system of physical, spatiotemporal, sociopolitical, and interactional conditions. Clitheroe, Stokols, and Zmuidzinas (1998) believed that context consists of mutually dependent features of surroundings. Traditionally, context is âa more or less direct relationship between situational, societal, political or cultural aspects of the âenvironmentâ of text and talkâ (van Dijk 2006: 161). In addition to the sociocultural and interactional settings, context should include âcognitive framing or salient common groundâ (Bach 2006: 21). Interlocutorsâ knowledge about the world should be part of the context (Sperber and Wilson 1986). According to the sociocognitive perspective, context is a special mental model that mediates between language and society (van Dijk 2009). Unfortunately, the varying definitions of context do not concretize contextual elements that can help us understand the practice and perception of (im)politeness.
It seems that from pragmatic perspectives, context can be cognitive, interactional, and social. It involves psychological, linguistic, sociocultural, epistemic, and spatiotemporal factors that affect interactantsâ language use. From sociolinguistic perspectives, context might be a given when it concerns independent social variables or personal traits, such as sex, age, class, or ethnicity. Context is global and macro in that it can be related to a larger reference frame that allows for generalization. From discursive perspectives, context may be chosen since interactants co-construct it when interacting and negotiating with each other in conversation. It is local and micro when connected with utterances, turns, body language, or situational factors such as relative power and social distance. Despite the disparate perspectives, the various aspects of context can complement, rather than contradict, one another. Context can exist in perception, vary according to sociocultural and personal variables, and be (re)constructed in conversational interaction.
The field of language and discourse has discussed context for decades. Goffman (1974, 1981) portrayed context as dynamic because people often move from one context to another. One of the most renowned developments was Hymesâ (1974) SPEAKING grid. To capture the context of communication, the researcher must provide details about setting and scene (physical and psychological circumstances), participants (speakers and addressees), ends (interactional goals), act sequence (message forms and message contents), key (tone of voice), instrumentalities (communication modalities and speech styles), norms (social interaction rules), and genre (the kind of event). Gumperz (1992) further argued that human beings store social knowledge in mind and then apply it to conversational interaction. The human mind processes and interprets language use and sociocultural activities in context. In social interactions, interactants tend to give phonetic, lexical, structural, or non-verbal cues. Through the cues, they often import context into communication, recreate context in communication, and export context from communication. Context often contains both linguistic and non-linguistic cues for interactants to decipher. Interactants must decide how to respond and what to do next. They have opportunities to accept, modify, or reject what is derived from a prior context. In this negotiation process, context is interactionally organized, deconstructed, reconstructed, and co-constructed. When the speaker creates âa context which matches an external context assumed by the addresseeâ (Li and Li 1996: 130), the ongoing conversation may be perceived as politic, appropriate, or polite.
The notion of context encompasses all the things that interconnect with the object of inquiry in some way and are crucial components for achieving an understanding of the object. Anything that is relevant to the object of inquiry contributes to our understanding of the object, including the spatiotemporal setting, interactantsâ individual traits and social world, their psychological world, and the contextual cues that emerge in their actual interactions. Bousfield (2008) posited that context also comprises presumptions that both speakers and addressees hold when producing and interpreting utterances. Fetzer (2012) argued that context is epistemic, sociocultural, interactional, emergent, fluid, and relational. It synchronically and diachronically connects communicative acts with a tremendous number of parameters on varying facets and layers. In contrast, the literature has paid little attention to the extent to which understanding the object of inquiry also requires an examination of researchersâ contexts and their research processes (de Saint-Georges 2012). In other words, researchers differ in their academic training and beliefs. The theoretical frameworks and the research methods for data collection and data analysis that researchers decide to employ can greatly influence their research findings and interpretations concerning the object of inquiry, even though researchers might strive to avert bias and remain objective.
Take myself for example. My academic training in interactional sociolinguistics and pragmatics has formed my strong belief in the influence of context on speech behavior and human interaction. The time and place of the interaction; the conversation topic; contextualization cues; and interactantsâ prior knowledge, experiences, stance, personal traits, status difference, and social distance (Gumperz 1982) can all affect the interactantsâ linguistic choices, communicative acts, and pragmatic perceptions. This belief has driven me to not adopt CA. In CA, âcontext is the immediate sequential context (what was just said) that is relevant to peopleâs conduct in a moment of interactionâ (Young 2009: 50). The immediate sequential context does not include individual traits or sociocultural environments. Although CA is âa very powerful methodology for understanding talk-in-interactionâ (Young 2009: 85), the circumstances that are not reflected in the transcript, analysis beyond the sequential context, and complete exploration of interactantsâ backgrounds (Cicourel 1995, 2000) are critical for us to really understand the interaction. My prior education showed me that interactantsâ sociocultural and personal contexts are essential for us to investigate the practice of extended concurrent speech for strong disagreement and the perception of the (in)appropriateness of the communicative act in the interactional context. Therefore, I collected spontaneous conversations, questionnaires, playback, and unstructured interviews to gain a relatively comprehensive view of the practice and perception of extended concurrent speech for strong disagreement in context. In this book, I examine the diverse data sources through interactional sociolinguistic methods, extract varying understandings of the communicative act, and interpret (in)appropriateness in context.
Recognizing context as the key to understanding (im)politeness in interactional conversation is a recent development. In the twentieth century, researchers who studied (im)politeness (e.g., Lakoff 1973; Leech 1983) took advantage of their native-speaker intuitions to examine the appropriateness of single utterances out of context. For instance, the speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) discusses the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts in isolated sentences without considering the effects of contextual factors and the functions of non-linguistic features in interaction. As I mentioned before, CA seeks to discover the structure of communication, such as opening, turn-taking, and closing (Schegloff and Sacks 1973), in the interactional context while ignoring the influence of the sociocultural context and the personal context on human communication. CA views each utterance as being dependent on its surrounding utterances, instead of non-linguistic personal or sociocultural situations. Typically, CA does not address the (in)appropriateness of utterances, although Schegloff (2000) believed that overlapping beyond the third syllable is problematic. Gricean pragmatics (Grice 1975) prioritizes speakers over addressees and fails to acknowledge the evaluative feature of (im)politeness from addresseesâ point of view, although (im)politeness is âconstantly negotiatedâ and ârenegotiatedâ (Locher 2004: 264) in the interaction where addressees, just like speakers, actively contribute to the built context (Locher 2006).
The most influential pragmatics theory in the twentieth century was Brown and Levinsonâs (1987) politeness theory. It claims that people display positive face when aspiring to connect with others and negative face when wishing to be left alone. Before delivering potentially face-threatening acts, speakers intend to mitigate face threats to manifest politeness toward addressees. The politeness theory has been advanced by Wattsâs (2003) proposal that politic behavior prevails in everyday life and by Culpeperâs (2011) model of impoliteness, which demonstrates strategies employed in situations such as army training (Culpeper 1996), traffic disputes (Culpeper, Bousfield, and Wichmann 2003), or TV shows (Culpeper 2005). Although Brown and Levinson (1987) did argue that social distance, relative power, and ranking of the imposition affect interactantsâ strategy choices, they did not seem to constrain their proposal culturally. After the discovery of empirical evidence against universal politeness in non-English-speaking cultures, many researchers have criticized their overgeneralization (e.g., Matsumoto 1988; Byon 2006). Furthermore, politeness means more than speakersâ attempts to mitigate face threats revealed only by researchersâ interpretations. It is uncertain whether addressees would interpret the attempts as polite until researchers elicit and analyze their assessments and emic perspectives (Locher and Langlotz 2008).
Spencer-Oatey and KĂĄdĂĄr (2016) convincingly posited that both emic and etic approaches can contribute to (im)politeness research. Culture-specific emic perspectives such as beliefs and ideologies can help us comprehend the impact of culture on interpersonal interaction and (im)politeness evaluations. The scope of culture can be as broad as national culture, ethnic culture, and regional culture, or as narrow as a community culture or a small-group culture (Spencer-Oatey and KĂĄdĂĄr 2016). Culture can consist of âassumptions and values, orientations to life, beliefs, policies, procedures, and behavioural conventions that are shared by a group of people, and that influence (but do not determine) each memberâs behaviour and his/her interpretations of the âmeaningâ of other peopleâs behaviourâ (Spencer-Oatey 2008: 3). Speakers from Western cultures and Eastern cultures may hold some opposite ideologies and perform communicative acts differently. But the East-West divide is not clear-cut in pragmatics due to shared commonalities among the cultures (Leech 2007). Mills (2011) rightly argued against the assumption that politeness in Eastern cultures is only community-oriented and politeness in Western cultures is only individual-oriented. Meanwhile, it is vital to recognize that culture can constrain our expectations in terms of the (in)appropriateness of communicative acts and our interpretations of the acts. We expect certain norms of speech and behavior in certain contexts and judge people to be (im) polite based on our normative anticipations (Haugh 2013). Neither universalism nor relativism would be tenable (Leech 2007) if we did not consider sociocultural, interactional, and personal contexts in the analysis of the (im)politeness of communicative acts.
The early twenty-first century witnessed the emergence of new directions in (im)politeness research. The new directions include the discursive approach. Discourse analysts (e.g., Eelen 2001; Mills 2003, 2011; Watts 2003, 2005; Locher 2004, 2006; Locher and Watts 2005; Bousfield 2008; Bousfield and Locher 2008) intend to account for (im)politeness in the interactional context without following a general predictive model (KĂĄdĂĄr and Mills 2011). They highlight the elusive nature of (im)politeness and the evaluation of interactants in analysis. They realize that interactants can switch between soft and firm tones or between formal and informal styles to indicate their awareness of their social roles in the interactional context. Politeness is âinteractionally achieved through the evaluations of self and other (or their respective groups) that emerge in the sequential unfolding of interactionâ (Haugh 2007: 295). Politeness is not a pre-existing, cross-culturally generalizable, or universal entity. It is transformed over time and space, resulting in synchronic and diachronic variations in practice and perception. Accordingly, discourse analysts recognize the complexity of (im)politeness (Mills 2009). They tend to focus on local specificities in context that can influence interactantsâ negotiation and interpretation of (im)politeness and shape practice-based norms in a community. They try to âdevelop a more contingent type of theorising which will account for contextualized expressions of politeness and impolitenessâ (KĂĄdĂĄr and Mills 2011: 8). I maintain that the contingent type of theorizing should go beyond the local interactional context to encompass sociocultural and personal contexts, because all of these contexts contribute to our understanding of the practice of communicative acts and the perception of (im)politeness.
