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9275 results in Sociolinguistics

Page 453 of 464

  • 1 - Introduction

  • Penelope Brown, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands, Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
  • Foreword by John J. Gumperz
  • Book:
    Politeness
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 55-59

  • Summary

    Prologue

    This paper has a broad sweep, and a diversity of motives. It will help here at the beginning to extract and formulate pur major aims. The foremost aim is simply to describe and account for what is in the light of current theory a most remarkable phenomenon. This is the extraordinary parallelism in the linguistic minutiae of the utterances with which persons choose to express themselves in quite unrelated languages and cultures. The convergence is remarkable because, on the face of it, the usages are irrational: the convergence is in the particular divergences from some highly rational maximally efficient mode of communication (as, for example, outlined by Grice 1967, 1975). We isolate a motive — politeness, very broadly and specially defined — and then claim, paradoxically enough, that the only satisfactory explanatory scheme will include a heavy dash of rationalism. The bulk of the paper provides evidence of the parallelisms, and demonstrates their rational sources.

    But why concern ourselves with this? Is this not a problem for ethology or psychology? We confess to underlying motives of a different sort. We believe that patterns of message construction, or ‘ways of putting things’, or simply language usage, are part of the very stuff that social relationships are made of (or, as some would prefer, crucial parts of the expressions of social relations). Discovering the principles of language usage may be largely coincident with discovering the principles out of which social relationships, in their interactional aspect, are constructed: dimensions by which individuals manage to relate to others in particular ways.

  • 1 - Introduction

  • Edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin, Elinor Ochs
  • Book:
    Language Socialization across Cultures
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 1-14

  • Summary

    Socialization

    Socialization has been defined in a variety of ways, each reflecting theories of the individual and society. According to Wentworth (1980), theories of socialization have swung back and forth in terms of the role assigned to the individual in the process of becoming a member of society. Nineteenth-century theories followed Hobbes's notion of the individual as aggressive, selfish, and asocial by nature and saw socialization as the process of reshaping these natural impulses into pro-social feelings and desires (Ross 1896). Freudian theory in the early twentieth century also emphasized conflict between human nature (the id) and society (the superego) (Freud 1960). Then, with the rise of functionalism in the work of Parsons (1937, 1951) and Merton (1949), the individual is viewed as more passive and more socially directed. Through the process of socialization, individuals internalize the values of society, including those relating to personality and role behavior.

    George Herbert Mead's theory of symbolic interactionalism (1956) also emphasized the impact of society on an individual's view of “self”; individuals' perceptions of themselves are influenced by how interactional partners see them and treat them. However, for Mead, the individual is an active agent in his own socialization throughout life; individuals do not automatically internalize how others see them and the rest of the world but rather have the capacity to select images and perspectives. In this sense, individuals and society construct one another through social interaction.

  • 6 - Derivative hypotheses

  • Penelope Brown, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands, Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
  • Foreword by John J. Gumperz
  • Book:
    Politeness
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 228-238

  • Summary

    Exploitations of strategies

    Our model would predict a number of possible exploitations of the politeness strategies. We consider these briefly here.

    Trying to re-rank R, P, or D. We mentioned in section 3.4.2, in our discussion of the nature of the sociological variables that go into assessing the seriousness of an FTA, that a speaker may exploit the fundamental ambiguity that derives from the compounding of the factors D, P, and R into a single index of risk, and attempt to redefine one of the variables. That is, any FTA utterance will encode the estimated danger of the FTA, but it does not necessarily display which of the social variables is primarily responsible for the assessed weight of Wx . S and H will both have some estimate of these variables, and S may choose to try to re-rank the expectable weighting of one of the variables at the expense of the others.

    In trying to re-rank R, S may take advantage of mutual-knowledge assumptions between S and H of their respective social distance D and social power P, and S may choose to act as though R x is smaller than he in fact knows (and knows that H knows) it really is. He can do this by saying, for example, ‘Hey, Harry, how about lending me your new car!’ and hoping that the positive-politeness optimism will convince Harry that it is not a very big or unreasonable request. This is risky, as Harry may decide that it is D or P that the addressee is manipulating, rather than R, and take offence.

  • 3 - The argument: Intuitive bases and derivative definitions

  • Penelope Brown, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands, Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
  • Foreword by John J. Gumperz
  • Book:
    Politeness
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 61-84

  • Summary

    Assumptions: Properties of interactants

    We make the following assumptions: that all competent adult members of a society have (and know each other to have)

  • (i) ‘face’, the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself, consisting in two related aspects:

  • (a) negative face: the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction — i.e. to freedom of action and freedom from imposition

  • (b) positive face: the positive consistent self-image or ‘personality’ (crucially including the desire that this self-image be appreciated and approved of) claimed by interactants

  • (ii) certain rational capacities, in particular consistent modes of reasoning from ends to the means that will achieve those ends.

    • Face. Our notion of ‘face’ is derived from that of Goffman (1967) and from the English folk term, which ties face up with notions of being embarrassed or humiliated, or ‘losing face’. Thus face is something that is emotionally invested, and that can be lost, maintained, or enhanced, and must be constantly attended to in interaction. In general, people cooperate (and assume each other's cooperation) in maintaining face in interaction, such cooperation being based on the mutual vulnerability of face. That is, normally everyone's face depends on everyone else's being maintained, and since people can be expected to defend their faces if threatened, and in defending their own to threaten others' faces, it is in general in every participant's best interest to maintain each others' face, that is to act in ways that assure the other participants that the agent is heedful of the assumptions concerning face given under (i) above.

  • 8 - Teasing and shaming in Kaluli children's interactions

  • Edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin, Elinor Ochs
  • Book:
    Language Socialization across Cultures
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 165-181

  • Summary

    Introduction

    An important issue facing researchers interested in language socialization is how children learn to use culturally appropriate rhetorical means to negotiate and accomplish certain pragmatic ends. For example, how do young children acquire the culturally specific routines and affective displays necessary to manipulate others to obtain what they want and keep what they do not wish to give up?

    This chapter examines exchanges in which Kaluli adults verbally tease and shame children to achieve a variety of ends. Teasing and shaming, two related speech acts and speech events, figure prominently in Kaluli adult-adult and adult-child verbal interaction. Kaluli adults try to avoid physical intervention when trying to influence others, especially small children. Instead, they prefer verbal manipulation through teasing and shaming, and socialize their children to do the same. As in many other Pacific cultures, such as Samoa (Ochs in press), one of the major ways in which social control is achieved is through members' fear of being publicly confronted and shamed. This is especially the case when individuals take something that is not theirs to take, as in cases of theft or adultery. When members feel that the risk of getting caught is low, they may attempt such acts, and, if they are not caught, there may be little consequence for them. However, if they are caught, confrontation can occur, and shaming, which is serious, will be public.

  • Foreword

  • Penelope Brown, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands, Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
  • Foreword by John J. Gumperz
  • Book:
    Politeness
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp xiii-xiv

  • Summary

    The bulk of the material in this volume first appeared in a collection in the series Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology, volume 8. Its reissue will now make it available to a much wider audience. In the years since it first appeared it has come to be accepted as the classic treatment on politeness in communication. As an integrative treatment of phenomena previously dealt with in a variety of disciplines it is now widely cited by linguists, psychologists and students of social interaction. A major reason for this interest is that politeness, as the authors define it, is basic to the production of social order, and a precondition of human cooperation, so that any theory which provides an understanding of this phenomenon at the same time goes to the foundations of human social life.

    In addition to their status as universal principles of human interaction, politeness phenomena by their very nature are reflected in language. Societies everywhere, no matter what their degree of isolation or their socioeconomic complexity, show these same principles at work; yet what counts as polite may differ from group to group, from situation to situation, or from individual to individual. If we can find some underlying grammatical and social regularities which account both for this type of variation and for the recurrent patterns, we will have taken a major step in demonstrating and not just claiming the basically social nature of human language.

  • 6 - Social norms and lexical acquisition: a study of deictic verbs in Samoan child language

  • Edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin, Elinor Ochs
  • Book:
    Language Socialization across Cultures
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 127-152

  • Summary

    Introduction

    This study documents the spontaneous use of two deictic verbs, sau ‘to come’ and 'aumai ‘to bring/give’, in the speech of young Samoan children. A major goal of this account is to demonstrate that patterns in young children's language production must be assessed not only in terms of grammatical properties, but also in terms of pragmatic properties as evidenced in spontaneous speech. Deictic verbs are viewed here from two perspectives: as forms that refer to or indicate certain semantic relationships between persons and objects in the speech context and as forms that, when used in a particular context, constitute (wholly or partially) social acts interpreted in particular ways by the speech community.

    Previous developmental studies of deictic verbs (e.g., E. V. Clark 1978; Gathercole 1978; Keller-Cohen 1973; Macrae 1976; Richards 1976; Tanz 1980) have discussed the function of deictic verbs in English (specifically, “come,” “go,” “bring,” and “take”) in indicating movement relative to persons and objects in the situation of utterance. These analyses view speaker and addressee as having certain semantic roles specified by the utterance, e.g., actor, agent, goal, recipient. The present account focuses not only on the spatial relationships between participants, but also on the social relationships between participants in the situation of utterance and on how these relationships might affect the use of deictic verbs.

  • 8 - Implications for language studies

  • Penelope Brown, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands, Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
  • Foreword by John J. Gumperz
  • Book:
    Politeness
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 255-283

  • Summary

    Face wants as functional pressures on language

    This section describes some interrelations between grammar and face redress. We propose (a) that face redress is a powerful functional pressure on any linguistic system, and (b) that a particular mechanism is discernible whereby such pressures leave their imprint on language structure.

    Functionalism in linguistic theory. Before we proceed, a few remarks on some trends in linguistic theory should be made. Recently, after a period of suppression by the methodological presuppositions of transformational generative grammar, there has been a resurgence of interest in functionalist explanation — that is, in the search for a source outside the purely linguistic system that might motivate the bulk of grammatical constraints. Most of this work attempts to locate such sources in the principles of cognitive processing, or in the interaction of language with other mental faculties.

    In contrast to what we may call ‘internal’ cognitive functionalist explanation, there are ‘external’ pragmatic theories that seek to link linguistic structures to the organization of communication. The theories of Grice (1971) and Searle (1969) are wholeheartedly of this latter sort, but more tentative partial pragmatic functionalisms are to be found in work stemming largely from the Lakoffs and scattered through issues of the Chicago Linguistic Society papers and in Cole and Morgan 1975.

  • 2 - Calling-out and repeating routines in Kwara'ae children's language socialization

  • Edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin, Elinor Ochs
  • Book:
    Language Socialization across Cultures
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 17-50

  • Summary

    Growing interest among child-language researchers in how routines shape children's language acquisition has led to studies of individual routines, focused primarily on what aspects of communicative competence they teach and how they teach them. Less attention has been paid to how individual routines in speakers' repertoires are interrelated. Yet, as Boggs (1985) points out, in order to interpret the meaning of a routine used in a particular instance, it is important to know both the content as understood by the speakers and why one routine rather than some other was selected. The latter concern is embodied in Hymes's (1974) concept of “speech economy,” which has to do with the distribution of particular codes and modes of speech in the various relationships found within a speech community (Boggs 1985). The notion of speech economy directs the researcher's attention to several levels of analysis, including the degree to which routines are shared across a speech community, a routine's form and usage across situations and participants, what each routine is “for,” contextual or other features (such as participation structure) that elicit a particular routine, and the life histories of routines.

    Reflecting on these issues has been very useful in helping us to organize an analysis of routines engaged in by Kwara'ae caregivers and children. This paper focuses on two interrelated routines, calling out and repeating, which are key routines in Kwara'ae children's language socialization.

Page 453 of 464