Speech Acts and Politeness across Languages and Cultures

Speech Acts and Politeness are among the main areas of interest in pragmatics. These communicative phenomena can be considered universal and at the same time language and culture-specific. It is this latter dimension that has been at the centre of recent developments in pragmatics, and it is also the focus of this book. The aim of this book is to reflect this development, providing evidence from four main areas crucial to pragmatics across languages and cultures: a description of a variety of speech acts and politeness strategies in different languages and cultures, a cross-cultural comparison of several speech acts and patterns of politeness, an in-depth analysis of issues concerning the learning and teaching of speech acts and politeness in second/foreign languages, as well as some methodological resources in pragmatics. This book is intended for researchers, scholars and students interested in the field of pragmatics, in general, or in the fields of cross-cultural and second/foreign language pragmatics, and specifically for those interested in speech acts and politeness. It will also be useful to any scholar interested in how communication and culture are related.

Autorentext

Leyre Ruiz de Zarobe is Associate Profesor in French Linguistics in the Department of French Philology at the University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. Her main research interests and publications are in the field of French pragmatics, discourse analysis, and French as a Second/Foreign Language. Yolanda Ruiz de Zarobe is Associate Professor in English Linguistics in the Department of English Philology at the University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. Her main research interests and publications are in the field of second language acquisition and multilingualism.

Inhalt

Contents: Eva Ogiermann: About Polish Politeness - Deniz Zeyrek: Thanking in Turkish: A Corpus-based Study - Spyridoula Bella/Maria Sifianou: Greek Student E-mail Requests to Faculty Members - Luis M. Larringan/Itziar Idiazabal: 'Generic you ' in Basque: A Politeness Strategy in Young People Debates? - Xiangying Jiang: Politeness and Facework in Chinese Language and Culture - Kathrin Siebold: Implicit and Explicit Thanking in Spanish and German - Leyre Ruiz de Zarobe: Learning-offers on the Internet in Spanish and French - Maria Shardakova: Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Use of Humor by Russian and American English Speakers - J. César Félix-Brasdefer/Maria Hasler-Barker: Complimenting and Responding to a Compliment in the Spanish FL Classroom: From Empirical Evidence to Pedagogical Intervention - Seonaid Beckwith/Jean-Marc Dewaele: The Effect of two Years Abroad on the Development of Apologies in the Japanese L2 of Adult English Native Speakers - Otilia Martí Arnándiz: Are Women more Polite than Men? The Effect of Gender on the Use of Request Modifiers by Spanish EFL University Students - Vesna Mikolic: Teaching Slovenian and Italian Communication Style - Eva Ogiermann/Denise Saßenroth: Statistics in Contrastive Pragmatics.