30 June - 2 July 2009, Lancaster University, LA1 4YT, United Kingdom

Plenary Speakers

Geoffrey Leech (University of Lancaster)
Opening Plenary: How far can a theory of politeness be a theory of impoliteness? Illustrated from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Sara Mills (Sheffield Hallam University)
Plenary Title: A discursive approach to impoliteness

Marina Terkourafi (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Plenary Title: The role of intentions in implicating (im)politeness

Karen Tracy (University of Colorado)
Plenary Title: Rude and Insulting or Reasonable Hostility? A Community’s Debate About its Conduct and the Implications for Politeness Theorizing

 

Plenary Abstracts

Prof. Geoffrey Leech (Lancaster University)  
Opening Plenary: How far can a theory of politeness be a theory of impoliteness? Illustrated from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a rich source of impoliteness in dialogue data. I will explore, using this data, the argument that a theory of politeness is also a theory of impoliteness. The theoretical framework I assume is that of the ‘General Strategy of Politeness’ (GSP) – see Leech (2007: 180-8). In pursuing the GSP, speakers will express or imply evaluative meanings which place a high value on what pertains to the other person (usually the addressee), and a low value on what pertains to the speaker. A simple way to characterize impoliteness, using this framework, is to treat is as violation of the GSP. This effectively means reversing the values above: i.e., placing a low value on what pertains to the other person and a high value on what pertains to the speaker. I will investigate some implications of this formula (with exemplification from Albee’s play), and discuss cases where the formula doesn’t quite work.  

Prof. Sara Mills (Sheffield Hallam University)  
Plenary Title: A discursive approach to impoliteness

In this paper I set out what range of analyses are possible when  drawing on a discursive approach.  Firstly I define the discursive approach, with its emphasis on contextualised analysis of longer stretches of conversation, participants' judgements and evaluations and the contested nature of these judgments about politeness and impoliteness.It is precisely the difficulty in many cases of deciding whether someone has been impolite, or at least whether they intended to be impolite, which will be the focus of the analysis section of this paper.Most analysis of impoliteness focuses on those cases of impoliteness where it appears to be clear that the speaker intended to threaten the interlocutor's face.  However, I will that impoliteness in the main is rarely as clearcut as these analyses suggest.

Leech, G. (2007) ‘Politeness: Is there an East-West divide?’, Journal of Politeness Research 3: 167-206.

Prof. Karen Tracy (University of Colorado)  
Plenary Title: Rude and Insulting or Reasonable Hostility? A Community’s Debate About its Conduct and the Implications for Politeness Theorizing

This talk brings into conversation two research areas that have occupied my thoughts for a long time: studies of politeness and facework (Craig, Tracy & Spisak, 1984; Tracy, 1990; Tracy & Tracy, 1998), and a decade-long investigation focused on the discourse of a particular U.S. local governance group (Tracy, 2007; Tracy 2008b). In the United States, education governance differs from most other Western countries in that local elected officials play an important role in setting education policy and raising taxes for their school districts. It is also the case that in school board meetings ― the regular public meetings that these governance bodies hold ― conflict and contention is commonplace. After providing background on the 35-month case study, school board meetings as a genre, and the normative ideals infusing this communicative context, I illustrate several prominent types of face attack that were regular occurrences in the meetings. Many of these moments of face attack were instances of conduct whose meaning was contested. Some in the community judged certain expressions as rude and insulting while others saw them as morally called for and needing to be said. Extending an argument I developed in a recent article in the Journal of Politeness Research (Tracy, 2008a), I make the case for why face-attacking behavior of a certain type is absolutely essential in local governance groups’ public meetings. Reasonable hostility, the name I give to desirable forms of face attack and rudeness, is a crucial style of expression in sites of ordinary democracy.

Tracy, K. (2008a). "Reasonable hostility”: Situation–appropriate face attack. Journal of Politeness Research: Language, Behaviour, Culture, 4, 169-191.

Tracy, K. (2008b). Challenges of ordinary democracy: Community, discourse, and reasonable hostility at a local school board. University of Colorado, book manuscript under review.

Tracy, K. (2007). Introduction: A moment of ordinary democracy. In K. Tracy, J. P. McDaniel, & B. E. Gronbeck (Eds.), The prettier doll: Rhetoric, discourse and ordinary democracy (pp. 3-21). Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.

Tracy, K. (1990). The many faces of facework. In H. Giles & P. Robinson (Eds.), The handbook of language and social psychology (pp. 209-226). Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons.

Craig, R. T., Tracy, K., & Spisak, F. (1986). The discourse of requests: Assessment of a politeness approach. Human Communication Research, 12, 437-468.

Tracy, K., & Tracy, S. J. (1998). Rudeness at 911: Reconceptualizing face and face-attack. Human Communication Research, 25, 225-251.

Dr. Marina Terkourafi (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Plenary Title: The role of intentions in implicating (im)politeness

In this talk I take up the thorny issue of the speaker’s intentions in communicating (im)politeness. The issue is thorny not just because a lot of (im)politeness seems to be achieved independently of the speaker’s intentions, or even in spite of them, but also because the notion of the speaker’s intentions itself as explanatory of linguistic communication has been challenged from various quarters (e.g., Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995, Asher 1999, Arundale 2008). My argument will build on two premises. First, I will attempt to clarify the role of the speaker’s intention in linguistic communication as first outlined by Grice (1957) by drawing a fine distinction between the speaker’s intention (as a second-order type of intention, which is moreover socially constituted in its genesis) and any perlocutionary effects thereby achieved. Following Fraser & Nolen (1981), I will advocate that (im)politeness is precisely such a perlocutionary effect, which may nevertheless be achieved in different ways. Second, building on the distinction between particularized and generalized implicatures in neo-Gricean approaches, I will outline two ‘modes’ of achieving (im)politeness, a marked one and an unmarked one, respectively. The speaker’s intention plays a different role in achieving (im)politeness in each of these modes, and that is why an account that foregoes reference to it runs the risk of being unable to distinguish between them. In sum, I will argue that a more fine-grained understanding of the notion of the speaker’s intention has a lot to offer to a general theory of (im)politeness and as such should not be too hastily dismissed.

References

Arundale, R. B. (2008) Against (Gricean) intentions at the heart of human interaction. Intercultural Pragmatics 5:2, 229–258.

Asher, N. (1999) Discourse structure and the logic of conversation. In K. Turner (ed), The. Semantics/Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View. Oxford/Amsterdam:. Elsevier, 19–48.

Fraser, B. & Nolen, W. (1981) The association of deference with linguistic form. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 27, 93–109.

Grice, H. P. (1957). Meaning. Philosophical Review 66, 377–388.

Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986/1995) Relevance: communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Second edition.