• Professor Gunter Senft, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands
• Are the Trobriand Islanders (im)polite? - Or are their forms of behavior based on ritualized norms of social interaction?
• In my talk I present and discuss the Trobriand Islanders’ greeting behavior, one of their forms of requesting, giving and taking, the communal bewailing of a dead person as one part of a complex mourning ritual and positive face management in the Trobriander’s highly competitive but “balanced” society. I argue that the culture specific aspects of their behavior can more adequately be described within the framework of “Ritual Communication (RC)” than within classic “Politeness Theory” and explain why. For me these two approaches are not mutually exclusive at all but complementary. The RC approach – which is clearly presented and defined – provides culture-specific insights into the respective – emic – norms, rules and regulations of communicative social interactions within speech communities. These insights have to inform the definition of the – etic – theoretical concepts developed within Politeness Theory that are crucial for the recognition, identification and definition of universals shared by communicative interactions in various languages, cultures and their speech communities. In addition, I point out that if we endeavor to come up with a theory of social interaction as our ultimate goal, we also have to incorporate its biological, human-ethological basis by falling back on concepts like the so-called “Universal Interaction Strategies” as well. If we combine the three approaches Politeness Theory, Ritual Communication and ethological ideas like the concept of “Universal Interaction Strategies”, then I think that we are on a very promising track to reach the ambitious aim to come up with a theory of social interaction.
• https://www.mpi.nl/people/senft-gunter(https://www.mpi.nl/people/senft-gunter)
• Dr María del Carmen Santamaría García, University of Alcalá, Spain
• ‘I Have Been Badly, Badly Let Down' Face and Offence in the Call Centre
• This talk will present some results from my research on taking offence by customers in phone calls to an insurance company call centre based in Spain. The calls are three-way calls, including customer, agent and interpreter, and were recorded when English-speaking customers reached the company for assistance. Taking offence has been analysed as a social action initiated by customers, in which they construe the actions or behaviour by service providers of the insurance company as offensive in relation to a moral order, i.e. ‘the moral worlds evoked and made actionable in talk’ (Heritage & Lindstrom, 1998: 397). The analytical methodology employed in the analysis of the data can be described as a socio-pragmatic approach (Haugh, Kádár & Terkourafi 2021), which has been used to explore the indexical, social and moral value of offence taking in interaction within the holistic perspective of integrative pragmatics (Culpeper & Haugh 2014, Haugh & Culpeper 2018). Customers are seen to register offence by expressing a negative emotive state of feeling bad, stressed, annoyed, angry etc. and to sanction offence with a moral claim of a prior affront on the part of another participant (Haugh 2015). Hurt face sensitivities seem to trigger offence registration while frustrated behavioural expectations and failure to achieve interactional wants seem to be the source for moral claims. Results show what a socio-pragmatic approach to the analysis of taking offence can bring to the understanding of its role in social life, showing the connection between emotion and morality. Claiming offence seems to be triggered by negative emotions and judgements, suspending preference for agreeability on the part of customers, and aiming at the agent’s persuasion for the benefit of having customers’ wants fulfilled. The study presented here was part of the project Analysis of face-work in telephone interpreting (Ref. CM/JIN/2019-040), which draws on INTTELPRAGMA, a multilingual corpus of more than 350 calls to a Spanish insurance company call centre by foreign customers who have an insurance policy in Spain for different types of properties. Chinese, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish and English are the languages spoken by customers and featured in the corpus.
• https://sites.google.com/view/carmen-santamaria-garcia/home (https://sites.google.com/view/carmen-santamaria-garcia/home)
• Dr Troy McConachy, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
• Exploring (im)politeness evaluations and moral emotions in language teacher education
• For many language teachers new (or not so new) to the profession, pragmatics is often a daunting and difficult area to pin down, with many associating it broadly with the phenomenon of politeness (e.g. Schauer, 2022). This is unsurprising given the relative neglect of pragmatics in teacher education programmes and the relative predominance of theory-heavy approaches where it does exist (e.g., Ishihara & Cohen, 2022; Vásquez & Fioramonte, 2011). When it comes to dealing with politeness in language teacher education, one issue that hampers matters at a practical level is the demand for clear-cut ‘dos and donts’ that teachers can pass on to their learners. This presentation will introduce a humble attempt to approach the topic of politeness with pre-service and in-service English language teachers that aimed to generate understanding of the embodied nature of (im)politeness evaluations and other interpersonal evaluations triggered by potential moral violations. This approach entailed introducing teachers to basic concepts in meta-pragmatics and moral psychology that highlight the role of emotion in negative interpersonal evaluations. This was combined with a sequence of tasks that aimed to help teachers identify the role of (moral) emotions in their own judgments of (im)politeness. In this presentation, I will introduce this pedagogical attempt in relation to its curricular context, reflect on teachers’ reactions, and consider some of the challenges encountered.
• https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/people/mcconachy/(https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/people/mcconachy/)
