Book contents
- From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness
- From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Im/politeness between the Analyst and Participant Perspectives: An Overview of the Field
- Part I Concepts and Cultural Norms Underlying Speech Acts
- 1 Offers in Greek Revisited
- 2 Politeness, Praising, and Identity Construction in a Greek Food Blog
- 3 Online Compliments of Iranian Facebook Users
- 4 Qué perfección : Complimenting Behaviour among Ecuadorian Teenage Girls on Instagram
- 5 Not All Positive: On the Landscape of Thanking Items in Cypriot Greek
- 6 Researching Im/politeness in Face-to-Face Interactions: On Disagreements in Polish Homes
- Part II Concepts and Cultural Norms Underlying Politeness
- Epilogue: Personal Encounters with Politeness Research
- Index
- References
5 - Not All Positive: On the Landscape of Thanking Items in Cypriot Greek
from Part I - Concepts and Cultural Norms Underlying Speech Acts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2019
Book contents
- From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness
- From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Im/politeness between the Analyst and Participant Perspectives: An Overview of the Field
- Part I Concepts and Cultural Norms Underlying Speech Acts
- 1 Offers in Greek Revisited
- 2 Politeness, Praising, and Identity Construction in a Greek Food Blog
- 3 Online Compliments of Iranian Facebook Users
- 4 Qué perfección : Complimenting Behaviour among Ecuadorian Teenage Girls on Instagram
- 5 Not All Positive: On the Landscape of Thanking Items in Cypriot Greek
- 6 Researching Im/politeness in Face-to-Face Interactions: On Disagreements in Polish Homes
- Part II Concepts and Cultural Norms Underlying Politeness
- Epilogue: Personal Encounters with Politeness Research
- Index
- References
Summary
Armostis and Terkourafi’s chapter focuses on aspects of politeness underrepresented in politeness research: prosody and the (competing) functions of borrowed and inherited linguistic items expressing politeness. Their first experiment looks at different phonological variants of thank you and the intonation patterns with which it is used, and establishes the contexts in which it is likely to be interpreted as a sincere form of thanking by speakers of Cypriot Greek. It shows that the decisive phonetic dimension is intonation; non-rising intonation is interpreted as sincere, especially in women’s speech. In the second experiment, participants listened to stimuli varying in choice of thanking item, intonation and address terms, and evaluated them on 14 dimensions expressing positive and negative attitudes. The results show that borrowed thank you is more likely to be evaluated as off-putting, curt, and arrogant than inherited efxariˈsto when used in high-imposition contexts, though the addition of address forms has a uniformly positive effect on both forms. The authors use these results to tease apart the effects of intonation and lexis on the evaluation of an utterance as im/polite.
Keywords
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- Information
- From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of PolitenessMultilingual and Multicultural Perspectives, pp. 117 - 145Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019
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