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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

By
Spyros Armostis  and
Marina Terkourafi
Edited by
Eva Ogiermann  and
Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
Eva Ogiermann
Affiliation:
King's College London
Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Charlotte
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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

Emic
Type
Chapter
Information
From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness
Multilingual and Multicultural Perspectives
 , pp. 117 - 145
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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