The Library

Explaining cross-cultural pragmatic findings: moving from politeness maxims to sociopragmatic interactional principles (SIPs)

Tools

Spencer-Oatey, Helen and Jiang, Wenying. (2003) Explaining cross-cultural pragmatic findings: moving from politeness maxims to sociopragmatic interactional principles (SIPs). Journal of Pragmatics, Vol.35 (No.10-11). pp. 1633-1650. ISSN 0378-2166

PDF
WRAP_Spencer-oatey_0673125-cal-290110-spencer-oateyjiang_jop03.pdf - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
Download (331Kb)

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(03)00025-0

Abstract

This paper focuses on how culture can be treated as an explanatory variable in cross-cultural pragmatic studies. It starts with a review of pragmatic maxims [Grice, H. Paul, 1989. Logic and Conversation. William James Lectures, 1967. (Reprinted in Grice, H.P. (Ed.), Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 22–40); Leech, Geoffrey N., 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman; Journal of Pragmatics 14 (1990)237], discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the concept. It then presents the findings from a British-Chinese replication of Kim's [Human Communication Research 21(1996)128] cross-cultural study of conversational constraints, and argues that the notion of maxims should be reconceptualised as sociopragmatic interactional principles (SIPs). The notion of SIPs is defined and explained, referring to the sociopragmatic-pragmalinguistic distinction [Leech, Geoffrey N., 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman; Applied Linguistics 4(1983)91] and other cross-cultural pragmatic approaches [House, Julianne, 2000. Understanding misunderstanding: a pragmatic-discourse approach to analyzing mismanaged rapport in talk across cultures. In: Spencer-Oatey, H. (Ed.), Culturally Speaking. Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures. Continuum, London; 145–164; Journal of Pragmatics 9 (1985)145]. SIPs are also discussed in relation to Brown and Levinson's [Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C., 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. CUP, Cambridge (Originally published ad ‘Universals in language usage: politeness phenomenon’ In: Goody, E. (1987), Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction. CUP, New York.)] perspectives on the impact of culture on language use. The paper ends with a call for more research to establish on an empirical basis the types of interactional principles that exist, and their interrelationships.

Item Type:

Journal Article

Subjects:

H Social Sciences > HM Sociology

Divisions:

Faculty of Social Sciences > Centre for Applied Linguistics

Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):

Intercultural communication, Interpersonal communication and culture, Pragmatics -- Research, Language and languages -- Philosophy, Politeness (Linguistics)

Journal or Publication Title:

Journal of Pragmatics

Publisher:

Elsevier BV

ISSN:

0378-2166

Official Date:

October 2003

Dates:

Date	Event
October 2003	Published

Volume:

Vol.35

Number:

No.10-11

Page Range:

pp. 1633-1650

Identification Number:

10.1016/S0378-2166(03)00025-0

Status:

Peer Reviewed

Access rights to Published version:

Open Access

References:

Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson, 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: CUP. Originally published as 'Universals in language usage: politeness phenomenon', in E. Goody (ed) (1978) Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction. New York: CUP.
Canary, Daniel J. and Brian H. Spitzberg, 1989. A model of the perceived competence of conflict strategies. Human Communication Research 15: 630–649.
Chen, Rong, 1993. Responding to compliments. A contrastive study of politeness strategies between American English and Chinese speakers. Journal of Pragmatics 20: 49-75.
Fraser, Bruce,1990. Perspectives on politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 14(2): 219-236.
Gazdar, Gerald, 1979. Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and Logical Form. New York: Academic Press.
Grice, H. Paul, 1989. Logic and conversation. William James Lectures, 1967. Reprinted in: H. P. Grice, ed., Studies in the Way of Words, 22-40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gudykunst, William, Yuko Matsumoto, Stella Ting-Toomey, Tsukasa Nishida, Kwangsu Kim, and Sam Heyman, 1996. The influences of cultural individualism–collectivism, self construals, and individual values on communication styles across cultures. Human Communication Research 22(4): 510–543.
Gu, Yueguo, 1990. Politeness phenomena in modern Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics 14: 237-257.
House, Juliane, 2000. Understanding misunderstanding: a pragmatic-discourse approach to analyzing mismanaged rapport in talk across cultures. In: H. Spencer-Oatey, ed. Culturally Speaking. Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures, 145–164. London: Continuum.
Kim, Min-Sun, 1994. Cross-cultural comparisons of the perceived importance of conversational constraints. Human Communication Research 21: 128-51.
Kim, Min-Sun, William F. Sharkey, and Theodore M. Singelis, 1994. The relationship between individuals' self-construals and perceived importance of interactive constraints. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 18(1): 117-140.
Leech, Geoffrey N, 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Lorenzo-Dus, N., 2001. Compliment respones among British and Spanish university students: a contrastive study. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 107-127.
Schwartz, Shalom, Gila Melech, Arielle Lehmann, ,Steven Burgess, Mari Harris, and Vicki Owens, 2001. Extending the cross-cultural validity of the theory of basic human
values with a different method of measurement. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 32(5): 519–542.
Sifianou, Maria, 1992. Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece. A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen, 2000. Rapport management: a framework for analysis. In: H. Spencer-Oatey, ed. Culturally Speaking. Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures, 11–46. London: Continuum.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen, 2002. Managing rapport in talk: using rapport sensitive incidents to explore the motivational concerns underlying the management of relations. Journal of Pragmatics, 34: 529–545.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen and Patrick Ng, 2001. Reconsidering Chinese modesty: Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese evaluative judgments of compliment responses. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication. 11(2): 181–201.
Thomas, Jenny, 1983. Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics 4(2): 91-112.
Thomas, Jenny, 1995. Meaning in Interaction. An Introduction to Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Watts, Richard J., 1989. Relevance and relational work: linguistic politeness as politic behavior. Multilingua 8(2/3): 131-166.
Wierzbicka, Anna, 1985. Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts. Journal of Pragmatics 9: 145–178.