Face and Rapport Management

We use politeness every day when interacting with other people. Yet politeness is an impressively complex linguistic process, and studying it can tell us a lot about the social and cultural values of social groups or even a whole society, helping us to understand how humans 'encode' states of mind in their words. The traditional, stereotypical view is that people in selected English-speaking cultures are indirect, deferential and polite - sometimes more polite than seems necessary, at least when compared to German-speaking environments. This advanced seminar will take a fresh look at the phenomenon, showing that the situation is far more complex than these stereotypes would suggest. The seminar will offer an account of a wide range of politeness phenomena in English, illustrated by hundreds of examples of actual language use taken largely from authentic British and American sources. We will take a pragmatic approach that is based on the controversial notion that politeness is equivalent to communicative altruism, and drawing on neo-Gricean thinking, we will reject the prevalent view that it is impossible to apply the terms ‘polite’ or ‘impolite’ to linguistic phenomena. We will cover all major speech acts that are either positively or negatively associated with politeness, such as requests, apologies, compliments, offers, criticisms, good wishes, condolences, congratulations, agreement, and disagreement. If time permits, we will also deal with impoliteness and the related phenomena of irony (‘mock politeness’) and banter (‘mock impoliteness’). The following textbook will be used in class and is recommended for purchase: Leech, Geoffrey. 2014. The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Please make sure that you order your copy of the book asap. Please check Stud.IP for updates and additional information as the semester approaches. Further secondary literature will be made available on my reserve shelf in the FBL. Deutsche und Englische Linguistik, Master of Arts LingA1, FAL 2 Registration – Stud.IP 01.09.2016-30.09.2016 Size restriction – 25 Prerequisites – LingF1-LingF4 (FüBA) Further information –rainer.schulze@engsem.uni-hannover.de Universität Hannover WiSe 2016/17 Englisch, Master LbS Prof. Dr. phil. Schulze Rainer phil