No abstract

This paper attempts to fill a gap in politeness research by introducing the concept of behavioural politeness and including the hearer as a significant component in the proposed analytical framework, which is set in the context of a cross-cultural study. Research into politeness has predominantly focused on linguistic features and on the speaker. Little attention has been paid to politeness as a whole unit of behaviour, and to the perspective of the hearer/receiver, i. e. how the hearer/receiver would judge politeness. It is proposed that politeness manifested through behaviour, i. e. behavioural politeness, and evaluation of politeness by the hearer/receiver are also important, and this paper takes the evaluation of attentiveness as an example of behavioural politeness using subjects from three cultural backgrounds. An attempt is also made to characterise the cultures (British, Japanese and Swiss) involved in this study in order to clarify this significant variable.

This paper investigates how Japanese university students performed in English, when offering something to someone and when making requests, in situations where the addresser and the addressee are equal in status, and the degrees of closeness between them are different. The performances by the Japanese subjech were compared with those of native English-speaking people. The major findings of this study include: (1) the Japanese subjects could not use appropriate expressions according to situations. even when they wanted to be more polite to the addressees; and (2) the expressions used by the Japanese subjects were too direct in most situations, and sounded rude. This meant that the Japanese subjects could not express their intentions in English, when they wanted to differentiate expressions under various situations. The results of this study revealed that the pragmatic competence of Japanese learners of English needs to be reinforced in their language instruction.

While the notion of face has continued to play a key role in many accounts of im/politeness, there has increasingly been calls for im/politeness to be theorized in its own right, drawing from the emic understandings of members in relation to im/politeness. In this paper, we make a contribution to this latter agenda by comparing emic understandings of attentiveness, and the related notions of empathy and anticipatory inference, in Japanese and Taiwanese Mandarin Chinese. Drawing from metapragmatic interviews with Japanese and Taiwanese participants from two different generations, we suggest that there are both similarities and differences in the ways in which these notions are conceptualized among speakers of Japanese and Mandarin Chinese spoken in Taiwan. It was found that while the participants evaluated these practices positively, and in some cases linked to politeness concerns, in other instances they evaluated them negatively. Intracultural variability also emerged in the course of our cross-generational-cultural comparison. We conclude that further work investigating the metapragmatics of interpersonal notions such as attentiveness, empathy and anticipatory inference is necessary if we are to better understand the moral grounds on which evaluations of im/politeness are made across different languages and cultures.

This paper looks into whether there are any differences in demonstration of attentiveness between different generations and different cultures. By attentiveness I mean a demonstrator’s preemptive response to a beneficiary’s verbal/non-verbal cues or situations surrounding a beneficiary and a demonstrator, which takes the form of offering. When and how often one would demonstrate attentiveness may vary according to such factors as generation and culture. Three groups of people from different generations and different cultural backgrounds (Japanese and Americans) served as the participants (280 people for the questionnaire data and 18 people for the interview data). It was investigated whether there were any differences among the participants in demonstration of attentiveness, in the reasons for demonstration of attentiveness, and in rating degree of imposition to demonstrate attentiveness. It was also examined whether there was any relationship between degree of imposition to demonstrate attentiveness and demonstration of attentiveness; and in which relationship (the relationship between a demonstrator and a beneficiary of attentiveness varied from very familiar to not very familiar at all) attentiveness was demonstrated. The data were collected using a questionnaire with six situations, based on field notes; and the interviews were conducted using the same six situations. The results show that in most situations there were no major differences among the participants in the choice of demonstration of attentiveness and the reasons for it. The participants chose to demonstrate attentiveness in four situations in the questionnaire, because they wanted to be of help to the other party. There was a relationship between degree of imposition to demonstrate attentiveness and demonstration of attentiveness in four situations. Overall, the interview data confirmed the questionnaire data.