Politeness and memory for the wording of remarks

Abstract

Three experiments were conducted to examine whether people spontaneously remember the wording used to convey politeness, In all experiments, subjects heard statements varying in politeness that had been made by either a high-status (e,g" a professor) or equal-status (e.g, another student) speaker. Subjects' incidental memory for these statements was then tested with either a recognition (Experiments 1 and 3) or a recall (Experiment 2) procedure. As expected, there was evidence of significant memory for wording that conveyed politeness, and subjects were more likely to remember forms that were incongruous with the speaker's status. There was also some evidence that subjects encoded the politeness of a remark even when they were unable to recall the specific remark. The results demonstrate the role of the interpersonal dimension in the processing of language in context.There have been only a handful of studies that have examined incidental memory for the wording of remarks in naturally occurring situations. This is unfortunate, because language use in real interactions (as opposed to the abstract materials used in laboratory studies) has an interpersonal dimension, and it is likely that this dimension will play some role in memory for the wording ofremarks. One feature of language with clear interpersonal implications is politeness (P. Brown & Levinson, 1987). In this research, I examined whether people spontaneously remember the wording used to convey politeness and how memory for politeness might vary as a function of the social context.Much early research on memory for verbal materials indicated that sentences were quickly transformed into an underlying abstract meaning and the original surface structure was lost (

Higher-order Intentions and Self-Politeness in Evaluations of (Im)politeness: The Relevance of Compliment Responses

“…Holtgraves 1997). Thus conventionalization needs to be understood in three ways: as the lexical and syntactic frequency of utterances that count as realizations of performing speech acts (Ruhi & Dogan 2001) for speakers in communities of practice; as 'a relationship holding between utterances and contexts, which is a correlate of the (statistical) frequency with which an expression is used in one's experience in a particular context' (Terkourafi 2003: 151); and as knowledge of what types of (linguistic) acts are perceived to typically occur in certain settings.…”

Memory-based and on-line processing of metaphoric sarcasm

“…Holtgraves (1994) has shown that social status plays a role in the speed with which such statements are understood. Other research (Holtgraves, 1997a;Kemper and Thissen, 1981) has shown similar effects on our memory for statements differing in politeness: participants were more likely to remember statement form for wordings incongruous with social status, such as when a low status person talks in an impolite manner to a high status person. Analogous effects can be found with gender: female participants are more likely than males to interpret statements as being indirect (e.g., Holtgraves, 1991) and, as a function of power relationships, closeness of relationship with the person to whom she or he is talking and the size of the request being made, differ from males in their use of polite language (Holtgraves, 1992).…”

Surface features of utterances, credibility judgments, and memory

“…As for the memory of surface features of speech, recent research has revealed that people remember far more of the surface characteristics of speech than earlier work suggested (e.g., Anderson, 1974;Bransford, Barclay, & Franks, 1972;Gernsbacher, 1985), especially if they view the information as important (Holtgraves, 1997;Keenan, MacWhinney, & Mayhew, 1977;Murphy & Shapiro, 1994). Keenan et al, for instance, found that an audience in a seminar could remember the verbatim wording of some sentences 27 and 48 h later.…”