Socio-Cultural Politeness in Medellín and Japanese Societies: an Introduction

Abstract

This paper presents an intercultural analysis between the Medellin and the Japanese society, taking into account the variability of the socio-cultural politeness from one culture to another, to serve as support for second language learners or foreign language. As a starting point, there are notions of interlanguage pragmatics, pragmatic transfer and the model of politeness of Brown and Levinson (1987) with its alternatives. The corpus of the study is based on some episodes collected in Medellin and in Japan. The analysis focuses on some speech acts, especially in non-solidarity interpersonal relationships. In such relationships, in Medellin society is preferred to save the positive face and in the Japanese, the negative face. It is important to teach the variability of the socio-cultural politeness from one culture to another explicitly not only to advanced learners of a second or foreign language, but beginners.