Familiar and polit speech

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Familiar and polit speech
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Why be polite?

• Almost all linguistic research views politeness
  as a universal feature of civilized societies,
  regardless of their background culture, or their
  language.
• Politeness is thus seen as an important social
  or urbane value, inherent to successful
  communication, although its realization may vary
  across the different speech communities.

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• Politeness offers a good way of emotional control
  of the individual.
• It is typically means of preserving and
  maintaining good social relationship between the
  speakers of one or more cultures.
• Polite behavior generally protects the
  individual, as well as their addressee, and often
  becomes subject matter of self-help books on
  etiquette .

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Politeness is an aspect of pragmatics in that
its use in language is determined by anexternal
context. This external context is the context of
communicationdetermined by the social status of
the participants politeness is a system used by
thespeaker in order to keep up to the
addressees expectations
. What Is Politeness?
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• The verbal realization of politeness poses even
  greater problems when the interlocutors belong to
  different cultures and try to communicate,
  transferring their pragmatic knowledge of polite
  behavior into the foreign language.

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• Lack of practice and the learners concern with
  rendering correctly the foreign languages
  grammatical structures in the first place often
  lead to misunderstandings
• or the so-called socio-pragmatic failures
  errors resulting from non-native speakers not
  knowing what to say or not saying the appropriate
  things as a result of transferring incongruent
  social rules, values and belief systems from
  their native languages and cultures.

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• These types of errors are likely to cause a
  downright insult for both the non-native and the
  native speakers of a certain language, the native
  speakers misunderstanding and misinterpreting the
  intentions of the non-native speaker, and the
  non-native speakers being over-sensitive to
  distinctions of grammatical form

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• In a way the native speakers are not. In any
  case, being polite is essential to maintaining
  healthy social relations within a specific
  culture, and even more so, for the communication
  across cultures.

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• Cross-cultural communication offers a wide field
  for research, as the socio-pragmatic failure of
  one speaker of a certain community tends to be
  stereotyped for the whole community

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• One is often confronted with statements like
  Russians are rude, The English are
  hypocrites, Japanese bow a lot, all of them
  resulting from a superficial comparison between
  the own pragmatic knowledge and the politeness
  strategies of the foreign culture.

For instance
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Languages with only one level of grammatical
politeness

• Nowadays English only uses one level of
  grammatical politeness. When speaking to someone,
  you always use the form "you". You can use it
  while speaking with your little sister and with
  the queen, (though in this case you may also use
  "Your Majesty", or "Your Royal Highness").

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• English used to have two levels of politeness,
  thou and you. However, over time, "thou" became
  less and less used, until it disappeared entirely
  and "you" was left to serve as the pronoun of
  choice for all situations

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The need to use politeness strategies are Three

• distance
• power
• Imposition.

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• Imposition covers every action (by this we also
  mean speech acts) which threatens the addressees
  autonomy and freedom of action and usually is
  conveyed in the form of an order.

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• power is evaluated in terms of numerous factors
  such as position in
• society and age.

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• distance implies the evaluation of the others
  place in the world,
• degree of familiarity and/or solidarity towards
  the addressee .

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Show Me Your Face

• Politeness is not only expressed in oral
  interactions but also in ones
  behavior.

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• The model defends that everyone has a FACE that
  is selfesteem
• This is to put danger in a communication
  situation. According to this theory,

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• Patterns of politeness try to avoid this effect
  on the addressee and they do so in two
• different ways
• by appealing to his/her POSITIVE FACE that is,
  acknowledging ones need for communion,
• by appealing to his/her NEGATIVE FACE that is,
  acknowledging the other the need for autonomy and
  freedom of action.

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• BL speak of POSITIVE POLITENESS
• If the speaker tries to strengthen his positive
  face by using special oral expressions as
• for example INTENSIFYING MODIFIERS (how
  absolutely marvelous)

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• We call this the STRATEGY OF APPROACH and for
  this we use a familiar language
• (between friends) or the rules of politeness, the
  so called a make A feel good-be
• Friendly.

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• When the speaker on the other hand
• marks distance in his oral utterances, he
  strengthens his negative face. Thus, he uses
• the STRATEGY OF DISTANCE his communication
  consists of hedged information
• (he uses words like may, presume, probably, I
  believe that or modal verbs like want to,
• would like to...).
• These hedged utterances stress that the speaker
  does not want to get
• involved too much.

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What are address terms?

• Address terms
• Forms used to refer to, or to name a person
  directly in speech or writing.

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They include

• Titles (your Ladyship).
• kinship terms (mother, mum),
• Endearments and insults
• First names (Margaret)
• Surnames (Thatcher).
• Titles and last names (Mrs. Thatcher).

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1-Titles and Names in Historical England
The position in society was indicated by ones
title that positioned the person in one of the
three existing estates, which formed society in
medieval England The clergy.
The nobility.
The laborers.
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• Land owners were called the GENTRY
• The others were the NON-GENTRY

The owning of land divided the people
into different classes
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The term GENTLEMAN

• developed from the expression
• for a land owner.
• In the sixteenth century
• this term extended its meaning and referred to a
  man who could live a comfortable
• life without working.

Gentry
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In Early Modern English

• were only used when
  there was a great intimacy between the addresser
  and the addressee.
• was used more frequently than first name alone
  but it was still only used by people who were
  familiar with each other.

FIRST NAMES
First plus LAST NAME
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For example

• A first name could have been used by sisters and
  brothers .
• And first plus last name by intimate friends.

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Titles and OCCUPATIONAL TERMS

• 
  
• were used quite frequently in direct address.
• A cook was addressed cook (occupational term).
• husband and wife addressed one another
• husband and wife (terms of relationship).
• men, women and gentlemen were
• addressed as such (generic terms) .

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2-Address Pronouns

• Until today most European languages have at least
  two different pronouns of address
• Formal term
• Informal term

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Formal term

• The formal, polite term normally is made up by
  the 3rd respectively 2nd person plural form.
• This polite pronoun address marks a kind of
  distance and respect towards the
• addressee.
• It is used by people who do not know each other
  well or want to mark distance or/and respect.

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Informal term

• The closer term .
• It is made up by the 2nd person singular.
• It is used for relatives, friends or people you
  feel
• acquainted with as well as among young people.
• English, however, is not as complicated as German
  or French.
• Nevertheless, some Europeans even high
  politicians do not know how to handle the easy
  English address terms.

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Old English

• In Old English the two address-terms were similar
  to the European system. It had the singular ðu
  and the plural ge.

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Middle English

• In Middle English Plural ye Changed to Singular
  ye
• The two terms became thou (singular) and ye
  (plural).
• In the 13th century the plural pronoun ye was
  used more and more in a singular context

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Modern English

• In early modern English ye was slowly replaced by
  you
• The use of plural you became very popular.
• The pronoun you now is the formal and informal
  address term.
• It is used by everybody and addressed to
  everybody, it does not matter to which social
  class you belong to.

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Thank you
Done by
Sarah Al-ajmi
Haifa Al-kzyyiam
Ibtsam Al-Hashem