Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 803–809 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review
Linguistic Politeness across Boundaries. The Case of Greek and Turkish Review of Bayraktarogˇlu, Arın, Sifianou, Maria, Eds., Amsterdam: Benjamins 2001. xiv + 435 pp. ISBN 1-58811-040 (US), 90-272-517 (EUR). In the preface to this collective volume, Sachiko Ide remarks that ‘‘[t]his book is unique in that it unites papers on linguistic politeness from neighbouring countries at the crossroads of the East and the West, Turkey and Greece’’ (p. xii). And the longstanding historical relationship between the Turks and the Greeks indeed provides an interesting testing ground for a study which could be called an empirically orientated exercise in contrastive pragmatics. In their introduction, Bayraktarogˇlu and Sifianou explicitly mention the following three goals of the book (p. 7): ‘‘The purpose of this book is many-fold, with equally important messages on all fronts. One is that it provides a dual opportunity to test politeness in areas other than English, which has hitherto been the playground of theory-makers. The second is that it makes available to observers regional patterns of behaviour, which are located between the East and the West. The third is that it demonstrates the results of cultural interaction, even when the interaction is the past’’. Quoting culture-specific scales of ‘‘Individualism vs. Collectivism’’ and ‘‘Masculinity vs. Femininity’’, Bayraktarogˇlu and Sifianou situate Greece and Turkey in the middle, classifying them as ‘‘moderately masculine and collectivist societies’’ (p. 7). They also point out that these scales would attribute slightly stronger characteristics of Masculinity to Greek culture. However, one of the main findings of the book is that Turkish culture ‘‘is inclined towards Masculinity a fraction more than Greek culture’’ (p. 6). As far as their theoretical background is concerned, most papers rely on standard theories of politeness, such as Brown and Levinson (1987) (=BL) or Leech (1983), but these theories are not accepted uncritically and, sometimes, modifications or critical revisions of politeness theories are suggested on the basis of more recent contributions, such as Watts (1992). Some contributions also take up alternative frameworks, such as Relevance Theory (cf. Sperber and Wilson, 1995). The chapters of the book have been arranged in pairs treating related issues. In this way, 6 pairs of papers focus on (1) general aspects of politeness in Greece and Turkey (R. Hirschon and D. Zeyrek), (2) classroom interaction (S. Dogˇanc¸ay-Aktuna and S. Kamıs¸ lı, and T.-S. Pavlidou), (3) approbatory and advice-giving expressions (M. Makri-Tsilipakou, A. Bayraktarogˇlu), (4) service encounters (Y. Bayyurt and A.
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Bayraktarogˇlu, E. Antonopoulou), (5) TV-interviews/panel discussions (A. Tzanne, A. Yemenici) and (6) compliments (S¸. Ruhi and Gu¨rkan Dogˇan, M. Sifianou). The article written by Rene´e Hirschon, ‘‘Freedom, solidarity and obligation: The socio-cultural context of Greek politeness’’ provides an overall view of the relationship between key cultural values, social behaviour and language usage in Greek. The key values of Greek culture most relevant for politeness conduct are freedom and personal autonomy on the one hand and sociability and solidarity on the other hand. Ongoing research on insults in Greek and Turkish indicates that Turks tend to take verbal insults more seriously (p. 32). In a similar way, the following article by Deniz Zeyrek, ‘‘Politeness in Turkish and its linguistic manifestations: A socio-cultural perspective’’, provides an overview of socio-cultural values, communication and polite language usage in Turkish. She concludes that the Turkish culture can be characterized as a culture of ‘‘relatedness’’ (a defining feature of ‘‘Collectivism’’). Families, neighbours, friends and colleagues are identified as the most important networks shaping communicative behaviour in Turkish culture. Dogˇanc¸ay-Aktuna and Kamıs¸ lı (‘‘Linguistics of power and politeness in Turkish. Revelations from speech acts’’) collected data on the use of politeness strategies of 80 native speakers of Turkish, via discourse completion tests and questionnaires. Subjects were asked to respond to given situations by writing down exactly what they would say in that particular situation. This method enabled them to control parameters, such as higher or lower status, type of speech event (interaction in the classroom vs. interaction at the workplace) or type of speech act (disagreement, correction). Amongst other results, their study shows that professors differ from workplace bosses in their more direct use of potentially face-threatening acts (=FTAs), a fact which can be explained with the institutional role of professors, who have to be as clear as possible for pedagogical purposes and, after all, have the responsibility of giving corrective feedback (pp. 85, 89). In her paper on ‘‘Politeness in the classroom? Evidence from a Greek high school’’, Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou preferred naturally recorded data and recorded eight teaching hours with three teachers and 75 students. In spite of the different methodological approach, some of her results are in line with the findings of Dogˇanc¸ay-Aktuna and Kamıs¸ lı: the classroom interaction observed by Pavlidou can be characterized by ‘‘minimal politeness investments, especially on the students’ part’’ (p. 129). In addition, Pavlidou found that, contrary to what has been claimed in earlier studies on gender and politeness, ‘‘girls do not emerge as unequivocally more polite than boys’’ (p. 130). However, boys and girls differ as to the type of directive or non-compliant turns which they tend to use more often (pp. 122–126). Marianthi Makri-Tsilipakou deals with two expressions of praise or approval/ approbation in Modern Greek (‘‘Congratulations and bravo!’’), namely, sugwarZtZ ria (‘‘congratulations’’) and mpra bo (‘‘bravo’’, ‘‘well done’’, ‘‘good for you’’). She presents a detailed description of their syntactical, semantic and pragmatic properties and then deals with authentic data from various types of discourse. The main difference in their usage lies in the fact that sugwarZtZ ria belongs to a more formal register and is restricted to conventionalized expressions in standard situations, whereas mpra bo seems to be ‘‘more of an exclamation done on the spur
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of the moment’’ (p. 149) and can be used much more flexibly. Therefore, it has acquired a number of additional functions, for example, thanking, exclaiming, agreeing, as well as ‘abusive’ uses with a sarcastic or coercive touch. In his paper on the speech act of ‘‘advice-giving’’, Arın Bayraktarogˇlu (‘‘Advice-giving in Turkish: ‘‘Superiority’’ or ‘‘solidarity’’?’’) first deals with the rather negative view prevailing in the literature on advice-giving, where it is placed among the FTAs. Then she presents a corpus of 23 h of taped conversations of 46 native speakers, which shows that advice-giving is seen much more positively in collectivist Turkish culture. This is true especially in the case of close partners, who carry out the process of advice-giving ‘‘without any signs of confrontation’’ and consider advice to be ‘‘a show of solidarity’’ (p. 205). The next pair of papers, written by Yasemin Bayyurt and Arın Bayraktarogˇlu (‘‘The use of pronouns and terms of address in Turkish service encounters’’) and by Eleni Antonopoulou (‘‘Brief service encounters: Gender and politeness’’), respectively, deals with Turkish and Greek service encounters. Bayyurt and Bayraktarogˇlu, using a questionnaire, asked 70 persons to fill in an utterance they would naturally use in 6 situations involving service encounters, from an open market place to a fashion shop of high reputation. The most important factors determining the use of T/-V-pronouns (i.e. Turkish sen and siz, respectively) and other terms of address are power and solidarity. In a society with a relatively high level of ‘‘Masculinity’’, it is no wonder that women were found to use more formal terms of address, while men tended to use informal terms of address. Furthermore, the relative economic strength or weakness of commercial settings was decisive for the (in)formality of terms of address (pp. 230–234). Antonopoulou focussed on gender-specific differences in encounters in a small news agency in Athens. Using an observation sheet, she documented encounters between 180 women and 200 men and the shop owners. While the data do not simply support earlier claims that women are more positively polite than men, women seem to construe the encounter as a more explicitly verbalized speech event, whereas men use more elliptical language and non-verbalized requests. More specifically, both men and women were found to adapt their communicative behaviour in a way which they considered to be more comfortable for the opposite sex (pp. 264–265). Two authors deal with politeness strategies and simultaneous speech in TV-interviews and TV-panel discussions in Greece and Turkey, namely Angeliki Tzanne (‘‘‘What you are saying sounds very nice and I’m delighted to hear it’: Some considerations on the functions of presenter-initiated simultaneous speech in Greek panel discussions’’) and Alev Yemenici (‘‘Analysis of the use of politeness maxims in Turkish political debates’’). Tzanne recorded 5 hourly all-male panel discussions (one presenter and four guest speakers). All in all, Tzanne’s findings support the general view of Greek culture as being orientated towards solidarity and positive politeness, where even politicians who differ in backgrounds and political beliefs frequently use jokes, teases and expressions of agreement (p. 303). This differs very much from the results in Yemenici’s paper, who recorded six hours of TV-interviews (with one interviewer and one or more interviewees). Distinguishing rapport-building and aggressive interruptions, Yemenici found that interruptions made by the interviewer often have cooperative goals and are redressed with the help of politeness strategies; however, when interviewees
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interrupt each other, they are highly impolite. This reflects the competitive nature of both the rating struggle of private TV-channels in Turkey, which favour settings leading to heated debates, and the attempts of politicians to appeal to their own voters and to potential voters (p. 335). The last two papers deal with the speech act of complimenting in Turkish and Greek: S¸u¨kriye Ruhi and Gu¨rkan Dogˇan characterise compliments as phatic communication and integrate Relevance Theory and Politeness Theory (‘‘Relevance theory and compliments as phatic communication: The case of Turkish’’), Maria Sifianou focuses on the multifunctional nature of compliments in Greek (‘‘ ‘Oh! How appropriate!’ Compliments and politeness’’). More specifically, Ruhi and Dogˇan point out that, as far as compliments are concerned, the propositional content of an utterance becomes less relevant than its contextual implications for the relationship level. Compliments fulfil a variety of functions in interpersonal communication and are constrained by factors like age, gender and status. For example, the 660 instances of complimenting in their data show that compliments are much more frequent in women-to-women interaction (35.2%) and men-to-women interaction (40.3%) than in men-to-men or women-tomen interaction (p. 367). Sifianou collected a corpus of more than 450 compliment exchanges (using an observation sheet). Interpreting these data, she stresses the fact that, in Greek culture, compliments are primarily face-enhancing positive politeness devices. Moreover, Sifianou emphasizes the close relationship between compliments and gifts, a relationship she tentatively connects with Greek cultural history (p. 424). Finally, Sifianou observes that compliments are often formulated creatively and playfully, especially by Greek youth (pp. 415–423). I now turn to the critical evaluation of the collective volume. All in all, it is a stimulating book which enhances the cross-cultural study of politeness considerably. The choice of Greek and Turkish is well motivated because their area of usage is situated at the crossroads of the West and the East; they share a long history of linguistic and cultural interaction but are neither genetically related nor typologically similar languages, which makes a contrastive study even more interesting. Furthermore, standard theories of politeness, like BL, are not simply presupposed as the underlying framework, but some of the criticism formulated in recent studies of politeness is taken up and the BL framework is revised and partially modified. To give but two examples: BL’s rather pessimistic and potentially ethnocentric view, which conceives of all politeness strategies as techniques to mitigate, redress or avoid FTAs is criticized by several contributors, who stress that there not only FTAs but also ‘‘face supportive’’, ‘‘face boosting’’ or ‘‘face enhancing’’ acts (cf. Bayyurt and Bayraktarogˇlu, p. 212; Tzanne, p. 293; Sifianou, p. 398). Furthermore, Watts’ important distinction between ‘‘politic’’ behaviour, which merely tries to keep personal relationships in a state of conflict-free equilibrium, and ‘‘polite’’ behaviour, where the ego tries to do more than what is normally expected of him/her (cf. Watts, 1992, 1999), is taken into account for the analysis of Turkish service encounters by Bayyurt and Bayraktarogˇlu (pp. 213–216).
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A feature of this collective volume which I particularly appreciate is its strong empirical orientation. Using different empirical methods and taking into account differing social settings and institutional contexts, the contributors have enriched the discussion of universality vs. relativity of politeness phenomena with a wealth of empirical data from Greek and Turkish. Even if somebody prefers to study politeness from a different theoretical point of view, he or she is provided with a highly diversified picture of politeness phenomena in Greek and Turkish discourse. The papers united by Bayraktarogˇlu and Sifianou also provide highly interesting results for gender studies. While it is true that the papers on Greek classroom interaction (Pavlidou), on Turkish (Bayyurt and Bayraktarogˇlu) and Greek (Antonopoulou) service encounters and on compliments in Turkish (Ruhi and Dogˇan) and Greek (Sifianou) partially support earlier findings concerning male and female politeness strategies, they also partially correct or refine the results of earlier studies. For example, Pavlidou’s data clearly reveal that ‘‘[r]egardless of certain quantitative differences which are usually taken to be indicative of a greater politeness on the girls’ part, female students sometimes seem to be less sensitive to teachers’ positive face wants than boys, and attempt more serious face assaults to the teacher’’ (p. 130); rather, boys and girls use differing strategies of (im)politeness. Another example, taken from Antonopoulou’s study on Greek service encounters, concerns the fact that ‘‘[a]pologies and excuses were employed by both males and females when they viewed their acts as imposing’’ (p. 260). Contrastive studies like this one are not only fruitful as far as differences between languages and cultures are concerned, but also enhance our knowledge about parallels and similarities. These might be explained as the result of the longstanding cultural interaction between Turks and Greeks. An interesting case is the close parallels in the formulation of polite phrases. From her corpus of Greek compliments, Sifianou quotes an example involving a metaphorical formulation: To sto´ma sou sta zEi mE li (‘‘Your mouth leaks honey’’) (p. 420) and adds a footnote explaining that, according to Bayraktarogˇlu, ‘‘exactly the same phrase agzından bal akiyor is found in Turkish’’ (p. 426). Other similarities could be explained as part of communicative strategies which are typical for a larger culturally connected region, in our case the Mediterranean area. Zeyrek (p. 51) notes the importance of diminutives in Greek for expressing endearment and affection, and Ruhi and Dogˇan (p. 382) stress the relevance of diminutives for (positive) politeness strategies in Turkish. Similar statements could be made about Italian and Spanish (cf. Coseriu, 1987: 216–218). I now turn to a few more critical remarks. On a very general level, the following fact could be criticised: in spite of the thematic parallels between the six pairs of papers, only rarely can you find explicit and direct comparisons between Greek and Turkish politeness phenomena. I am aware of the fact that it would have been very difficult to find exactly parallel institutional settings and to conduct and coordinate research relying on precisely the same type of data and using the same kind of methods, but still, the scarcity of direct comparisons between Greek and Turkish politeness phenomena can be deplored (the papers of Hirschon, Tzanne and Yemenici and some additional cross references in other papers notwithstanding).
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More direct comparisons will also be needed to substantiate the general conclusion (p. 6) that Turkish culture is inclined a bit more towards Masculinity than Greek culture. As far as politeness theories are concerned, I would have appreciated some more decisive steps towards a revision and elaboration of standard theories like BL. In this context, attempts to overcome BL’s focus on FTAs are most welcome (cf. above my remarks on Bayyurt and Bayraktarogˇlu, Tzanne, Sifianou). But this more positive evaluation of ‘‘face enhancing acts’’ could have led towards an attempt to replace BL with alternative theories (cf. e.g. Held, 1995; Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1997; Eelen, 2001; Terkourafi, 2001, and the contributions in Kienpointner, 1999, especially Arundale, 1999). Moreover, many politeness studies favour politeness as the unmarked case and treat impoliteness/rudeness simply as the marked, competitive and destructive counterpart of politeness. This bias is challenged in some recent papers, which should have been taken into account (cf. Schiffrin, 1984; Sarangi and Slembrouck, 1992; Culpeper, 1996; Kienpointner, 1997). Especially the tension between personal autonomy and solidarity, which often underlies conflictive behaviour in Greek culture, could have encouraged a more positive view of and a closer look at some varieties of rudeness or impoliteness. In this respect, the following statement made by Makri-Tsilipakou is highly pertinent (p. 169; cf. also Hirschon, pp. 32–34): ‘‘Hence the relative scarcity of ‘thank yous’ and ‘pleases’ and ‘sorrys’, and the abundance of bald-on-record imperatives but also of positive-polite diminutives; the ordinariness of touching, kissing and hugging, but also of their obligatory opposites of shouting, arguing, fighting and the like’’. Finally, I would like to criticize two minor points. Hirschon quotes I. Millas’ ongoing contrastive work on Greek and Turkish insults, which allows the preliminary conclusion that insults are taken much more seriously in the Turkish culture (pp. 32–34). This may be true as a general statement, but there seem to exist (exceptional) contexts where in Turkish culture, too, even very rude insults are harmless and rather used as a ‘safety valve’ to prevent fighting and violence, namely, the duelling rhymes of Turkish boys (cf. Dundes et al., 1972). For example, the very rude Greek utterance gamo tZ ma na sou (‘‘I fuck your mother‘‘) has close parallels to Turkish duelling rhymes, such as Ananın amını patlattık (‘‘We blew up your mother’s cunt’’; cf. Dundes et al., 1972: 146). My last point concerns Ruhi and Dogˇan’s claim that ‘‘Complimenting is necessarily an act of polite communication’’ (p. 352). Of course, this claim is not refuted by the undeniable existence of ‘faked’, that is, ironic or sarcastic compliments, but there are also instances of ‘sincere’ compliments which can be experienced as impolite (e.g. the inappropriate compliments of a former student, who ‘praised’ her former teacher at a journalism school for having written a feature article in a major newspaper; cf. Tannen, 1992: 85). To summarize my evaluative remarks, I would like to repeat that Bayraktarogˇlu and Sifianou have edited a stimulating and highly valuable book on Greek and Turkish politeness phenomena, which not only provides many interesting empirical findings, but also, in spite of a few shortcomings, could be used as a model for future studies in contrastive politeness.
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References Arundale, R., 1999. An alternative model and ideology of communication for an alternative to politeness theory. Pragmatics 9, 119–153. Brown, P., Levinson, S.D., 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Coseriu, E., 1987. Der romanische Sprachtypus. In: Albrecht, J. (Ed.), Energeia und Ergon. Bd I, Narr, Tu¨bingen, pp. 207–224. Culpeper, J., 1996. Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 25, 349–367. Dundes, A., Leach, J.W., O¨zko¨k, B., 1972. The strategies of Turkish boys’ verbal duelling rhymes. In: Gumperz, J., Hymes, D. (Eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, pp. 130–160. Eelen, G., 2001. A Critique of Politeness Theories. St.Jerome Publishing, Manchester. Held, G., 1995. Verbale Ho¨flichkeit. Narr, Tu¨bingen. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C., 1997. A multilevel approach in the study of talk in interaction. Pragmatics 7, 1– 20. Kienpointner, M., 1997. Varieties of rudeness. Functions of Language 4, 251–287. Kienpointner, M. (Ed.), 1999. Ideologies of Politeness. Pragmatics 9 (Special Issue). Leech, G., 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. Longman, London. Sarangi, S.K., Slembrouck, S., 1992. Non-cooperation in communication: a reassessment of Gricean pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics 17, 117–154. Schiffrin, D., 1984. Jewish argument as sociability. Language and Society 13, 311–335. Sperber, D., Wilson, D., 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford. Tannen, D., 1992. That’s Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks your Relations with Others. Virago, London. Terkourafi, M., 2001. Politeness in Cypriot Greek. Ph. Diss. University of Cambridge, Cambridge. Watts, R.J., 1992. Linguistic politeness and politic verbal behaviour: Reconsidering claims for universality. In: Watts, R.J., Ide, S., Ehlich, K. (Eds.), Politeness in Language. Studies in its History, Theory and Practice. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 43–69. Watts, R.J., 1999. Language and politeness in early eighteenth century Britain. Pragmatics 9, 5–20. Manfred Kienpointner (Associate Professor for General and Applied Linguistics, Department of Languages and Literatures, Section Linguistics, University of Innsbruck, Austria) is currently doing research on ancient and modern rhetoric and argumentation theory (argument schemes, figures of speech), politeness theory and feminist linguistics. Recent publications include: ‘Figures of speech’. In: Verschueren, Jef et al. (Eds.), 1999, Handbook of Pragmatics, Annual Installments, Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 1–19; Le latin classique–est-il une langue sexiste? In: Moussy, C. (Ed.), 2001, De lingua latina novae quaestiones, Peeters, Louvain, pp. 95–106; Article ‘Linguistics’. In: Sloane, Th. O. (Ed.), 2001, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 426–449; Unho¨fliche Partikeln? Kompetitive Verwendungen von Partikeln in der Alltagskonversation. In: Held, Gudrun (Ed.), Partikeln und Ho¨flichkeit (in press).
Manfred Kienpointner Department of Languages and Literatures Section Linguistics, University of Innsbruck Innsbruck, Austria E-mail address: manfred.kienpointner@uibk.ac.at
PII: S0378-2166(02)00174-1