PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Existing research distinguishes lay peoples’ conceptions and use of politeness (first-order perspective) from a theoretical approach to politeness (second-order perspective) (Locher & Watts, 2005; Watts, 1992). Recent work, criticizing this binary distinction, proposes methods to combine both perspectives (e.g. House & Kádár, 2023; Spencer-Oatey, 2011). We consider a politeness model based on first-order insights, resulting from lay peoples’ perspectives on politeness (Lumer & Buschmeier, 2023) and discuss it theoretically (second-order perspective), comparing it to existing models (e.g. Spencer-Oatey, 2008). In Lumer and Buschmeier (2023), we interviewed German speakers to gain insights on lay peoples’ expectations regarding politeness. We analyzed the interviews using thematic analysis and found, among other topics, two main politeness strategies: adaptive and rule-governed politeness strategies (Lumer & Buschmeier, 2023). These strategies are comparable to dichotomous politeness strategies (e.g. positive and negative politeness in Brown and Levinson, 1987, or associative expressiveness and restraint in Spencer-Oatey, 2008, building on Scollon and Scollon, 1995). We also collected participants’ expectations regarding robots’ use of politeness. This additional perspective on interaction did not only provide insights for human–robot interaction, but also for linguistic politeness research, i.e. human–human interaction. We found that one of the two complementary strategies identified in our data (adaptive politeness) implies the use of the other (rule-governed politeness), the latter of which appears more fundamental for interaction. This follows from the finding that participants mostly expected robots to use rule-governed and not adaptive politeness. This result only arose because participants considered interaction with non-human agents in addition to human–human interaction — a methodological benefit. This paper presents insights gained by comparing a model built on first-order politeness to already existing theoretical models. Our results support contemporary views of politeness as a relational phenomenon rather than a rational one (in line with e.g. Hodeib, 2023). References Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511813085 Hodeib, C. (2023). Conceptualizations and evaluations of (im)politeness in Syrian Arabic. Journal of Politeness Research. https://doi.org/10.1515/pr-2020-0016 House, J., & Kádár, D. Z. (2023). A new critique of the binary first- and second-order distinction in politeness research. Journal of Pragmatics, 213, 145–158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2023.06.001 Locher, M. A., & Watts, R. J. (2005). Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture, 1, 9–33. https://doi.org/10.1515/jplr.2005.1.1.9 Lumer, E., & Buschmeier, H. (2023). Should robots be polite? Expectations about politeness in human–robot interaction. Frontiers in Robotics and AI Human–Robot Interaction, 10, Article 1242127. https://doi.org/10. 3389/frobt.2023.1242127 Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. B. K. (1995). Intercultural communication: A discourse approach. Blackwell. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2008). Face, (im)politeness and rapport. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking second edition: Culture, communication and politeness theory (pp. 11–47). Continuum International Publishing Group. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2011). Conceptualising ‘the relational’ in pragmatics: Insights from metapragmatic emotion and (im)politeness comments. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(14), 3565–3578. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma. 2011.08.009 Watts, R. J. (1992). Linguistic politeness and politic verbal behavior: Reconsidering claims for universality. In R. J. Watts, S. Ide, & K. Ehlich (Eds.), Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory and Practice (pp. 43–69). Mouton de Gruyter.