Languages and Cultures Seminar | (Im)politeness implicatures, ‘culture’ and the moral order

Event Details

Date:

Friday, 07 August 2015

Time:

11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Room:

208

UQ Location:

Gordon Greenwood Building (St Lucia)

URL:

Event category(s):

Full Description:: It has long been held that implying something or leaving something unsaid rather than saying it can be regarded as “polite”. Yet while much has made of the role of “indirectness” in politeness research it has also been pointed out that implicatures only sometimes give rise to ‘politeness’, while in other instances they may give rise to other kinds of evaluations, such as ‘impoliteness’, ‘mock politeness’, ‘mock impoliteness’ and shades between. And, indeed, in many cases implicatures do not give rise to any kind of im/politeness-related evaluation at all. In this presentation it is proposed that in order to understand the relationship between implicature and im/politeness we need to examine more carefully their moral underpinnings, namely, the ways in which participants’ understandings of implicatures and evaluations of im/politeness arise with respect to a complex moral substrate of seen but unnoticed expectancies. It is also argued that this complex moral substrate is inevitably culturally torqued, and thus close analysis of interactions where participants are orienting to issues of ‘im/politeness’ offers us a useful window into understandings of im/politeness across cultures.