The Importance Of Politeness In Culture

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Language reflects the context in which it is used. We adapt our talk to suit our audience and talk differently to children, customers and colleagues. And all these are also dependant on our speech community. Politeness is a criterion of civilization. It directs the activities of human being. Being a social activity, language is also restrained by this criterion. There are different polite norms in different social groups. In this paper, polite verbal behavior of Turkish people living in Jovein , a city in Iran,is considered with contributions from intercultural communication, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies. This study examines the understanding of politeness phenomena in Jovein. Accordingly, two speech acts namely, request and apology
Panzarasa and Jennings (2006,P.402) maintain that “individual cognition is necessary for collective cognition to come into existence: thus the latter is nomologically dependent on the former”. Two intrinsic aspects of cultural cognition are cultural conceptualizations and language .Cultural conceptualizations are the ways in which people across different cultural groups construe various aspects of the world and their experiences (Sharifian 2003). These include people’s view of the world, thoughts, and feelings. Language is a central aspect of cultural cognition in that it serves as a “collective memory bank” (Frank2003, 2005; waThiong'o 1986) for cultural conceptualizations, past and recent. It is shaped by the cultural conceptualizations that have prevailed at different stages in the history of a speech community and these can leave their traces in current linguistic practice. In this sense language can be viewed as one of the primary mechanisms for storing and communicating cultural conceptualizations. It acts as both a memory bank and a fluid vehicle for the (re-transmission of these socioculturally embodied cultural conceptualizations. Like cultural cognition, language can also be viewed as a complex adaptive system (e.g., Frank forthcoming; Steels 2000; Sharifian forthcoming-a). The lexicon of a language is perhaps the most direct link with cultural
Earlier research appears to indicate that there are four major perspectives on politeness. Each of these perspectives is briefly introduced below and the selected view, the conversational maxim view, which is used in the present study, would be discussed as well.

The social norm view

“The social norm view of politeness assumes that each society has a particular set of social norms consisting of more or less explicit rules that prescribe a certain behavior, a state of affairs, or a way of thinking in a context” (Fraser, 1990: 220). Ide (1989) was one of the first to express this view in her study of politeness phenomena in the Japanese society.

The conversational-contract

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