Vol 27, No 1 (2023): Identity, Politeness and Discursive Practices in a Changing World

With the technological benefits and challenges computer-mediated communication provides, interactants in social network service (SNS) communication are driven to use language creatively, overcoming the disadvantages and exploiting advantages. This creative language use leads to innovative language change that often extends beyond SNS environments. In this regard, the medium is not merely a restrictive but also a facilitative factor. Communicative acts are fundamentally bound by the interactants’ desire to express politeness, especially in face-threatening acts, well articulated in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model. In recent research, however, the issues of the norms of politeness and impoliteness as well as those of appropriateness have been highlighted (Locher & Watts 2005, Locher & Bousfield 2008). Interactants employ not only mitigating strategies to alleviate face-threatening but also use impoliteness strategies, which are often disguised politeness. Drawing upon the data from a 26-million-word corpus of synchronous SNS communication, involving two or more participants, in 3,836 instances, developed by the National Institute of the Korean Language, this paper addresses how SNS interactants make use of diverse elements of language to show their polite and impolite stances in interpersonal negotiation. For instance, interactants use fragments, interjections, letter-based ideophones and emoticons, exaggerated punctuations for emotiveness, omission of regular punctuation marks, intentional violation of orthographic rules, prolific slang expressions, deviated spelling to create cuteness or intimacy, among numerous others. All these creative strategies lead to language change at lexical, grammatical and discourse levels.

Impoliteness entails the employment of strategies oriented toward attacking face and bringing about social disruption. Although research on impoliteness has received great attention in the past two decades, how impolite utterances are perceived and what the recipients of impoliteness do in return has remained relatively under-addressed. The current study set out to examine native English and Persian speakers’ perceptions of and response to impoliteness in the production of the speech act of refusal. To this end, 90 native English speakers and 120 native Persian speakers were administered a written discourse completion task containing eight refusals that either observed politeness or contained various degrees of impoliteness. The results showed that native Persian speakers did not perceive any of the refusals to be impolite whereas three of the refusals were considered impolite by native English speakers. When reacting to impoliteness in refusals, native English speakers exploited a wider range of strategies than did Persian speakers. The results showed that social distance and power relations were of more significance for Persian speakers than for English speakers in perceiving the degree of impoliteness; however, in responding to an utterance perceived as impolite, English speakers were more likely to adopt offensive strategies to counter impoliteness, including positive and negative impoliteness strategies. These findings indicate both cross-cultural divergence and convergence in the perception of impoliteness and responses to impoliteness.

Human e/migration across the Mediterranean increased significantly in the first part of the 21st century. At the mercy of people smugglers, migrants who succeed in crossing the seas face uncertain futures in Europe. Such immigration is at the heart of political debate in Europe, where right-wing populist parties have made significant gains because of their opposition to it. These parties tend to view human migration as a negative phenomenon, using familiar and by now even clichéd cultural and socio-political arguments against it. This study explores some of these discursive tropes. Rather than following studies that use a critical discourse paradigm, the paper’s main aim is to identify positive discourse and practice that might represent models for future behaviour in this context. It focuses on a discussion on recent migration involving Italy and, by applying tools of pragmatic analysis, united to knowledge of the socio-political background, traces some underlying trends in migrant reception. The data analysed were gathered by interviewing an Italian mayor who has attracted hostility from right-wing media for his novel approach to migrants, whose needs are met by finding them a place in the local social context. Findings suggest that, in certain circumstances, the migratory phenomenon may benefit not just the subjects involved but also the places concerned. The study thus foregrounds the degree to which welcoming the cultural other counters social discourses that currently appear triumphant in mainstream media and electoral processes.

The question of sociolinguistic authenticity has been widely researched with reference to authentic linguistic production and authentic language users. Globalization and intense language contacts have brought increased attention to the question of authenticity as it applies to what linguistic and cultural production is considered authentic and what facets of linguistic and cultural production are most salient to authenticity. The study examines the notion of authenticity in relation to the linguistic presentation of Russian womanhood by the Tajik-Russian singer Manizha in her song Russian woman . We aim to show how linguistic and cultural transgression underlying her performance prompted contestable interpretations and opened up the evaluative divide among the audience. Using Pennycook’s semiotics of transignification (Pennycook 2007), we analyze the performance at different levels (pretextual history, contextual relations, subtextual and intertextual meanings, and post-textual interpretations). We juxtapose the song, the singer’s post-performance interviews, and the viewers’ online comments in order to reveal the authenticating and deauthenticating discourses of gender and ethnicity. We have identified the opposing conceptions of Russian womanhood in the performance, both of which can be deemed authentic or inauthentic. We argue that authentication and deauthentication of this textual assemblage are driven by different ideologies and often depend on a single textual level or element. Moreover, authenticity may be recontextualized and renegotiated through discourse. The study highlights the co-existence of multiple and competing authenticies within a single multimodal performance and demonstrates how semiotics of transignification may be used to un-cover these competing ideological orientations.

Language and culture contacts resulting from the migration of population, as well as current geopolitical and technological processes, enhance the increase of translingual works that reveal symbiotic phenomena of languages and cultures in contact. However, there are still many unsolved problems in defining the translingual discourse and linguistic devices for creating it. The article discusses intercultural narratives in a novel by Kiana Davenport, an American author of Hawaiian descent, whose literary creative translingual work is enhanced by intercultural phenomena related to the contacts of American English, Hawaiian, and Russian languages. The article aims to describe linguistic devices for creating translingualism and to characterize the processes that take place in assimilation and language alteration in contact situations. The research has revealed that translinguality characterizes not only texts that are written in a second language, as is a traditional point of view, but also writings of a bilingual with two native languages enhanced by a third one. Translinguality can be reached by various linguistic tools comprising lexical borrowings, including endonymic toponyms and culture-specific concepts, loan translations, allusions, as well as pidginization of speech and some others. The findings showed that pidginization of speech of different characters results in stylized dialogues with deviated articulation of English words, intentional grammatical deviations, set expressions from Hawaiian Pidgin and wordplay. The results of the paper expand the idea of translingualism and intercultural communication and can be used for further research into linguistic and cultural contacts.

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