Selasa, 12 Juli 2011

System in Politeness and Culutural Diversity in Language Use

Cross-cultural diversity in language use
Although such theories of the universality of language use clearly contain a certain degree of truth, many sociolinguists have expressed reservations. Saville-Troike (1982) suggests that while many functions of language are indeed universal, the way language operates in any one society to serve these functions is culture-specific.
Loveday (1982) says much the same thing in his observation that cross-cultural differences reside, not in what we do, but in how, we do it. Like others, such as Varonis (1981), Schmidt and Richards (1985), Fasold (1990), Odlin (1990), he stresses the part played by cross-cultural transfer, for example in the ways ritual formulae are used.
Different systems of politeness
Most of those who disagree with theories of politeness systems focus their arguments on the work of Brown and Levinson (1987), since this is the most comprehensive statement of the universal case.

Criticisms of Brown and Levinson's theory concentrate on four main areas:
the absense of context (both situational and cultural)
the neglect of discourse
the rigidity of the politeness scale in relation to the three sociological variables (P,D, and R).
the universality of the concept of face and of their ranking of politeness strategies.
In this paper we will concentrate on this area. Our claim is that the universality hypothesis lacks empirical evidence, in spite of the fact Brown and Levinson provide with sufficient data from three different languages.


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