Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

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This paper examines how politeness may be employed in requests in Xhosa drama. It has
been established that various meanings play a role in the understanding of indirect requests.
This finding is based on the theory of Brown and Levinson's (1987) face work of politeness.
Chunk et al (1980) maintain that the politeness of response is governed by the attentiveness
hypothesis which states that the more attentive the hearer is to all aspects of the speaker's
requests, the more polite he is. Request is one of the most common motivations for politeness.
Brown and Levinson (1987) define politeness as the manifestation of respect for and
recognition of another's face. They depict face into two components: negative face and
positive face. Positive face is the way a person wants to be regarded, admired, or approved by
others and to be treated as a friend. Negative face is the person's desire not to be imposed on
by other people.
The ten negative politeness strategies of Brown and Levinson (1987) do not apply to Xhosa
because they have been developed for a Western language. In the place of these strategies, it has
been found that negative politeness may be expressed in Xhosa through certain pragmatic
functions by means of which negative politeness may be applied to avert a face-threatening act.
Brown and Levinson (1987) list fifteen positive strategies. The most regular strategies are:
seek agreement, give or ask for reasons and address forms. In the case of Xhosa dramas
analysed, few strategies for positive politeness were found. These strategies can be divided
into two groups :high frequency and negligible. An explanation for the high frequency of
these strategies is to be found within positive politeness. Positive politeness forms describe
closeness between speaker and hearer and people see it as a solidarity strategy. A face saving
act is concerned with the person's positive face and it shows solidarity.
Two ways of thanking in Cypriot Greek
Terkourafi, Marina
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
mt217@cam.ac.uk
Cyprus has been in the periphery of the Greek world since antiquity. As a result, the Greek
language spoken on the island has been in successive contact with the languages of several
peoples, including, but not limited to, Arabic, Old French, Venetian, Ottoman Turkish, and
most recently English. The island was under British administration for just under a century,
between 1878 and 1960.
Although the newly founded Republic has two official languages, Greek and Turkish, English
remains an unofficial third language. Use of English was until recently pervasive in the
administrative sector, where statistical reports and agricultural instructions were normally
compiled in English, while the policies of semi-governmental organisations often reflect the
corresponding British ones (including use of imperial measures). This situation continues in
the legal and medical professions, as well as in education, where English-speaking private
schools exist at all levels. The use of English in Cyprus today could be put pretty much down
to historical reasons were it confined to the professional settings cited above—indeed, its use
in these settings is arguably subsiding.
However, use of English in spoken Cypriot Greek is boosted by the numbers of returning
Cypriots from the UK and the US, as well as recent immigrants to the island, predominantly
from Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. Such use of English takes the form of either
borrowing of individual words or phrases, or situational code-switching to achieve particular
rhetorical effects. Spoken corpus data suggest that, in the former case, English words tend to
co-occur with features of Cypriot—rather than Standard—Greek, are used by all social
classes alike, and are largely absent from formal settings such as discussions on radio/TV.