Acta Linguistica Academica
Volume/Issue:
Volume 66: Issue 2
(Im)politeness and alignment
A case study of public political monologues
Authors:
Dániel Z. Kádár Dalian University of Foreign Languages

Search for other papers by Dániel Z. Kádár in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed Close
and
Sen Zhang Dalian University of Foreign Languages

Search for other papers by Sen Zhang in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed Close
Pages:
229–249
Online Publication Date:
Jun 2019
Publication Date:
01 Jun 2019
Article Category:
Research Article
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1556/2062.2019.66.2.5
Keywords:
(im)politeness; alignment; monologue; public discourse; Chinese political language use
Open access
Get Permissions

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the role of (im)politeness and alignment in public monologues. Linguistic politeness theory has predominantly focused on the interpersonal aspect of (im)politeness, and we know relatively little about forms of (im)politeness that do not serve a direct interpersonal function but rather aim to form a sense of alignment with an indefinite group of recipients. We define such form of pragmatic behaviour as ‘alignment’, to distinguish it from politeness as an interpersonal form of interaction. Forms of alignment may operate in a duality with interpersonal (im)politeness, and they represent the default mode of relational involvement in public discourses – in particular, in public monologues. We argue that forms of alignment cannot be ignored in politeness research due to their prevalence in certain genres/modes of communication, and also because their operation can be intriguingly complex from a politeness theoretical point of view, considering their dual relationship with (im)politeness. We use data drawn from Chinese political discourse as a case study to illustrate this dual relationship.

  • Agha, Asif . 2007. Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Agha, Asif . 2015. Tropes of slang. Signs and Society 3. 306–330.

  • Bhatia, Aditi . 2006. Critical discourse analysis of political press conferences. Discourse & Society 17. 173–203.

  • Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Bucholtz, Mary . 2009. From stance to style: Gender, interaction, and indexicality in Mexican immigrant youth slang. In A. Jaffe (ed.) Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 146–170.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Bull, Peter and Anita Fetzer. 2010. Face, facework and political discourse. Revue internationale de psichologie sociale 23. 155–185.

  • Chen, Guo-Ming . 2000. The impact of harmony on Chinese conflict management. Paper presented at the 86th Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association (Seattle, November 9–12, 2000). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED456490.pdf

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Chen, Xinren . 2017. Extensions of the Chinese passive construction: A memetic account. East Asian Pragmatics 2. 59–74.

  • Cooren, François . 2008. Between semiotics and pragmatics: Opening language studies to textual agency. Journal of Pragmatics 40. 1–16.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Culpeper, Jonathan, Leyla Marti, Meilian Mei, Minna Nevala and Schauer, Gila. 2010. Cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness: A study of impoliteness events reported by students in England, China, Finland, Germany and Turkey. Intercultural Pragmatics 7. 597–624.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Eelen, Gino . 2001. A critique of politeness theories. Manchester: St Jerome.

  • Flowerdrew, John . 1999. Face in cross-cultural political discourse. Text 19. 3–23.

  • Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar . 2010. A genre approach to the study of im-politeness. International Review of Pragmatics 2. 46–94.

  • Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar . 2013. Introduction: Face, identity and im/politeness. Looking backward, moving forward: From Goffman to practice theory. Journal of Politeness Research 9. 1–33.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Goffman, Erving . 1981. Forms of talk. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press.

  • Goodwin, Charles . 2007. Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse & Society 18. 53–73.

  • Graham, Sage . 2007. Disagreeing to agree: Conflict, (im)politeness and identity in a computer-mediated community. Journal of Pragmatics 39. 742–759.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Harold, Christine . 2007. Pranking rhetoric: ‘culture jamming’ as media activism. Critical Studies in Media Communication 21. 189–211.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Harris, Sandra, Karen Grainger and Louise Mullany. 2006. The pragmatics of political apologies. Discourse & Society 17. 717–736.

  • He, Ziran and Wei Ren. 2016. Current address behaviour in China. East Asian Pragmatics 1. 163–180.

  • Huckin, Thomas . 2002. Critical discourse analysis and the discourse of condescension. In: E. Barton and G. Stygall (eds.) Discourse studies in composition. Cresskill, NJ.: Hampton Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Jiang, Xiangying . 2006. Cross-cultural pragmatic differences in US and Chinese press conferences: The case of the North Korea Nuclear crisis. Discourse & Society 17. 237–257.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Johnson, Sarah . 2017. Agency, accountability and affect: Kindergarten children's orchestration of reading with a friend. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 12. 15–31.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Jong, Markus de, Mariët Theune and Dennis Hofs. 2008. Politeness and alignment in dialogues with a virtual guide. Aamas ’08: Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conferences On Autonomous Agents And Multiagent Systems 1. 207–214. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1402416

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Kádár, Dániel Z . 2017. Politeness, impoliteness and ritual: Maintaining the moral order of interpersonal interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Kádár, Dániel Z . 2019. Introduction: Advancing linguistic politeness theory by using Chinese data. Acta Linguistica Academica 66. 149–164.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Kádár, Dániel Z. and Jonathan Culpeper. 2010. Historical (im)politeness: An introduction. In J. Culpeper and D. Z. Kádár (eds.) Historical (im)politeness. Berne: Peter Lang. 9–35.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Kádár, Dániel Z. and Michael Haugh. 2013. Understanding politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Kádár, Dániel Z. and Sen Zhang. 2019. Intersubjectivity and implicitness in Chinese political discourses: A case-study of the 2018 vaccine scandal’. Journal of Language and Politics. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.18053.kad

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Kollias, Christos, Stephanos Papadamou and Psarianos, Iacovos. 2014. Rogue state behaviour and markets: The financial fallout of North Korean nuclear tests. Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy 20. 267–292.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Leech, Geoffrey . 2008. Language in literature: Style and foregrounding. London: Taylor & Francis.

  • Liu, Fengguang and Wenrui Shi. 2019. Political advice in Chinese political discourse (s). Acta Linguistica Academica 66. 209–228.

  • Locher, Miriam . 2006. Polite behaviour within relational work: The discursive approach to politeness. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Locher, Miriam and Richard Watts. 2005. Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research 1. 9–33.

  • Roche, Jennifer, Rick Dale and Gina Caucci. 2010. Doubling up on double meaning: Pragmatic alignment. Language and Cognitive Processes 27. 1–24.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Schafer, John C . 1981. The linguistic analysis of spoken and written texts. In: B. M. Crall and R. J. Vann (eds.), Exploring speaking-writing relationships: Connections and contrasts. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. 1–31.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Schermerhorn, John and Michael Bond. 1997. Cross-cultural leadership dynamics in collectivism and high power distance settings, Leadership & Organization Development Journal 18. 187–193.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Spencer-Oatey, Helen (ed.). 2000. Culturally speaking. London: Continuum.

  • Spencer-Oatey, Helen and Vladimir Žegerac. 2017. Power, solidarity and (im)politeness. In: J. Culpeper, M. Haugh and D. Z. Kádár (eds.) The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 119–141.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Tanaka, Hideki, Stephen Nightingale, Hideki Kashioka, Kenji Matsumoto, Masamchi Nishiwaki, Tadashi Kumano and Maruyama, Takehiko. 2002. Speech to speech translation system for monologues-data driven approach. ICSLP-2002. 1717–1720.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Tracy, Karen . 2017. Facework and (im)politeness in political exchanges. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh and D. Z. Kádár (eds.) The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 739–757.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Watts, Richard . 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Yang, Mayfair . 1997. Mass media and transnational subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (re)cosmopolitanism in a Chinese metropolis. In A. Ong and D. Nonini (eds.) Ungrounded empires: The cultural politics of modern Chinese transnationalism. New York: Routledge. 287–321.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Collapse
  • Expand
Cover Acta Linguistica Academica
Acta Linguistica Academica An International Journal of Linguistics
Print ISSN:
2559-8201
Online ISSN:
2560-1016

Editors

Editor-in-Chief: András Cser

Editor: György Rákosi

Review Editor: Tamás Halm

Editorial Board

  • Anne Abeillé / Université Paris Diderot
  • Željko Bošković / University of Connecticut
  • Marcel den Dikken / Eötvös Loránd University; Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Hans-Martin Gärtner / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Elly van Gelderen / Arizona State University
  • Anders Holmberg / Newcastle University
  • Katarzyna Jaszczolt / University of Cambridge
  • Dániel Z. Kádár / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • István Kenesei / University of Szeged; Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Anikó Lipták / Leiden University
  • Katalin Mády / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Gereon Müller / Leipzig University
  • Csaba Pléh / Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Central European University
  • Giampaolo Salvi / Eötvös Loránd University
  • Irina Sekerina / College of Staten Island CUNY
  • Péter Siptár / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Gregory Stump / University of Kentucky
  • Peter Svenonius / University of Tromsø
  • Anne Tamm / Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church
  • Akira Watanabe / University of Tokyo
  • Jeroen van de Weijer / Shenzhen University

 

Acta Linguistica Academica
Address: Benczúr u. 33. HU–1068 Budapest, Hungary
Phone: (+36 1) 351 0413; (+36 1) 321 4830 ext. 154
Fax: (36 1) 322 9297
E-mail: ala@nytud.mta.hu

Indexing and Abstracting Services:

  • Arts and Humanities Citation Index
  • Bibliographie Linguistique/Linguistic Bibliography
  • International Bibliographies IBZ and IBR
  • Linguistics Abstracts
  • Linguistics and Language Behaviour Abstracts
  • MLA International Bibliography
  • SCOPUS
  • Social Science Citation Index
  • LinguisList

 

2024  
Web of Science  
Journal Impact Factor 0.4
Rank by Impact Factor Q4 (Language & Linguistics)
Journal Citation Indicator 0.4
Rank by Journal Citation Indicator Q3 (Language & Linguistics)
Scopus  
CiteScore 1.2
CiteScore rank Q1 (Literature and Literary Theory)
SNIP 0.972
Scimago  
SJR index 0.193
SJR Q rank Q1

 

2023  
Web of Science  
Journal Impact Factor 0.5
Rank by Impact Factor Q3 (Linguistics)
Journal Citation Indicator 0.37
Scopus  
CiteScore 1.0
CiteScore rank Q1 (Literature and Literary Theory)
SNIP 0.571
Scimago  
SJR index 0.344
SJR Q rank Q1

Acta Linguistica Academica
Publication Model Hybrid
Submission Fee none
Article Processing Charge 900 EUR/article
Effective from  1st Feb 2025:
1200 EUR/article
Printed Color Illustrations 40 EUR (or 10 000 HUF) + VAT / piece
Regional discounts on country of the funding agency World Bank Lower-middle-income economies: 50%
World Bank Low-income economies: 100%
Further Discounts Editorial Board / Advisory Board members: 50%
Corresponding authors, affiliated to an EISZ member institution subscribing to the journal package of Akadémiai Kiadó: 100%
Subscription fee 2025 Online subsscription: 648 EUR / 712 USD
Print + online subscription: 744 EUR / 820 USD
Subscription Information Online subscribers are entitled access to all back issues published by Akadémiai Kiadó for each title for the duration of the subscription, as well as Online First content for the subscribed content.
Purchase per Title Individual articles are sold on the displayed price.

Acta Linguistica Academica
Language English
Size B5
Year of
Foundation		 2017 (1951)
Volumes
per Year		 1
Issues
per Year		 4
Founder Magyar Tudományos Akadémia   
Founder's
Address		 H-1051 Budapest, Hungary, Széchenyi István tér 9.
Publisher Akadémiai Kiadó
Publisher's
Address		 H-1117 Budapest, Hungary 1516 Budapest, PO Box 245.
Responsible
Publisher		 Chief Executive Officer, Akadémiai Kiadó
ISSN 2559-8201 (Print)
ISSN 2560-1016 (Online)

Monthly Content Usage

Abstract Views Full Text Views PDF Downloads
Jan 2025 0 62 8
Feb 2025 0 87 11
Mar 2025 0 152 2
Apr 2025 0 46 7
May 2025 0 20 7
Jun 2025 0 22 4
Jul 2025 0 0 0