Abstract Wishes are remarks that express the desire that things will turn out well for one’s interlocutor. They are among the expressive speech acts that have received scant scholarly attention. Purporting to further their study in online communication and extend the line of their comparative analysis, the present study examines wishes in the digital environment of Greek and English food blogs. Employing the relational work framework, our study examines 1,061 wishes occurring in the comment section of three Greek and three English food blogs. Our aim is to identify the triggering events, the types (situational, interactional or mixed) and forms (conventionalised or creative) of wishes found in the data, and the functions they perform in terms of relational work (politic or polite). Our analysis shows that the majority of wishes in Greek and English food blogs are situational. Interactional wishes are also present in the data; however, the majority of the English ones relates to the topic of the blog, i.e., the making or the consumption of a dish, whereas most Greek interactional wishes concern the addressee’s well-being. Finally, mixed wishes appear much more frequently in the Greek than in the English dataset. Our findings suggest that wishes are instances of polite relational work for Greek commenters, whereas of politic behaviour for the English.

Abstract Address forms have been investigated in various social contexts in association with solidarity and power (Brown, Roger & Albert Gilman. 1960. The pronouns of power and solidarity. In Thomas Albert Sebeok (ed.), Style in language, 252–281. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). In Indo-European languages, solidarity is often linked with singular pronouns, while power is associated with plural pronouns. Anchimbe and Janney (2017. Postcolonial pragmatics. In Anne Baron, Yueguo Gu & Gerard Steen (eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics, 1st edn., 105–120. London: Routledge, Yusra et al. (2023. Borrowing of address forms for dimensions of social relation in a contact-induced multilingual community. Journal of Politeness Research 19(1). 217–248) and other studies have extended this concept to non-European communities with multi-complex social structures and relations. They found that, beyond the solidarity and power continuum, other forms of relations exist, each represented by particular address forms. This study aims to refine these concepts by observing address forms in the Sasak communities. Through ethnographic observation of communication in key community centers, the study investigates the linkage between address forms, social structures, and social relations. By interviewing key informants and recording naturally occurring conversations, the study identifies patterned links between the forms and the conditions governing them. The study provides evidence that precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial Sasak societies have undergone significant changes, leading to increasingly complex social structures and relations. This complexity suggests that the binary solidarity-power concept should be revised and extended. Furthermore, the study displays the social dynamics that address forms can play within the postcolonial Sasak communities, highlighting the need for culture-specific refinement of the association between address forms and the nuanced dimensions of social relations.

Abstract Academic interest in impoliteness within political interactions has grown, but there remains a significant gap in the exploration of Chinese political discourse, let alone understanding how and why multiple participants perceive and respond to this phenomenon. Moreover, metaphor, as a crucial off-record strategy in impoliteness research, has not been given in-depth scrutiny by pragmaticists. To address the gaps, we collected 228 Chinese diplomatic press conference texts, and interviewed 27 Chinese citizens to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze external journalists’ face-threatening impoliteness and public understandings and retorts, in comparison with Chinese spokespersons’ measures of counter-impoliteness. It is found that first, the journalists’ impoliteness primarily consists of explicit negative association, seeking disagreement, and threatening/frightening. Second, the interviewees’ evaluation of impoliteness is influenced by their background knowledge, collective identity, political stances, and attention to the journalists’ querying manners. Third, the spokespersons use 11 types of deliberate metaphors along with other negative evaluations such as denials and rhetorical questions. Apart from these devices, the interviewees’ responses abound with distinct outpourings of other-condemning sentiment. The multiple recipients’ judgments and rebuttals may interrelate with their discoursal and social roles, which are arguably affected by China’s contemporary diplomacy and nationals’ mentalities.

Abstract This systematic review explored self-denigration in research articles published across different disciplines in the past four decades. Following a comprehensive collection and screening of data (4,002 initial records) from four scholarly databases, 80 research articles that met our eligibility criteria were identified. In line with the objectives of this study, the publications were coded and analyzed for contextual, methodological, and theoretical dimensions. The review also adopted an in-depth synthesis of the research articles investigating the attitudes of individuals toward self-denigration, and probed the development of research foci in this area. Among other results, the study revealed that the participants in the vast majority of studies effectively employed self-denigration as a relational communication management strategy. Contrary to our expectations, findings provided evidence for the widespread popularity of research on self-denigration in Western contexts, most of which report a favorable account of using self-denigration in social interactions away from its face value. Accordingly, this area deserves further exploration in different disciplines and contexts, as the study has practical significance in managing different interactional predicaments.

Abstract In this paper, we compare conventions of offering food and alcohol in Chinese and English. We define offering as an interaction ritual because in many linguacultures, food and drink are offered by following certain conventions, the observing of which is a ritually sacred duty for the host. Foreign residents in China are often irritated by Chinese conventions of offering food and drink. We try to explain such irritations by investigating how Chinese and ‘Western’ offering conventions differ from one another. Our framework brings together speech acts and interaction ritual theory. We first present relevant experiences of English-speaking foreigners living in China. We then conduct a contrastive pragmatic study of English and Chinese food and alcohol offering conventions, followed by an interpretation of the irritations reported by our panel of foreigners through our contrastive outcomes.

Abstract Politeness relies on interlocutors’ frames, which are cognitive concepts that include a linguistic expression and extralinguistic variables. Politeness research has highlighted the importance of extralinguistic variables on speakers’ linguistic choices. Despite many studies that touch on these topics, questions about the comparative importance of contextual variables and the joint effect of them on speakers’ utterances remain unanswered. To examine these questions, a quantitative approach using a conditional inference tree was employed to investigate the influence of power, distance, and imposition on the use of verb forms in requests in Italian. Verb forms were selected as the dependent variable because they are essential for performing speech acts and they can be placed on a politeness continuum. Considering the importance and hierarchical relationship of the predictor variables of power, distance, and imposition, the results indicated that the three variables were predictors of verb form. While power was the main predictor, the effect of distance and imposition depended on whether the other variables were considered, showing a varying and complex effect of contextual variables. The findings enhance the understanding of Italian politeness, and represent the complex calculations that speakers make when selecting linguistic forms by considering interacting contextual variables.

Abstract This paper examines the Italian folk concept of bella figura in the framework of politeness-theories and the various binary conceptions it provides for explaining the nature of human communication. BF is a culture-specific understanding of self-projection in everyday discourse: It is both, a cognitive concept concerning the “beautiful” embodiment of self, and a performative concept concerning the active “figuring out” of a bella figura in order to avoid its contrary, the brutta figura. Thus, the figura-concept represents a pragmatic principle for acting in line with socially accepted norms setting out a reference frame for judging social endeavours according to a culture-inherent value system. Accordingly, affinities can be assumed between the figura-concept and the sociopragmatic core notions ‘face’ and ‘politeness’. A comparison of the figura-concept with the respective first- and second-order conceptions of the two, reflects a cultural version of ‘impression management’ conceiving an image of self which coincides with Goffman’s, but not at all with Brown and Levinson’s face-concept. This makes it difficult to identify figura in relation to politeness. Connections and disconnections are discussed alongside the paradigmatic binary scales and the positive/negative value-attributes. Finally, the findings are verified by comparing the use of the respective expressions as evaluation tools.

Abstract Despite the fact that impoliteness research has spanned over three decades, it has been conceptualized persistently in terms of politeness as its binary opposite. In this paper, we endeavor to provide a theoretical framework for studying impoliteness as significant communicative practice. We aim to introduce Levinas’ face as an alternative to Goffman’s face and identify impoliteness with Levinas’ face for the reason that Levinas’ face, featuring absolute difference, can only be expressed through the discourse of resistance which manifests in various phenomena commonly categorized as impoliteness. We also argue that impoliteness is essentially the discourse of the authentic Self whose uncompromising difference, though potentially resulting in conflictive phenomena, facilitates understanding between individuals, not as actors, but as unique beings with their individualities and differences. We further contend that impoliteness is ethical in that the discourse of resistance does not aim for power but calls for respect for individual difference as well as responsibility for the Other in an effort to seek equality in human relations which are fundamentally power-laden and unequal. We also provide a case study to apply our theoretical construction of impoliteness to a literary classic, namely, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to illustrate our main points.

Abstract This paper addresses the issue of verbal behaviour which, being neither markedly polite nor markedly impolite nor simply politic, is interpersonally ambivalent. It focuses on what are known as mock impolite utterances (in which a positive attitude to the addressee(s) masquerades as a negative one). Through the detailed analysis of one attested utterance, it shows that apparently non-serious utterances of this kind can be more than simply the opposite of their surface realisations, that they can contain within them varying degrees of ‘seriousness’, so that interpretation of them is not just a binary matter of serious versus non-serious. It proceeds to propose that we can go some way to capturing this complexity by recognising that (non)seriousness operates on at least two dimensions – the affective and the propositional – and moreover that the precise degree of (non)seriousness of an utterance on each dimension is independent of the other. Two further examples are briefly examined to illustrate this variability.