Lesson 6 Language description and corpus analysis.

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Lesson 6 Language description and corpus analysis

Transcript of Lesson 6 Language description and corpus analysis.

Page 1: Lesson 6 Language description and corpus analysis.

Lesson 6

Language description and corpus analysis

Page 2: Lesson 6 Language description and corpus analysis.

Language description• A corpus analysis will normally involve some

kind of language description linking elements found to be salient with the context and purpose of the texts

• The theoretical approach or model should be made explicit and details of the descriptive framework given. E.g. Appraisal

• Categories from a corpus based grammar• (register, stance, modality, speech acts)

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• This usually means identifying sets of items from the wordlists or keyword lists or collocates and linking them to some independent description of language to be found in a grammar, a dictionary or other sources of linguistic research.

• (e.g. the resources of dialogistic positioning from Appraisal theory)

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• If you give a description of the resources involved you can illustrate how your corpus shows particular use of these, i.e. the discourse type showing evidence of patterns of use of a group of features to achieve a goal

• (e.g. features which identify informality were found in the keywords of SiBol, vague language, contractions, this can be linked to an attempt to construct a familiar relationship)

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• You should be able to provide references or quotations from an independent source to show how the features you identify have been identified in other corpora

• You should also be able to cite work which has been done already on your topic

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Spoken Interaction

Spoken discourse and face work

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Interpreting speech acts

• We often need to go beyond literal meaning to get at speaker meaning. We often have to make inferences based on context.

• We cannot rely solely on the literal meaning and the syntactic ordering of words to understand the intended meaning

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Identifying speech acts

• Locutionary act: the communicative act of uttering a sentence (involving the acts of referring to certain objects in the world and saying stuff about them).e.g. It’s hot in here.

• Illocutionary act: the act (defined by social convention) which is performed when making an utterance: e.g. accusing, apologizing, asserting, boasting, congratulating, praising

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Knowledge and inferring

• For interpretation to be successful various types of contextual knowledge as well as vital inferential processes and an assumption of cooperative linguistic behaviour are all required

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Choice and context

• Linguistic behaviour is linked to social context• We always have a choice in what we say or

write and one of the linguist’s tasks is to uncover what Choice X does that Choice Y doesn’t do.

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Politeness and Face

• Politeness theory(Brown and Levinson 1987, 1999)

• To lose face• To save face• Face threatening acts• (Goffman 1967)

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B and L

• People have certain needs and two of these are:

• the need for freedom (autonomy)• and the need to be valued (self-worth)• and because these needs are fragile they

require careful tending by all participants involved.

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Assumption

• All competent adult members of society have, and know each other to have:

• Face: the public self image that every member wants to claim for himself, consisting in two related aspects

• A) negative face• B) Positive face

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Negative face

• the basic claim to territories,• personal preserves, • rights to non-distraction• i.e. to freedom of action and freedom from

imposition

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Positive face

• The positive consistent self image or ‘personality’ (crucially including the desire that this self image be accepted and approved of) claimed by interactants

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cooperating

• In general people cooperate in maintaining face in interaction, this cooperation is based on the mutual vulnerability of face

• Certain acts intrinsically threaten face• We can distinguish the sorts of acts that

threaten face

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Cooperation

• Normally everyone’s face depends on everyone else’s face being maintained

• People can be expected to defend their face if threatened

• Defending face can threaten the other person’s face

• It is in every participant’s best interest to maintain each other’s face

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Politeness

• Politeness is a term we use to describe the extent to which actions, including the way things are said, match the addressee’s perceptions of how they should be performed

• Politeness refers to behaviour which actively expresses positive concern for others, as well as non-imposing distancing behaviour

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• Politeness is linked to status and power, which are not absolute

• Social relations and situational contexts can determine who can expect to get their own way

• To achieve our aims we have to interact in a way that meets our addressee’s expectations of how we should interact in that particular context

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Face threatening acts

• Threats to hearer’s negative face: indicating that the speaker does not intend to avoid impeding hearer’s freedom of action

• 1. Acts that suggest hearer will have to do some future act (orders, requests; suggestions, advice; remindings; threats, warnings,dares

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Threats to H’s negative face

• 2. acts that suggest some positive future act on the part of S towards H which consequntly puts pressure on H to accept or reject and might therefore lead to H incurring a debt (offers, promises)

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Pressure to protect or surrender

• 3. acts that suggest some desire on the part of S towards H or H’s goods which may put pressure on H either to protect the object or to give it to S.

• A. compliments, expressions of envy or admiration

• B. expressions of strong negative emotions toward H (hatred, anger, lust)

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Compensatory linguistic strategies

• Positive politeness is linguistic behaviour signalling that the speaker wants/needs/appreciates the same things as the hearer.

• Negative politeness is linguistic behaviour which signals that the speaker recognizes the hearer’s fundamental right to unimpeded action and autonomy

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politeness

• Politeness = behaviour which actively expresses positive concern for others (positive politeness) as well as non imposing distancing behaviour (negative politeness)

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strategies• Positive politeness strategies:• 1. claim common ground• 2. convey that S and H are cooperators• 3 Fulfill H’s wnat for some X• Negative politeness strategies:• 1. be direct• 2. don’t presume/assume• 3. don’t coerce H• 4. communicate want not to impinge on H• 5. Redress other wants of H

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Claim common ground• Notice, attend to H’s wants• Exaggerate interest/approval/sympathy in of

with H• Intensify interest for H (question tags, direct

quotes, historic present)• Use in-group identity markers (solidarity

address forms, dialect, slang , contractions)

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Common ground

• Seek agreement (safe topics, repetition)• Avoid disagreement (token agreement,

pseudo agreement, white lies)• Presuppose/assert common ground (gossip,

speak from H’s point of view (use H’s deictic centre) presuppose H’s knowledge

• Joke

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Convey that H and S are cooperators

• Assert knowledge of H’s wants• Offer, Promise• Be optimistic (reduce degree of opposition)• Include S and H in the activity• Give or ask for reasons (why not…..?)• Assume or assert reciprocity (you scratch my

back)

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Fulfil H’s wants

• Give gifts to H:

• Goods• Sympathy• compliments

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Negative politeness strategies

• Be conventionally indirect• Don’t assume/presume: question or hedge• Don’t coerce H: minimise imposition, be pessimistic,

give deference – treat H as superior• Communicate S’s wnat not to impinge on H• Apologise, impersonalise (avoid pronouns I and you)• Go on record as incurring a debt

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NB

• Being linguistically polite does not necessarily entail sincerity

• The fact of making an effort to go through the motions is what makes the act a polite one

• Cross cultural differences: this is an Anglo- centric view

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Institutional discourse

• When language is being used for institutional purposes there can be more than one mode dominant at any one time

• And these can relate to different kinds of face

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Transactional mode

• Language used to convey content• Transmission of information• Task focussed• Need for clarity, efficiency and brevity • Linked with competence face (being good at

your job)

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Interactional mode

• Language used to express and maintain social relationships

• Primary goal is the establishment and maintenance of social relationships

• Negociation of role relationships, peer solidarity, the exchange of turns, the saving of face of both speaker and hearer

• Linked with affective face (being liked)

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Interpersonal and transactional

• You can conduct interpersonal work (enhancing affective face) while pretending to do transactional work (involving competence face) and vice versa. In some jobs where social skiils are important – where some kind of persuasion is needed - affective face is part of competence face

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competence face• Competence face: professional, capable, in

control, authoritative• Compromised by error, oversight, perceived

inefficiency• Not compatible with the expression of in-

group solidarity• Associated with formality

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Affective face

• Non-threatening, congenial, good to be around, teasing, joking, relaxed

• Associated with informality

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Balancing acts

• Buid up of competence face means risk of appearing non-affiliative, of claiming supremacy and superiority

• Too much indulgence in in-group reference, common ground,humour or self deprecation can undermine competence face

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references

• Grundy, P. Doing Pragmatics ch7• Bloomer et al. Introducing Language in

Use ch 3 and 4• Watts, R. Politeness• Lakoff, R, what you can do with words:

politeness, pragmatics and performatives

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Overview of corpus linguistics and (im)politeness

• (Im)politeness studies: generally concerned with trying to understand the role of face and facework in communication, and how different types of facework are expressed.

• The term (im)politeness implies aggressive facework as well as mitigation of face threat, or face enhancement.

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(Im)politeness and corpus studies

• previous studies in this field: • the theoretical framework of (im)politeness

has been used in combination with corpus linguistics for a range of purposes and at a variety of stages in the research process:

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Over- and too polite?

• Culpeper (2008) has used corpus linguistics to investigate the evaluative force of the expressions over-polite and too polite, and thus highlights the potential of a corpus semantic approach to metalinguistic labels of (im)politeness.

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annotation

• McEnery et al (2002), annotated their data for pragmatic information about the sense and force of utterances in order to investigate directness and indirectness. In this kind of analysis the annotation may be very time-consuming

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trolling

• Hardaker’s (2010) analysis of first order (im)politeness notions of “trolling” in computer-mediated communication. She examines over 2000 references to troll* in her chosen discourse type to see how this community perceives troll behaviour and to form a working, user-based definition of trolling for future research.

• Trolling is generally understood as the deliberate creation of social discord in online communities, though see Hardaker’s article for a full definition

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Searching for features

• Most frequently, the corpus is used as a resource for examples of a given (im)politeness feature, and research using this combination ranges from Kohnen’s (2008) study of Anglo-Saxon address terms to Beeching’s (2006) study of quoi in contemporary French.

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What to analyse

• a corpus approach to (im)politeness can provide a new means of deciding what to analyse as (im)politeness;

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Conventionalised formulae

• it enables the researcher to provide information about how frequent a phenomenon is; and also permits research into the process of conventionalisation of im/politeness formulae and pragmatic meaning shift.

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Cherry-picking

• the use of a corpus does not in itself guarantee reliability or validity - a cherry-picked example from a corpus is still a cherry- picked example even if it comes from a corpus.

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when “politeness” is not being polite

• the use of conventional markers of respect such as with respect or sir and challenge the blunt assumption that a polite form will necessarily be doing politeness work.

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Different functions

• the use of such forms can perform a number of different functions in discourse other than respecting an interlocutor’s face.

• they are sometimes used as a deliberate ploy to attack face.

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Humphries: Minister, with the greatest possible respect--

Hacker: Oh, are you going to insult me again?

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Taylor

• This case study examines the variety of functions which negative politeness forms fulfil in institutional discourse.

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negative politeness, does not refer to impoliteness

• but to politeness which is directed at an individual’s negative face, that is to say the right of the recipient to maintain their distance (Goffman 1967: 72).

• As opposed to positive politeness through which a speaker may show his/her appreciation for another participant

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Invasion of space

• as Goffman notes, the two are frequently in opposition:

• To ask after an individual’s health, his family’s well-being or the state of his affairs, is to present him with a sign of sympathetic concern; but in a certain way to make this presentation is to invade the individual’s personal reserve. (1976: 73)

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Mitigation and warnings

• negative politeness features are not limited to mitigation of the effect of an unavoidable face-threatening act (FTA) on the addressee (e.g. Harris 2001, Blas-Arroyo 2003).

• in certain contexts some “polite” phraseologies have become so conventionalised that most competent English speakers would be primed to treat them as discourse markers indicating that a face threat is about to follow.

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Polite phraseologies

• polite phraseologies, while superficially expressing distance and deference, can be seen to perform a variety of overlapping functions such as showing awareness of the discourse norms, allowing the participant to be “consciously aggressive in an acceptable way” (Locher 2004: 90)

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Mock politeness

• functioning as an integral part of an impolite move in the case of mock politeness, where mock politeness is used to refer to instances where “the FTA is performed with the use of politeness strategies that are obviously insincere, and thus remain surface realisations” Culpeper (1996: 356).

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Adversarial discourse

• Eg in Prime Minister’s Question Time

• within this context the function of politeness changes: politeness strategies are not the linguistic means necessary to avoid conflict. Question time is conflict. Politeness strategies become the means at the Chamber’s disposal to be able to work and progress, even in the middle of conflict. (2001: 164-165)

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Adversarial agression

• Politeness markers then become a way of “getting away with it”. In these cases, it is not so much a case that politeness “makes possible communication between potentially aggressive partners” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 1) but makes communication between explicitly (and necessarily) aggressive partners possible.

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broadcast interviews,

• a rhetorically similar institutional discourse type, Piirainen-Marsh(2005: 208-209)

• the [interviewer] combines conventionally polite forms and a neutralistic posture with a challenging use of interrogative syntax. By doing so the [interviewer] seems to build on what is appropriate or within the expected politic behaviour of the interaction and uses it as a resource in constructing an accusatory question agenda.

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Taylor’s research

• UK data from parliamentary discourse, a public inquiry and political interviews.

• three discourse types chosen because they are all instances of public, institutional discourse consisting of a restrictive turn-taking format, in which “sanctioned aggressive facework” may form part of the expected behaviour given the lack of common goals.

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The corpora– HoC contains c. 960,000 tokens from House of

Commons debates on the Iraq war, – Hutton contains c. 840,000 tokens from the Hutton

Inquiry, a public inquiry set up to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. David Kelly which heard from seventy-four witnesses including members of the government, the Ministry of defence, and the BBC,

– Frost contains c. 480,000 tokens of interviews with Labour politicians on the BBC television programme Breakfast with Frost.

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ways in which corpora may be used to identify sites of impoliteness

• would include looking for:

• meta-pragmatic comment on the discourse norms

• reception/judgements of impoliteness from an addressee

• reception/judgements of impoliteness from third parties i.e. neither the speaker nor the addressee

• shifts from transactional to interactional mode

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e.g. from the BNC

• I don't mean to be rude, but how on earth are you going to

• I'm sorry, dear boy, I don't mean to be rude• He didn't mean to be rude.• I'm sorry, I don'tmean to be rude.• He doesn't mean to be rude,’ explained

Betty.• You see you see I don't mean to be erm rude or

anything but as I'm sure you

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meta-pragmatic comment• The first set is formed of terms which evaluate

and classify events or utterances using meta-pragmatic politeness terms such as: rude, (im)polite etc.

• The second set, in the search for impoliteness, would include terms which indicate that aggressive facework occurred such as feisty, confrontational etc.

• The third set is made up of terms which refer to the norms, and exceptions to them such as: (in)appropriate, (un)usually etc.

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Parliamentary discourse

• Francois (Con): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I fully appreciate that the Minister can take the decision not to give way, but as someone who served in the regiment that hon. Members have been discussing, I must put it on record that I think that it was extremely discourteous that he did not give way to me. Do you not think that he is being impolite?

• Lord (Deputy-Speaker): That is a matter not for the Chair, but for debate. In any case, the hon. Gentleman has now put his point on record. (HoC)

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Parliamentary discourse

• • (3) Garnier (Con): I have the greatest respect for the

right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife [Mr. Campbell] for the manner in which he advanced his case this afternoon and for the clever way in which he said that this afternoon's debate should not descend into party-political argument. That makes it hugely impolite to be rude about the Liberal Democrat motion. I shall not be impolite, but I will have one or two things to say about it. (HoC)

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Outsiders’ comments

• This is what Mr Blair is certain to do in his speech tomorrow - saying, as he did in his unusually feisty performance on Breakfast with Frost yesterday - that what really motivates him is crime, asylum, health, and education. (Scotsman 29/09/2003)

• (5) Mr Blair used a combative interview on BBC1's Breakfast with Frost to confront his critics and tell them he was in no mood to back down. (Telegraph 29/09/2003)

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Press reviews• (6) Mr Blair again showed his resilience yesterday in a

combative performance on the BBC One show Breakfast with Frost. (Times 29/09/2003)

• (7) Mr Blair gave a combative performance on BBC's Breakfast With Frost programme (Independent 29/09/2003)

• (8) It wasn't just a belligerent performance he gave on Breakfast With Frost, it was arrogant. (Mirror 29/09/2003)

• (9) But nor was the refusal to back down on Iraq, NHS reforms or student top-up fees couched in the confrontational language Mr Blair deployed in his conference warm-up interview with BBC1's Breakfast with Frost. (Guardian 01/10/2003)

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Suggestions• Choose a particular discourse community to

investigate in terms of first order conceptions of impoliteness (impoliteness1). What kinds of language behaviour are described or classified as impolite?

• A potentially interesting source : online forums which are created for expatriate/migrant communities because discussion here often centres on cross-cultural differences in im/polite behaviours.

• Another fruitful source is the?” on the website www.mumsnet.com because this also frequently involves discussion and interpretation of impolite behaviours.

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• Look at the presidential debates see if you can identify speech acts such as FTA e.g accusations, contradictions. What are people doing when they use the word frankly?

• Find examples of positive and negative politeness.

• Are there any examples of mock-politeness• Are there any differences between democrats

and republicans in terms of (im)politeness?