Symbols and abbreviations Foreword John J. Gumperz Introduction to the reissue Notes 1. Introduction 2. Summarized argument 3. The argument: intuitive bases and derivative definitions 4. On the nature of the model 5. Realizations of politeness strategies in language 6. Derivative hypotheses 7. Sociological implications 8. Implications for language studies 9. Conclusions Notes References Author index Subject index.

Politeness : Some Universals in Language Usage

How to Do Things With Words

People are capable of thinking about the future, the past, remote locations, another person's perspective, and counterfactual alternatives. Without denying the uniqueness of each process, it is proposed that they constitute different forms of traversing psychological distance. Psychological distance is egocentric: Its reference point is the self in the here and now, and the different ways in which an object might be removed from that point-in time, in space, in social distance, and in hypotheticality-constitute different distance dimensions. Transcending the self in the here and now entails mental construal, and the farther removed an object is from direct experience, the higher (more abstract) the level of construal of that object. Supporting this analysis, research shows (a) that the various distances are cognitively related to each other, (b) that they similarly influence and are influenced by level of mental construal, and (c) that they similarly affect prediction, preference, and action.

/pdf/construal-level-theory-of-psychological-distance-g5kjiydrew.pdf

Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance

This paper discusses some principles of critical discourse analy- sis, such as the explicit sociopolitical stance of discourse analysts, and a focus on dominance relations by elite groups and institutions as they are being enacted, legitimated or otherwise reproduced by text and talk. One of the crucial elements of this analysis of the relations between power and discourse is the patterns of access to (public) discourse for different social groups. Theoretically it is shown that in order to be able to relate power and discourse in an explicit way, we need the cognitive interface of models. knowledge, attitudes and ideologies and other social represen- tations of the social mind, which also relate the individual and the social, and the micro- and the macro-levels of social structure. Finally, the argu- ment is illustrated with an analysis of parliamentary debates about ethnic affairs.

/pdf/principles-of-critical-discourse-analysis-4xloscykj3.pdf

Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis

Preface I. On the Shoulders of Bakhtin and Vygotsky 1. The Woman Who Climbed Up the House 2. A Practice Theory of Self and Identity II. Placing Identity and Agency 3. Figured Worlds 4. Personal Stories in Alcoholics Anonymous 5. How Figured Worlds of Romance Become Desire III. Power and Privilege 6. Positional Identities 7. The Sexual Auction Block IV. The Space of Authoring 8. Authoring Selves 9. Mental Disorder, Identity, and Professional Discourse 10. Authoring Oneself as a Woman in Nepal V. Making Worlds 11. Play Worlds, Liberatory Worlds, and Fantasy Resources 12. Making Alternate Worlds in Nepal 13. Identity in Practice Notes References Credits Index

/pdf/identity-and-agency-in-cultural-worlds-4ninhgaoz5.pdf

Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01228.x

A prelinguistic gestural universal of human communication

How and why are women more polite: Some evidence from a Mayan community

/pdf/the-origins-of-syntax-in-discourse-a-case-study-of-tok-pisin-2sbg83scd9.pdf

The Origins of Syntax in Discourse: A Case Study of Tok Pisin Relatives.

“There is nothing so brutally shocking, nor so little forgiven, as seeming inattention to the person who is speaking to you […] I have seen many people who, when you are speaking to them, instead of looking at, and attending you, fix their eyes upon the ceiling or some other part of the room […] Nothing discovers a little, futile, frivolous mind more than this, and nothing is so offensively ill-bred.” Lord Chesterfield 1752 (Letters to his son, Letter CCLXXVIII) Introduction This chapter is about gaze behavior in conversation. Using data from three unrelated cultures (or more properly, speech communities), we ask whether there are, on the basis of these three cultures, plausible candidates for universal patterns of gazing during interaction, and where, on the contrary, we may expect to find culturally specific patterns. This focus is already rather different than the tenor of most of the other papers in this volume. Moreover, because of this focus, a central part is played by basic descriptive statistics, rather than the qualitative analysis of specific episodes. Despite these foci and the methods adopted, we see this paper as addressing some central issues posed by conversation analysis (CA). We are interested in a pervasive conversational practice, namely when participants gaze at one another during conversation. There has been relatively little published work in CA on the systematics of gaze, and what there has been (e.g., by Goodwin 1981) will be shown by our data not to provide a possible general analysis of the phenomena.

Gaze, questioning and culture

Is there a universal hierarchy of the senses, such that some senses (e.g., vision) are more accessible to consciousness and linguistic description than others (e.g., smell)? The long-standing presumption in Western thought has been that vision and audition are more objective than the other senses, serving as the basis of knowledge and understanding, whereas touch, taste, and smell are crude and of little value. This predicts that humans ought to be better at communicating about sight and hearing than the other senses, and decades of work based on English and related languages certainly suggests this is true. However, how well does this reflect the diversity of languages and communities worldwide? To test whether there is a universal hierarchy of the senses, stimuli from the five basic senses were used to elicit descriptions in 20 diverse languages, including 3 unrelated sign languages. We found that languages differ fundamentally in which sensory domains they linguistically code systematically, and how they do so. The tendency for better coding in some domains can be explained in part by cultural preoccupations. Although languages seem free to elaborate specific sensory domains, some general tendencies emerge: for example, with some exceptions, smell is poorly coded. The surprise is that, despite the gradual phylogenetic accumulation of the senses, and the imbalances in the neural tissue dedicated to them, no single hierarchy of the senses imposes itself upon language.

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Penelope Brown

Papers

A prelinguistic gestural universal of human communication

How and why are women more polite: Some evidence from a Mayan community

The Origins of Syntax in Discourse: A Case Study of Tok Pisin Relatives.

Gaze, questioning and culture

Differential coding of perception in the world's languages