Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies PDF

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Book reviews 261 has in the last two decades lost its role as the leading discipline in the research on man. Such a leading role was apparently taken up by biology, genetics and so on: see e.g. in this same volume (p. 15) how the shaping of the structure of a honeycomb is used as an example to expla...

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has in the last two decades lost its role as the leading discipline in on man. Such a leading role was apparently taken up by biology, so on: see e.g. in this same volume (p. 15) how the shaping of the a honeycomb is used as an example to explain how in language explicit statement of the rule, though the final structure looks as rule-governed” (see for similar cases pp. 200, 203 and passim).

the research genetics and structure of “there is no though it is

References Bates, Elizabeth and Brian MacWhinney, 1982. Functionalist approaches to grammar. In: E. Wanner and L. Gleitman, eds., Language acquisition: The state of the art, 173-218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berlin Brent and Paul Kay, 1969. Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bybee, Joan and Carol Moder, 1983. Morphological classes as natural categories. Language 59: 251-270. Jaeger, Jeri, 1980. Categorization in phonology: An experimental approach. Ph.D. Dissertation, UC Berkeley. Rumelhart, D. and McClelland, J., 1986. On learning the past tense of English verbs. In: D. Rumelhart and J. McClelland, eds., Parallel distributed processing, Vol. I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Juliane House and Gahriele Kasper, eds., Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies (Advances in discourse processes, 31). Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1989. 300 + ix pp. $47.50 (Inst.), $32.50 (Pers.). Reviewed

by Marina

Sbisa*

1. Cross-cultural pragmatics is today a crucial area for pragmatic studies. There is a world-wide, not merely theoretical need for enlarged consciousness and deeper knowledge of cultural differences in attitudes about both verbal interaction and social behavior. In pragmatics itself, and in particular in the study of speech acts, there is urgency to detect ethnocentric bias and eliminate it by the adoption of non-ethnocentric methodologies. The more general task of understanding the role of cultural differences in communicative processes and their possible relations to cognitive processes has become a central concern for many linguists, semioticians, and philosophers of language. In this context, the volume under review is certainly of interest for many readers. *

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address:

M. Sbisa, Via del Castelliere

18, l-34149 Trieste,

Italy.

The volume is the expression of collective research conducted in the framework of a research project (Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project or CCSARP) aimed at investigating cross-cultural variation in verbal behavi0r.l The research project focused on the speech acts of request and apology because of the variety of modes of performance and the richness of social implications that characterize these speech acts: in particular, both requests and apologies constitute face-threatening acts, but the former impose mainly to the hearer, while the latter are risky for the speaker’s face. The volume is divided into three parts: the first, ‘Issues in speech act pragmatics’, and the second, ‘Socio-cultural pragmatics’, both deal (with small differences of focus) with speech acts, their linguistic formulations, and the socio-cultural values attached to these. The third, ‘Interlanguage pragmatics’, contains two contributions investigating the verbal behavior not only of native, but also of nonnative speakers. The conceptual framework within which the research is conducted is inspired by speech act theory. However, this does not mean that the researchers’ attitude toward the use of language is in any way dogmatic or inattentive to empirical data. Speech act theory is present in the volume rather as a set of conceptual tools and of theoretical problems, than as a doctrine. The editors of the volume express the conviction that many of the central issues about speech acts have been left unanswered by the diverse theoretical approaches and methodological frameworks employed up to now in their study, and that therefore the study of speech acts is to remain “a central concern of pragmatics, expecially cross-cultural pragmatics” (p. 2). As to the relation of theory with empirical data, it is claimed that the collection of data about the actual use of language makes it possible to discuss theoretical issues about speech acts from an empirically based vantage point (p. 23). Other cross-cultural pragmatic studies have shown that parallel linguistic choices have different interactional values in different cultures (Wierzbicka 1985). Here, the opposite perspective is adopted: given a certain (intended) interactional value (i.e. the illocutionary force of a request or of an apology, in a given situation), it is investigated whether different cultures use different means to express it. In this perspective attention has to be paid to the variety of means used to express a given speech act in each language and culture. This links cross-cultural investigation to the discussion of such a variety (in each language and culture), and therefore to issues such as indirectness and speech act modification.

r The CCSARP research team comprised Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Claus Faerch. Juliane House, Gabriele Kasper, Elite Olshtain. Ellen Rintell, Jenny Thomas. Eija Ventola, Elda Weizman. Nessa Wolfson; among these, J. Thomas and E. Ventola did not contribute individually to the volume. Other contributors to the volume (in collaboration with CCSARP team members) are Steve Jones. Thomas Marmor. Candace J. Mitchell, Helmut J. Vollmer.

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The results of such investigations indicate that, while it is reasonable to admit the existence of universal pragmatic principles underlying speech act performance (all the languages studied vary their mode of speech act performance by situational factor, and sometimes it is even possible to identify common trends of variation), the ways in which these principles are used and the contexts of their application can but vary cross-culturally. Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences observed by the researchers include: variation in the overall character of a culture’s interactional style (speakers’ tendency to be more direct/more indirect, or to use a greater or smaller amount of speech act modification, . ..). variation of the specific proportion in the choices among the available modes of speech act performance, in a given situation; variation in the social meaning attached to similar linguistic choices; variation in perceptions of social reality. However, cross-cultural differences are greater in some situations than in others, and tend to emerge as a gradient phenomenon rather than as categorical differences. 2. The method used by the authors to collect their data merits some attention. The CCSARP project team was interested in getting a large sample, in several countries, of two specific speech acts used in the same contexts, in order to compare speech act performances by speakers of different languages and cultures and/or by native and nonnative speakers of the same language. The collection of such data would have been virtually impossible under field conditions. Therefore, written elicitation techniques were used. The instrument used is a discourse completion questionnaire, consisting of scripted dialogues and containing first the description of the situation (specifying the setting, the social distance between the participants and their status relative to each other), followed by an incomplete dialogue. The turn to be provided was the first in the case of requests and the second in the case of apologies; all dialogues contained a response to the missing turn, designed to signal illocutionary uptake. The unit of analysis was the utterance supplied by the informant in filling the missing turn. The languages investigated were English, French, Danish, German, Hebrew, Spanish; the countries where investigation was carried out were Australia, U.S.A., England, Canada, Denmark, Germany. Israel, Argentina. The target population were university students (in order to ensure as much homogeneity as possible in variables different from linguistic and cultural ones; such a homogeneity, however, might influence the research results in the direction of maximizing cross-cultural similarities, as is observed by Olshtain, p. 171). Written elicited data do not provide a fully ‘authentic’ picture of the spontaneous use of language, let alone spoken language. This difficulty is explicitly mentioned in the volume. However, it is contended that the data

obtained by the CCSARP discourse completion questionnaire provide evidence of what the informants believe people would typically utter in a given situation, that is, of what are felt to be the standard modes of performance for the speech act under investigation, and that such largely stereotyped responses make cross-cultural comparisons easier (p. 13; cf. p. 82). Some of the contributions to the volume are devoted to discussing the possibilities and limitations of the employed method. Thus, Wolfson, Marmor and Jones compare CCSARP data with ethnographic data and point out the emergence of some analogies (pp. 1855186); Rintell and Mitchell investigate whether a role play technique would elicit different responses from those elicited by the questionnaire, reaching the conclusion that the elicitation technique used does not produce remarkable differences in the mode of performance of the speech act by native speakers (p. 254, pp. 270-271). Both role play and discourse completion tests elicit representations of spoken language: informants say, or write, what they or someone else might say in a given situation. Another methodological difficulty concerns the distinction between the cross-cultural differences that lie in the way each culture perceives and assesses social reality, and those that he in the social meaning each culture attaches to formally similar linguistic choices. Can this distinction be drawn? And how is it to be drawn? The issue is tackled, but not exhaustively, by Blum-Kulka and House in their comparison between the CCSARP data and the results of a situation assessment questionnaire; the author’s conclusions (pp. 150-152) point out that a great deal of work is still to be done. 3. As the editors probably intended, the volume contributes several suggestions to some open issues in speech act theory. I shall hint at two of these. The study of speech act realization across situations and cultures offers evidence of the fact that there is no one-to-one relation between illocutionary acts and their linguistic formulations, but that each language disposes of different ways for performing the same speech act. But this accepted fact raises some questions, which are, in fact, old unresolved questions in speech act theory. For example: In what respects can different formulations of the ‘same’ speech act be ‘different’? And to what extent can different formulations be considered as performing the ‘same’ speech act? The theoretical framework of the CCSARP project accepts the distinction, traditional in speech act theory since Searle (1975), between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ modes of performance of the same speech act. Explicitness and lack of explicitness are also dealt with, in terms of ‘transparency’ or ‘opacity’ of the illocutionary force of the speech act (pp. 7681); lack of explicitness is, moreover, analysed by distinguishing pragmatic vagueness from pragmatic ambiguity (p. 43). How-

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ever, what is peculiar is the attention devoted to describing all the ‘different’ formulations of the ‘same’ speech act as degrees of a scale, and to investigating the social meanings of each. With respect to requests, Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper propose a detailed scale ranging from the most direct mode of performance (straightforward imperatives) to the most indirect (mild hints: i.e. utterances that are interpretable as requests merely by context) (p. 18). Within this scale, they distinguish direct strategies, conventionally indirect strategies, and nonconventionally indirect strategies (a distinction similar to that drawn by Brown and Levinson 1987); each level includes more than one strategy. Nonconventional strategies are divided into strong and mild hints, which differ with regard to the reference they make to one or more elements of the request situation (or to none of them), and are shown not to be used interchangeably (Weizman, pp. 81-94). Among conventionally indirect strategies there are suggestory formulae, i.e. utterances which contain a suggestion to do the requested act (‘How about cleaning up?‘) and query preparatories (utterances containing reference to the preparatory conditions of the request); the former are considered as less indirect than the latter. However, the directness/indirectness distinction does not seem to be exhaustive with respect to the differences among strategies; the direct level itself does not consist, as one would expect, in one strategy (the direct performance of the speech act), but includes five different modes of performance: three cases in which the understanding of illocutionary force relies on linguistic indicators, and two in which it relies on the semantic content of the utterance (as when a request is performed stating the hearer’s obligation to do something or the speaker’s desire that the hearer does something). From all these distinctions, a picture of illocutionary force and its indicators emerge, which is more complex and stimulating than the received one. With respect to the second question mentioned above (to what extent can different formulations be considered as performing the ‘same’ speech act?), the CCSARP data have little to say. In the CCSARP context, this question can hardly arise, since the identification of requests as requests ~ and of apologies as apologies - is predetermined by the questionnaire. However, the problem arises in connection with the investigation of apologies, which, if performed in certain ways or downgraded to a certain extent, may no longer count as apologies (cf. pp. 21-22, 155-159, 180, 292-293). This phenomenon is certainly worth further discussion. Another, more recent issue concerns the relation between illocutionary indicators and other pragmatic markers (politeness markers, pragmatic connectives, illocutionary force modifiers). The CCSARP researchers, dealing with real data (though elicited and therefore stereotyped) rather than with constructed examples, have to cope with the complexities of the actual use of language, in which utterances can’t be reduced to the coding of a proposition

plus the coding (or the more or less indirect indication) of an illocutionary force, but are rich of many pragmatic facets. Thus, the categories used in the analysis of the data include ~ beside the so-called Head Act, i.e. the part of the utterance which is sufficient for the performance of the expected speech act - other categories such as the alerters or attention getters, supportive moves, and modifiers (divided into upgraders, that intensify the speech act. and downgraders, that attenuate it) (pp. 17. 19, 2755276). But even this is too abstract, if compared to actual data. Some remarks throughout the volume suggest that one should reconsider the relation between illocutionary indicators or strategies and other kinds of pragmatic indicators, as a dynamic relation allowing for reciprocal influence or even role-switching. So, for example, it is claimed that modifiers can be multifunctional: they may act both as force indicating devices, and as sociopragmatic devices that affect the social impact of the utterance; an example of such multifunctionality is the Hebrew uluy (‘perhaps’). which may act as a downgrader, but in nonconventionally indirect requests strongly helps to ensure a requestive interpretation (p. 61). Another interesting case, discussed at length (by House, pp. 96119), is that of the German zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCB hitte (and of the English please). House concludes that the label ‘politeness marker’ as a designation for please or hitre is indiscriminate and inappropriate (p. 114): she claims that these are essentially requestive markers (namely, illocutionary force indicators), which take on different socio-pragmatic values in different situations. Thus, as a requestive marker please/hitte downgrades the force of an utterance in the imperative mood from command to request; when it is used within conventionally indirect requestive strategies, if the illocutionary point of the strategy is ascertainable from the nature of the situation itself, its use is supportive and downgrading, and therefore a gesture of politeness. But when it is used within indirect strategies, in situations in which it is not clear from the situation itself whether the utterance is a request, it reveals its nature of illocutionary indicator by making it explicit that the (potentially) negotiable force of the utterance is in fact requestive. 4. Among the many doubts or perplexities that the volume under review can raise (every complex, serious work does!) I shall briefly mention three, that strike me as specially important, each in its own way. First, the problem of gender. The CCSARP questionnaire was not designed to investigate the gender variable, and therefore the sex of speakers and hearers was randomly varied across situations (p. 15). Nevertheless, as is observed by Wolfson, Marmor and Jones, gender has acted as a hidden variable (p. 191). The ‘random’ distribution of sexes has unintentionally engendered sociologically loaded situations. In the apology questionnaire, the

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apologizer is a male when there is social distance between the participants, and a female when the situation is characterized by familiarity (p. 193). Moreover, situation 3 in the request questionnaire (a young woman wants to get rid of a man pestering her on the street) is so stereotyped as a male-female situation, that it becomes difficult to compare the answers it elicits with those elicited by other situations (as is noted by House, p. 109). All this strongly suggests that gender can’t be so easily excluded from analysis. It would have been safer to take it into account explicitly, for example by pairing each situation in the questionnaire with a similar situation in which the sex of the participants is reversed (as is suggested by Wolfson, Marmor and Jones). It also remains to be explored whether the sex of the participants affects the mode of performance of speech acts in ways that differ across cultures and across situations. Another issue which, in my opinion, is not tackled satisfactorily in the volume concerns the notion of context and its relationship to the speech act. It is not clear whether the authors maintain that this relationship is one-way or two-way: do they conceive the speech act as influenced or even determined by the context, or do they allow for the context’s being affected by the participants’ speech acts? In the former case, they should at least declare their position, which has several theoretical and methodological consequences (cf. Sbisi and Fabbri 1980). In the latter case, they ought to draw a distinction between those features of the context that are determined by social factors external to the current interactional episode, and those which are affected or produced within the interactional episode or even by the speech act under examination. Thus, for example, in the discussion of the situational features associated with requests it would be correct to distinguish ~ within the overall notion of the hearer’s obligation to comply with the request (cf. pp. 105P107, 140--149) ~ between pre-existing obligations and obligations stemming from the accepted performance of the requestive act. Last but not least, there is a remarkable asymmetry in the volume between the approach to requests and the approach to apologies. The strategies for requesting are analysed by reference to the indirectness scale, while in the case of apologies there is no clear distinction between direct and indirect strategie...