Politeness in English and German: a contrastive study

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1.7 (A-), University of Bayreuth (UB Bayreuth), course: Contrastive Linguistics, language: English, abstract: Almo st all linguistic research views politeness as a universal feature of civilized societies, regardless of their background culture, or their language. Politeness is thus seen as an important social or 'urbane' value, inherent to successful communication, although its realization may vary across the different speech communities. Politeness offers a good way of emotional control of the individual (House and Kasper, 1981: 158), and is typically means of preserving and maintaining good social relationship between the speakers of one or more cultures. Polite behaviour generally protects the individual, as well as their addressee, and often becomes subject matter of self- help books on etiquette, especially in cases when people belong to a specific hierarchy (roya l court, business company etc). The verbal realization of politeness poses even greater problems when the interlocutors belong to different cultures and try to communicate, transferring their pragmatic knowledge of polite behaviour into the foreign langua ge. Lack of practice and the learners' concern with rendering correctly the foreign language's grammatical structures in the first place often lead to misunderstandings, or the so-called 'socio-pragmatic failures' (Thomas, 1983)- ' errors resulting from no n- native speakers not knowing what to say or not saying the appropriate things as a result of transferring incongruent social rules, values and belief systems from their native languages and cultures'. These types of errors are likely to cause a downright insult for both the non- native and the native speakers of a certain language, the native speakers misunderstanding and misinterpreting the intentions of the non- native speaker, and the nonnative speakers being over-sensitive to 'distinctions of grammatical form' (Brown and Levinson 1996: 35), in a way the native speakers are not. In any case, being polite is essential to maintaining healthy social relations within a specific culture, and even more so, for the communication across cultures. Cross-cultural communication offers a wide field for research, as the socio-pragmatic failure of one speaker of a certain community tends to be stereotyped for the whole community (Knapp-Potthoff 1992: 203), consequently labeling a nation as rude, over-polite, insincere etc. [...]