Im/Politeness and in/directness in the speech act of disagreement
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Abstract
This paper presents the results of an empirical study investigating disagreements and linguistic im/politeness in Hungarian. The research questions are: (1) How do Hungarian native speakers conceptualize im/politeness; i.e., how can first-order im/politeness be defined? (2) How does the degree of in/directness employed in the expression of disagreement influence the perception of the im/politeness of the utterance?
The research was carried out among 93 Hungarian undergraduates, with the help of three questionnaires. In order to answer the research questions, I used two association tasks and an attitude test with a Likert scale.
The results show that the informants associated im/politeness primarily with deference, the use/lack of conventionally polite linguistic items, swearing, the non-/observance of interactional norms and the use of in/appropriate register. Overall, the disagreements expressed by means of indirect strategies were judged to be more polite than those employing direct strategies. However, the judgements on the degree of im/politeness were not unified within each category or strategy type.
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