Abstract
My thesis cross-fertilises im/politeness research with identities analysis (e.g. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Sifianou, 2017; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Georgakopoulou, 2021) by examining lay understandings of im/politeness in face-to-face naturally-occurring interactions. It particularly seeks to understand how members of two Greek friendship groups living abroad (co-)construct and negotiate more or less explicit evaluations of im/politeness both in ongoing interactions and in narratives talk in their informal coffee meetings. This topic has proved hard to investigate, given that participants scarcely evaluate their co-interactants’ behaviour in the flow of interaction (Haugh, 2007). And while the implicit aspects of im/politeness evaluations have received scant attention (but see e.g., Haugh, 2013; Ogiermann, 2019), more ink has been spilled on explicit (metapragmatic) comments, yet mainly in elicited data and corpus analyses. My aim is to address these gaps by exploring the entire spectrum of implicit and explicit evaluations mobilised by participants in spontaneous everyday interactions.To attain this, I mainly drew on audio- and video-recorded interactions (c. 73 hours), supplemented by participant observations and playback interviews. The micro-analyses of interactional data drew from the CA apparatus, which has only partially been integrated with im/politeness scholarship, while the analysis of interactional narratives relied on Georgakopoulou’s (2007) small stories research and on Bamberg’s (1997) model of positioning.
The analysis yielded the following findings: first, it uncovered systematic links between the form of evaluations, and the discourse activity under way and the participation framework. Hence, implicit/indexical (multimodal) cues featured mainly in ongoing interactions with targets being present, while explicit metapragmatic comments of various types, including affective ones, were more dominant in naturally-occurring narratives about co-present or absent parties, as well as in elicited narratives during playback interviews.
A second key finding relates to the redrafting of situated evaluations in different contexts and over time. Participants tended to shift from implicit or mitigated explicit evaluations in ongoing talk towards lexicalised and more serious modes of evaluating in retellings of known events and in playback interviews, which both attests to the dynamicity and context-contingency of evaluations, and points to the affordances of storytelling and playback interviews.
Thirdly, the analysis demonstrated the importance of considering all members’ contributions in multi-party interactions when it comes to evaluations of im/politeness. This is because both in ongoing interactions and in retellings of known events where the target was a co-present interlocutor and an intimate party, unaddressed recipients intervened by introducing a jocular frame that was subsequently embraced by all members involved, thereby forestalling the escalation of conflict.
Finally, the analysis of narratives about third parties foregrounded the existence of systematic relations between impoliteness and small stories which are conducive to the positioning of absent targets as impolite and of the complainant-teller as a suffering victim. It also put forth a cross-fertilisation between other-positionings and self-identity construction, as participants performed their stories about un/ethical others to basically position themselves as ethical and thus to jointly restore the moral order.
| Date of Award | 1 Sept 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Alexandra Georgakopoulou-Nunes (Supervisor) & Eva Ogiermann (Supervisor) |