Читать книгу The Politeness/Impoliteness Divide - Saida Anssari-Naim - Страница 7

Prologue

The study of the rules governing communicative practice in different languages and cultures is a broad and vibrant area of research. Yet work here has tended to develop through a theoretical framework based on, or heavily influenced by, the English language and the Anglo-Saxon cultural domain. This presence of English in the World has not always been addressed with the necessary critical attitude. If languages impose in some way a particular world view, this will in turn condition and affect the way we deal with how other people communicate, create mental states and propose different views on reality through their language. This is not a new issue in Western culture. Let us recall the usual connotation of the term ‘barbarian’, first used by the ancient Greeks to point to foreign peoples, due to their way of speaking. Consider also the way Latin grammar and the Christian tradition imposed a particular perspective on the description of aboriginal languages and cultures after the ‘discovery’ of America. In more general terms, a Western cultural filter has conditioned the approach to the description of a range of phenomena in different colonial and postcolonial processes. These days the English language has come to serve as the primary means of global communication, yet both the language and the Anglo-Saxon culture associated with it impose certain biases on the view of other linguistic and cultural spaces.

This book seeks to avoid this kind of bias in cross-cultural pragmatics. It contains a proposal for an encounter between English-based theories, developed from a Western cultural perspective, and communicative practices characterising the cultural ethos and language of Morocco. The study will focus on three types of speech acts, relating to the use of thanks and apologies, to the formulation of invitations, and to complimenting behaviour. Together these will provide three perspectives from which to establish a consistent and internally cohesive account of a particular interpretation of the concept of politeness, of the social image involved when performing these speech acts and, finally, of the nature of these communicative acts in the Moroccan cultural context. The book offers, by means of this combination of perspectives on Moroccan communicative practice, an integrated empirical field with which the theoretical models can establish a truly fruitful dialogue. This entails, as a first step, avoiding the assessment of the communicative behaviour of others in terms of deviant or ‘exotic’ interpretations. This study by Saida Anssari-Naim constitutes a valuable contribution to research in cross-cultural pragmatics, but, moreover, should be praised for its unique attempt to transform our perspective on the alien, from the uncritical view of oddity to the insight of a true alterity.

CARLOS HERNÁNDEZ Y ANTONIA SÁNCHEZ

University of Valencia