Читать книгу The Politeness/Impoliteness Divide - Saida Anssari-Naim - Страница 8

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Introduction

The aim of this book is to illustrate the way in which a theoretical discourse on politeness, based on a specific linguistic-cultural framework, can challenge the practice of politeness in a language and culture with a different tradition. Certainly, this kind of contrast is common in the academic literature dealing with the intercultural dimension of pragmatics. The theoretical discourse on politeness should be understood in close relation to the linguistic and cultural context in which it is historically conceived, i.e. the English language and the associated Anglo-Saxon culture, with all the nuances that this generalization entails. Assigning such a discourse the role of a universal framework brings with it interpretative biases, as well as the danger of overlooking meaningful facets in the description of other cultural and linguistic domains. This interpretative bias is inevitable, considering that the interest and quality of a theoretical discourse lies not simply in the fact that it can be mechanically applied to the description of events, but also in its ability to establish an open dialogue with these. Such an open dialogue always involves negotiating and thus modifying some initial assumptions.

In this study my intention is to explore the particular contribution of Moroccan Arabic (MA), and the cultural code associated with it, to the theoretical discourse on politeness. My focus will be on the particular way MA handles central speech acts such as expressing gratitude, invitations and compliments. However, as I will try to show, the ‘unique’ treatment of these speech acts uncovers a new way of viewing the act of communicating and of understanding how human beings are involved in this process. To my understanding, politeness is more than a mere strategy to solve the conflicts inherent to social interactions; it is a way of constructing our identity, and the identities of others, in human terms. The issue of how MA deals with certain speech acts leads us, somehow, to rethink the disciplinary adscription of the theoretical discourse on politeness, removing it from an interactional sociolinguistics frame, where it was initially formulated, into the domain of linguistic anthropology, or, simply anthropology.

The dialogue between a theoretical discourse and the empirical field which this discourse describes is articulated here in two stages. In the first, an intercultural contrast (a theory originally based on English and Anglo-Saxon culture sets against empirical data from MA) allows us to identify specific cases of what concerns a polite behaviour. It is precisely this contrast with the theoretical discourse that leads us to pay a special attention to the aspects of a polite behaviour in MA that might not have been seen as meriting explicit reflection had they not been questioned from outside the culture. Indeed, the contact and contrast with other cultural contours is the only instrument at our disposal to identify singularities of the culture itself. In the second stage, these singularities are re-examined and through this they cease to be loose and discordant pieces of the theoretical discourse, inasmuch as their inherent internal logic now becomes apparent. In this way, the empirical field described becomes a true interlocutor with the theoretical discourse, which must adapt the assumptions and the scope of its proposals if the aim of a universal description is to be achieved. Politeness is definitely a universal phenomenon, so to think about politeness requires a dialogue between complementary visions adopting a transcultural position.

To conclude this brief introduction, it is worth mentioning that the formulation of this type of theory is fed by my personal bicultural experiences, as a person for whom the forging of a style and an identity was the result of a long process of hybridization and reconciliation of cultural codes, a process, of course, which included problems and more than one misunderstanding. Intercultural dialogue has been in my case an inner dialogue, one that people in such circumstances normally keep to themselves.

Through my experience as a native speaker of MA and also my work in the field of pragmatics, I was able to anticipate that the use of the three speech acts chosen for the present study might involve potential pragmatic conflicts in terms of Western communicative expectations. Communicative breakdowns or other problems are thus expected to occur during interactions between Moroccans and, for example, English speakers as a result of the lack of a one-to-one correspondence of how thanks/apologies, invitations and compliments are used and interpreted in the two language communities.

An overview of the sociolinguistic profile of Morocco will now be given, together with a description of the different dialects spoken in this country.