Hatice Çelebi’s book, which is based on her Ph.D. thesis, follows the recent tradition of impoliteness studies by addressing the central question that has been preoccupying scholars of this field: ‘[H]ow is it possible to decide whether an utterance is impolite or not given that it will be perceived differently depending on various factors such as previous encounters, culture, prosody, semantic schema and so on?’ (3). Furthermore, in line with the laudable desire to base impoliteness research in authentic data, the study is corpus-based, leading to the second major question: ‘[H]ow can we extract impoliteness from corpora, given that it is such a complex notion to define?’ (3). The use of corpus data – specifically, corpora of conversations – stems from the influence of the interactional approach to pragmatics (e.g. Arundale Reference Arundale2006, Haugh Reference Haugh2007), whereby the politeness or otherwise of an utterance can only be assessed within the wider context of the interaction between the participants. Çelebi looks at data from both British English and Turkish. The former is taken from the conversations subcorpus of the spoken section of the British National Corpus (BNC); the latter from the recently created Spoken Turkish Corpus (STC, Ruhi, Eyrılmaz & Acar Reference Ruhi, Eyrılmaz and Acar2012), which is still under construction. Although the two corpora are not directly comparable, partly because of the different points in time at which they were constructed, it is of great interest to the wider research community to learn more about this corpus resource for Turkish, and gain insights into the politeness (and impoliteness) principles of a non-Indo-European language.
The main contribution of this book consists of the detailed analysis of twelve extracts of conversation (seven English, five Turkish). Rather than provide a detailed summary of the work, which would prove difficult without access to the conversations themselves, this review will focus on some of the more general theoretical and methodological issues raised by the monograph regarding various aspects of (im)politeness research.
In Chapter 3, Çelebi describes her research design and methods. Central to this is establishing how one can go beyond the ‘standard procedures [of corpus linguistics] such as exploration of concordance outputs and frequency information and to move from clause discourse to extended discourse’ (68) – an issue routinely encountered by any researcher undertaking corpus pragmatics research. Çelebi’s proposed approach is lucidly described, and summarised for the reader in a helpful table (69). It includes both discursive and cue-based methods. The discursive approach is widely known (e.g. Locher Reference Locher2006). It takes as central the participants’ perspective and their evaluation of the discourse as (im)polite, using metapragmatic comments (e.g. ‘That’s very rude’) or other, similar reactions. It allows the researcher to avoid bias or misunderstanding by relying directly on the hearer’s verdict of what has been said. The cue-based approach (a newly proposed term by Çelebi) looks at a wider range of features, focusing on the actual contents of the speaker’s utterance, such as conventionalised and non-conventionalised impoliteness formulae, structural aspects of conversation (turn-taking, pauses, silences, topic changes), and semantic prosody (the positive or negative shades of meaning a word acquires through association with other positively or negatively evaluated words); it also considers aspects that go ‘beyond the linguistic expressions’ (189) such as prosodic changes and the relationship between the interlocutors. In doing so, it aims to obviate some of the perceived weaknesses of the discursive approach, such as the need to rely on the more or less explicit evaluations of the participants (see Haugh Reference Haugh2007 among others for a critique), by looking more broadly at the unfolding of the conversation. Çelebi acknowledges that elements of these two approaches are interrelated and can provide the context for the clearer interpretation of one another; I find the combination of methods convincing, but am uncertain as to how the cue-based approach differs from the interactional approach to politeness, as they seem to me to share a large number of features.
The importance of context is made clear in the process of data extraction. Çelebi starts with a list of words and phrases conventionally categorised as impolite to be searched for in the corpora, although it is not clear to this reader whether the list is actually used in the results; she claims that the lack of contextualisation in the search results made them less useful (99–102). This is seen for example in Extract 4 (BNC), where the conventionally impolite expression ‘Don’t be so stupid’ is revealed, when taken in context and with knowledge of the relationships among the participants, to be an affectionate and friendly way to disagree with a friend (and, in fact, indirectly compliment her appearance). This example is a helpful reminder of the importance of viewing data beyond the individual utterance, demonstrating how a ‘typical’ impolite expression can have a range of interpretations depending on the context.
A sizeable issue that arises from the numerous constraints Çelebi has imposed on her search for data is that the resulting set of examples for analysis is extremely limited (as she herself acknowledges). This is partly a reflection of her – commendable – decision to analyse everyday conversation data rather than ‘specialized discourse types’ (54) such as the interactions between law enforcers or members of the military, where the situation leads to a much higher chance of impolite interactions. As a result, the analysis in the book can do no more than provide a collection of case studies and suggestions for research directions rather than a comprehensive theoretical treatment of the topic, though this is also in line with the doctoral origins of the monograph.
The lengthy analysis of each passage, where everything has to be spelled out in detail – and where the analyst inevitably has to supply some inferences about the participants’ state of mind at various points – reminds us of the difficulty of writing about conversation analysis and pragmatics, trying to verbalise thought processes which are intuitively accessible to expert speakers of the language. The author acknowledges this herself: ‘interpreting the exchange requires a complex web of inferencing’ (130), and we might disagree with some of the interpretations provided. An example of this relates to Turkish Extract 4, which I assume has been identified through the presence of an apology from one of the speakers (in fact, this is a reported event). The apology is for a (rather trivial) misunderstanding. Çelebi asks: ‘[W]hat brings [the speaker] to apologize? What makes him perceive that his behaviour was impolite?’ (180). She sees the misunderstanding as a form of unintentional impoliteness, but given that it was quite minor, and the person involved did not seem to be particularly aggrieved by this, I would question the equation of misunderstanding with impoliteness. In my view, since no offence was intended, and none was taken, classifying this example as impolite is a case of over-interpretation.
A minor methodological issue arises from the analysis, in Chapter 4, of one of the Turkish examples, where there is a long discussion of the English translation selected for the verb geçir- (which has several meanings, including ‘to pass’, ‘to transfer’, ‘to engage’, ‘to hit’ and ‘to insult’), and the negative semantic prosody this has acquired. Although perfectly competent as a micro case study in corpus-driven semantic prosody, I was at a loss as to how to interpret its role in the wider discussion. Çelebi notes that semantic prosody adds ‘subtlety’ to utterances (163) and that ‘[t]he fact that it triggers a negative evaluation of the utterance confirms once more that impoliteness studies require a wider understanding of methodological concerns for extraction and for theorization at the analysis level’ (ibid.) but I would counter that this is a valid concern only where the analyst is not very familiar with the language studied (as we readers might be assumed to not be with regard to Turkish) – if a word has a strong semantic prosody, either negative or positive, both we and the interlocutors would notice and the intended (im)politeness effect would take place, regardless of a corpus analysis; if the prosody is so subtle that only a thorough corpus study would reveal it, how can we be so sure that it achieved the intended effect on the hearer?
This leads us to another methodological point which I find problematic: the fact that the Turkish data has been translated by the author, who is a linguist and the analyst. In a research area where – by the author’s own admission – subtle shades of meaning and interpretation can drive the perception of an utterance as more or less impolite, the translation of a particular lexical item which could have a range of equivalents from neutral to less neutral becomes a delicate matter. It is then incumbent on the author-translator to assure the audience (who might not speak the language) that the translation chosen is indeed the most appropriate one qua translation, rather than the one that best fits the interpretation the author wishes to give to a particular passage, and that said interpretation can therefore be trusted. It must be said that I am not suggesting this is the case in any of the Turkish extracts presented in the book (despite my complete lack of knowledge of the Turkish language), and indeed Çelebi brings together evidence from multiple layers of communication including prosodic annotation, conversation structure, and non-verbal communication to support her analyses of the passages. She even presents a particularly thorough discussion of a single polysemous lexical item, supported by corpus and dictionary data, to demonstrate why its negative connotation is justified. However, the underlying question remains not just here but in any discussion of multilingual pragmatic analysis – can the author-translator ever truly be a neutral translator? Would it not be better, or safer, to put the translation in the hands of a neutral third party instead? And thinking more broadly – what are the steps we need to ensure are taken when carrying out cross-cultural (im)politeness studies?
From a more practical perspective, the origins of the book as a thesis are occasionally brought to the fore by the rather frequent and over-detailed discussion of related work. While this is in part necessary – and indeed one of the advantages of discussing research in a monograph rather than a journal article is that one has more freedom to provide a theoretical context – it can feel overlong at times, such as when minutiae of the collection of data for the BNC or of the historical developments of conversation analysis are described. The interpolation of ‘other’ scholarly voices occurs very frequently, not just in the chapter devoted to the theoretical background (Chapter 2), and often takes the form of paragraph-length verbatim quotations. While I acknowledge that these are all representing valid points in the discussion, they do break up the flow of the text, and one might have liked to see a bit more of the author’s own voice. There are also a number of small presentation niggles, in particular to do with the figures, which sometimes appear truncated or – being in black and white – lose the informativeness that comes from their colour-coding (particularly distracting when the colours themselves are referred to in the accompanying explanation).
In general, this volume raises a number of thought-provoking questions for the impoliteness researcher, regarding methodology, analysis, and theoretical implications. Unfortunately these are not always accompanied by substantial suggested answers, but the monograph acts as a welcome starting point for discussion. In particular, as the book draws to a close, Çelebi proposes that the cue-based approach to identifying impoliteness can overcome the criticisms imputed to the discursive approach and ‘compensate for what might be neglected by [it]’ (190); her work has certainly added food for thought to this complex, ongoing debate.
