EXPERIMENTAL AND EMPIRICAL APPROACHES TO POLITENESS AND IMPOLITENESS. POLITENESS IN ADMINISTRATIVE DISCOURSE: SOME PERSPECTIVES FROM TWO INSTITUTIONS IN GHANA C. Hammond

EXPERIMENTAL AND EMPIRICAL APPROACHES TO POLITENESS AND IMPOLITENESS. POLITENESS IN ADMINISTRATIVE DISCOURSE: SOME PERSPECTIVES FROM TWO INSTITUTIONS IN GHANA

C. Hammond

ABSTRACT

Your face…….is like a book where men may read strange matters Macbeth, Act 1, Scene V. Linguistic pragmatics studies have incorporated sociolinguistic perspectives to include pragmatic variations in communicative and discursive dimensions such as computer-mediated massages, spoken and written interactional practices. Rather than adhering to a strict first order participant constructed (Culpepper 2011, 2008) or second order analyst constructed conceptions of politeness (Tekourafi 2008, Locher and Watts 2005,), this paper argues that each of them could be used to inform the other by utilizing both the first and second order methodological approaches to classify politeness strategies in organizational communication. The paper seeks to investigate the different syntactic structures of linguistic politeness strategies employed in two institutions with different organizational culture; the University of Education, Winneba and the Ghana Police Service, Winneba. By exploring and foregrounding Ting-Toomey’s face negotiation theory; in the light of why the “face” is said to be the public image of the individual that the society sees and evaluates based on perceived cultural norms and values, the paper thus attempts to bridge the gap between three pragmatic subfields: politeness research, institutional communication as a discourse and cross-cultural pragmatics. It is also tacitly demonstrated in the central portions of this paper that there are pragmatic variations realized in the use of lexical, syntactic and textual resources to mark (im)politeness in written business discourse. Through a discoursal analysis of communicative events gathered, findings from the study explicitly provide evidence that the structure, cultural expectations and requirements of an institution influence the linguistic and non-linguistic behaviours acceptable as signaling (im) politeness in different contexts.