Registration open for free upcoming event: “Language matters: communication, culture and society”

CASS is excited to announce an upcoming event at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester on Thursday 12th November from 4pm-9pm.

“Language matters: communication, culture and society” is a mini-series of four informal talks showcasing the impact of language on society. The timely themes will be presented in an approachable manner that will be accessible to a general audience, stimulating to novice language researchers, and interesting to social scientists. Topics include hate speech, myths about impoliteness, and online aggression. Each talk incorporates an element of social science research beyond linguistics and we will take this opportunity to emphasise the importance of interdisciplinary work.

Afterwards, the audience will be invited to a drinks reception, during which they will have the opportunity to engage further with speakers and to network with guests.

In a single event, participants will have the opportunity to hear renowned scholars talk about their lives, their work, and what they find most interesting about the relationship between language and society. Talks are short, energetic, and pitched for a general audience.

Speakers

  • “Impoliteness: The language of offence” – Jonathan Culpeper
  • “Vile Words. What is the case for criminalizing everyday hate speech as hate crime?” – Paul Iganski
  • “The ethics of investigating online aggression: where does ‘virtual’ end and ‘reality’ begin?” – Claire Hardaker
  • “Spoken English in UK society” – Robbie Love

This free event is part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2015. Please register online to book your place.

For a taste of what’s in store, please see this video recap of a similar event held in London last year. For more information, please visit the ESRC website.

Jonathan Culpeper talking ‘Sarcasm’ tonight on The One Show

Sarcasm is one of the phenomena that seems to have endless fascination for British people, partly because  they are stereotypically associated with it. When did sarcasm first start?  Is there something about British culture that makes it flourish?  And what is sarcasm anyway? These are some of the questions that Gyles Brandeth  of BBC 1’s The One Show puts to Jonathan Culpeper in an item reflecting on sarcasm in Britain.

Tune in to BBC1 tonight at 19:00 to hear CASS co-investigator Prof. Jonathan Culpeper discussing sarcasm on The One Show.

Rude Britannia – what our politeness says about our nation

Britain is still a nation of polite people and fears that texts, tweets and Facebook are making people ruder is a myth, according to research from Lancaster University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS). The British are famous for their reserve, indirect way of saying things and a love of queuing. However, new research shows that what we find polite, and what we find rude is unique to our culture and can be very different to notions of rudeness in other cultures.

The research carried out by Professor Jonathan Culpeper, an expert in linguistic politeness, will be presented at an event as part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s annual Festival of Social Science, which runs between 2-9 November 2013.

Read more…

Politeness and impoliteness in digital communication: Corpus-related explorations

Post-event review of the one-day workshop at Lancaster University

Topics don’t come much hotter than the forms of impoliteness or aggression that are associated with digital communication – flaming, trolling, cyberbullying, and so on. Yet academia has done surprisingly little to pull together experts in social interaction (especially (im)politeness) and experts in the new media, let alone experts in corpus-related work. That is, until last Friday, when the Corpus Approaches to Social Science Centre (@CorpusSocialSci) invited fifteen such people from diverse backgrounds (from law to psychology) gathered together for an intense one-day workshop.

CASS workshop cropped

The scope of the workshop was broad. One cannot very well study impoliteness without considering politeness, since merely failing to be polite in a particular context could be taken as impoliteness. Similarly, the range of digital communication types – email, blogs, texts, tweets and so on – presents a varied terrain to navigate. And then there are plenty of corpus-related approaches and notions, including collocation, keywords, word sketches, etc.

Andrew Kehoe (@ayjaykay), Ursula Lutzky (@UrsulaLutzky) and Matt Gee (@mattbgee) kicked off the day with a talk on swearwords and swearing, based on their 628-million-word Birmingham Blog Corpus. Amongst other things, they showed how internet swearword/profanity filters would work rather better if they incorporated notions like collocation. For example, knowing the words that typically accompany items like balls and tart can help disambiguate neutral usages (e.g. “tennis balls”, “lemon tart”) from less salubrious usages! (See more research from Andrew here, from Ursula here, and from Matt here.)

With Ruth Page’s (@ruthtweetpage) presentation, came a switch from blogs to Twitter. Using corpus-related techniques, Ruth revealed the characteristics of corporate tweets. Given that the word sorry turns out to be the seventh most characteristic or keyword for corporate tweets, it was not surprising that Ruth focused on apologies. She reveals that corporate tweets tend to avoid stating a problem or giving an explanation (thus avoiding damage to their reputation), but are accompanied by offers of repair and attempts to build – at least superficially – rapport. (See more research from Ruth here.)

Last of the morning was Caroline Tagg’s (@carotagg) presentation, and with this came another shift in medium, from Twitter to text messages. Focusing on convention and creativity, Caroline pointed out that, contrary to popular opinion, heavily abbreviated messages are not in fact the norm, and that when abbreviations do occur, they are often driven by communicative needs, e.g. using creativity to foster interest and engagement. Surveying the functions of texts, Caroline established that maintenance of friendship is key. And corpus-related techniques revealed the supporting evidence: politeness formulae were particularly frequent, including the salutation have a good one, the hedge a bit for the invitation, and for further contact, give us a bell. (See more research from Caroline here.)

With participants refuelled by lunch, Claire Hardaker (@DrClaireH) and I presented a smorgasbord of relevant issues. As an opening shot, we displayed frequencies showing that the stereotypical emblems of British politeness, words such as please, thank you, sorry, excuse me, can you X, tend not to be frequent in any digital media variety, relative to spoken conversation (as represented in the British National Corpus). Perhaps this accounts for why at least some sectors of the British public find digital media barren of politeness. This is not to say that politeness does not take place, but it seems to take place through different means – consider the list of politeness items derived by Caroline above. And there was an exception: sorry was the only item that occurred with greater frequency in some digital media. This, of course, nicely ties in with Ruth’s focus on apologies. The bulk of my and Clare’s presentation revolved around using corpus techniques to help establish: (1) definitions (e.g. what is trolling?), (2) strategies and formulae (e.g. what is the linguistic substance of trolling?) and (3) evaluations (e.g. what or who is considered rude?). Importantly, we showed that corpus-related approaches are not just lists of numbers, but can integrate qualitative analyses. (See more research from me here, and from Claire here.)

With encroaching presentation fatigue, the group decamped and went to at a computer lab. Paul Rayson (@perayson) introduced some corpus tools, notably WMatrix, of which he is the architect. Amanda Potts (@watchedpotts) then put everybody through their paces – gently of course! – giving everybody the opportunity of valuable hands-on experience.

Back in our discussion room and refreshed by various caffeinated beverages, we spent an hour reflecting on a range of issues. The conversation moved towards corpora that include annotations (interpretative information). Such annotations could be a way of helping to analyse images, context, etc., creating an incredibly rich dataset that could only be interrogated by computer (see here, for instance). I noted that this end of corpus work was not far removed from using Atlas or Nudist. Snapchat came up in discussion, not only because it involves images (though they can include text), but also because it raises issues of data accessibility (how do you get hold of a record of this communication, if one of its essential features is that it dissolves within a narrow timeframe?). The thorny problem of ethics was discussed (e.g. data being used in ways that were not signaled when original user agreements were completed).

Though exhausting, it was a hugely rewarding and enjoyable day. Often those rewards came in the form of vibrant contributions from each and every participant. Darren Reed, for example, pointed out that sometimes what we were dealing with is neither digital text nor digital image, but a digital act. Retweeting somebody, for example, could be taken as a “tweet act” with politeness implications.

The neglected west: first-order politeness in Britain

Teaching and Learning (Im)politeness: An International (Im)politeness Conference“, will be held at SOAS, University of London, 8-10 July. I will be giving a talk with Jim O’Driscoll (Huddersfield) on the topic below:

Almost without exception, it is scholars based in “Western” locations that have introduced the ideas with pretensions to universal application which are commonly regarded as major milestones in the field of politeness studies: face (Goffman); politeness principle (Leech); politeness as redress to face and positive & negative faces (B&L); first versus second order politeness and politic behaviour (Watts 1992ff); impoliteness (Culpeper 1996ff); discursive politeness (Eelen 2001, Watts 2003, Mills 2005ff). Typically, the role of scholars from non-western areas has been to present culture-specific evidence to challenge or tinker with these ideas. Likewise, a perusal of merely the table of contents of edited collections (e.g. Watts et al 1992, Bargiela-Chiappini & Haugh 2009, Bargiela-Chiappini & Kádár 2011) suggests that data from western environments needs no specific labelling as such, while contributions from elsewhere have to indicate geographical specificity in their titles.

This decidedly western discursive deictic centre (O’Driscoll 2009) has a distorting effect. For one thing, there is a tendency to believe that the politeness2 and face2 conceptualisations emanating from western locations are actually accounts of politeness1 and face1 in these western cultures, so that, for example, Goffman’s face (second-order) is American face (first-order) or that B&L’s politeness (second-order) reflects ‘English’ politeness (first-order) (cf. Matsumoto 1988; Ide 1989; Gu 1990; Mao 1994; Nwoye 1992; Wierzbicka 1991 [2003]). For another, it has resulted in a relative paucity of emic studies of core western cultures, leading in turn to an unwisely unexamined acceptance of certain stereotypes of these cultures.

This paper probes English people’s understandings of politeness. More specifically, it investigates their usage of the term polite. Deploying methodologies from corpus linguistics, we report results from the 500 million-word subsection of the Oxford English Corpus. These results fly in the face of the large number of studies which have found evidence that present-day English politeness – by which English English politeness is meant – is often characterised by off-record or negative politeness (e.g. Blum-Kulka 1989; Stewart 2005; Wierzbicka  2006; Ogiermann 2009). We refine these results further by looking at variation across the social categories of the British National Corpus.

Check back after the event for access to slides.