Politeness Strategies in a Speech by Jordan B. Peterson about "How to be Articulate"

Ali Pirdehghan

doi:10.24071/joll.v24i1.7146

Politeness Strategies in a Speech by Jordan B. Peterson about "How to be Articulate"

Ali Pirdehghan^(1*),

(1) University of Guilan
(*) Corresponding Author

Abstract

Politeness is a concept in the area of pragmatics and conversational analysis in which the speaker considers several factors to be polite, including their relationship with the hearer, their age, the power they have over the hearer, the importance of their utterances, etc. Speeches from prominent figures provide rich sources of analysis on politeness, a vital concept in everyday communication. This study examines different realizations of politeness strategies. The researcher used Brown and Levinson's model (1987), categorizing the strategies into four main realizations (Bald on-record, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off-record). The data source has been a 15-minute video clip from Jordan B. Peterson – a prominent Canadian psychologist and author – about being articulate, for which a qualitative method was used. During the data analysis, first, the author watched the video clip to get the gist, then wrote its transcription to look for the types of strategies used by the speaker. The transcription was then re-evaluated by two teachers in the field of English as a foreign language (EFL)to assure its inter-rater reliability. The results showed that the speaker employed the four types of politeness strategies during the speech, among which negative and positive politeness, together with their realizations – 'do not presume/assume' and 'raise/assert common ground were the most dominant. Further research on known figures, in different contexts and with larger data is imperative to ameliorate the pragmatics knowledge of both teachers and students and enhance their interactions.

Keywords

Conversational Analysis, Brown and Levinson's Model, Politeness Strategies, Jordan B. Peterson

Full Text:

PDF

References

Abudayeh, H., & Dubbati, B. (2020). Politeness strategies in translating Donald Trump's offensive language into Arabic. Perspectives, 28(3), 424-439. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2019.1709514

Alamsyah, A. (2022). Using of politeness strategy theory to portray positive and negative face responses in Vladimir Putin's speech on the reason why Russian attacked Ukraine.

Ammaida, Y. (2020). Politeness strategies of the comments toward Trump's instagram post on international women's day. Mahakarya: Student's Journal of Cultural Sciences, 1(1).

Aulia, K. (2013). Politeness strategies usage in accompanying assertive illocutionary acts on Barack Obama's speech and interview towards the development of Islamic Center near Ground Zero. The International Journal of Social Sciences, 16(1).

Balogun, S., & Murana, M. O. (2018). Language in political discourse: A pragmatic study of presupposition and politeness in the inaugural speech of president Donald Trump. Bulletin of Advanced English Studies, 1(1), 64-76.

Batubara, M. H., Rahila, C. D. I., & Fitri, H. (2022). An analysis of politeness strategies used by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton presidential debate 2016. Journal of Linguistics, Literature, and Language Teaching (JLLLT), 1(2), 51-58.

Biddle, B. J. (1967). Chapter X: Methods and concepts in classroom research. Review of Educational Research, 37(3), 337-357.

Brown, P. (2015). Politeness and language. In J. D. Wright (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences (IESBS) (2nd ed., pp. 326-330). Amsterdam: Elsevier. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.53072-4.

Brown, P., Levinson, S. C., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Vol. 4). Cambridge University Press.

Dharmayanti, N., Sukarini, N. W., & Savitri, P. W. (2018). Politeness strategies used in Ellen DeGeneres’s TV talk show with Barack Obama as the guest star. Jurnal Humanis, Fakultas Ilmu Budaya Unud, 22(1), 142-146.

Eshreteh, M., & Draweesh, Y. (2018). Applying Brown and Levinson's politeness theory on Lady Macbeth's speech in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Applied Linguistics Research Journal, 2 (1), 25-32.

Fasold, R. W., & Connor-Linton, J. (2014). An introduction to language and linguistics. Cambridge University Press.

Fitria, H., Ningrum, D. R., & Suhandoko, S. (2020). Politeness strategies reflected by the main character in “Bridge to Terabithia” movie. Etnolingual, 4(1), 57-70.

Geertz, C. (1976). The religion of Java: University of Chicago Press.

Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: essays on face-to-face interaction. Oxford University Press.

Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words: Harvard University Press.

Gu, Y. (1990). Politeness phenomena in modern Chinese. Journal of pragmatics, 14(2), 237-257.

Haryanto, H., Weda, S., & Nashruddin, N. (2018). Politeness principle and its implication in EFL classroom in Indonesia. XLinguage" European Scientific Language Journal", 11(4), 90-112.

Hinck, E. A., & Hinck, S. S. (2002). Politeness strategies in the 1992 vice presidential and presidential debates. Argumentation and advocacy, 38(4), 234-250.

Holmes, J. (1995). Women, Men, and Politeness (1st ed.). Routledge.

Hymes, D. (1972). On communicative competence. Sociolinguistics, 269293, 269-293.

Ide, S. (1989). Formal forms and discernment: Two neglected aspects of universals of linguistic politeness. Multilingua, 8 (2-3) 223-248.

Karimnia, A., & Afghari, A. (2010). On the applicability of cultural scripts in teaching L2 compliments. English Language Teaching, 3(3), 71-80.

Kosman, M. (2023). New Polish Right –politeness and radicalism. A corpus analysis of Krzysztof Bosak’s (de) legitimation strategies on twitter. New Perspectives. Interdisciplinary Journal of Central & East European Politics and International Relations, 31(3), 200-222.

Kurniawan, N. (2015). An analysis of positive and negative politeness strategies in an interview of Mark Rutte on metro tv’s face 2 face with Desi Anwar program [Unpublished strata one thesis, Universitas Islam Negeri]. https://repository.uinjkt.ac.id/dspace/bitstream/123456789/30600/1/NURDY%20KURNIAWAN%20-%20FAH.pdf

Leech, G. (1993). The Principles of Pragmatics. London. Longman Group UK.

Li, S. (2008). A Performative Perspective of Flouting and Politeness in Political Interview. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 5 (2).

Mahmud, M. (2019). The use of politeness strategies in the classroom context by English university students. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 8(3), 597-606.

Matsumoto, Y. (1989). Politeness and conversational universals–observations from Japanese. Multilingual—Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 8, 207-221. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/mult.1989.8.2-3.207

Mohammadi, M., Sa’d, S., & Hatam, S. (2014). Native speakers' assessment of (im) politeness of non-native speakers' requests. International Journal of Research Studies in Language Learning, 3(4), 23-40.

Paltridge, B. (2021). Discourse analysis: An introduction: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Permadi, D. W., Mulyati, T., & Hasibin, N. (2022). A descriptive study on politeness strategies in “Aladdin” movie. LUNAR: Journal of Language and Art, 6(1), 332-341.

Purba, A., Nasution, T., Matondang, M. K., Zulkarnain, Z., & Purba, R. (2023). Application of Brown and Levinson's model on Joe Biden's victory speech: A case on politeness strategies. English Review: Journal of English Education, 11(1), 75-82.

Ruansyah, R. A., & Rukmini, D. (2018). The host's politeness strategies in Ellen DeGeneres reality talk show. English Education Journal, 8(1), 96-106.

Sameer, I. H. (2021). Speech acts and politeness in Nixon and Bush's victory speech. Al-Adab Journal, 2(138), 13-32.

Scollon, R., Scollon, S., & Jones, R. (2012). Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach (Vol. 30).

Sifianou, M. (1992). Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Oxford University Press.

Tisia, N. (2016). Illocutionary act types and positive-negative politeness strategies in Donald Trump's campaign speech. [Sarjana thesis] Universitas Negeri Jakarta. http://repository.unj.ac.id

Yule, G. (2022). The study of language. Cambridge University Press.

Yuniarti, E., Natsir, M., & Setyowati, R. (2020). Positive politeness strategies on Catwoman movie. Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Budaya, 4(2), 264-276.

Zhang, Q. (2011). Teacher request politeness: Effects on student positive emotions and compliance intention. Human Communication, 14(4).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.24071/joll.v24i1.7146