Indexical and sequential properties of criticisms in initial interactions: implications for examining (im) politeness across cultures

What follows this barb also subsequently shapes the meaning it takes on, as we can see in excerpt (10), which follows on from excerpt (9). Immediately following Gary's claim to not like parties is an upgraded barb in which Natalie suggests “parties”, which metonymically stands for “people” here, “probably don't like you either” (line 351).

While Gary initially agrees with Natalie's explicitly negative assessment, he then backtracks with an account that there are always some people at parties who like “someone they can saddle up to” or “someone in the corner” they can talk to (lines 353-- 357). Natalie indicates she understands this to mean Gary is claiming to be someone who is quiet, and thus a good listener, by making a more general complaint about it normally being women who do the listening, while men do the talking (lines 359--360). Gary emphatically agrees with this complaint (line 361), and then proceeds to upgrade it in line 363 through an extreme case formulation (Pomerantz 1986). What started out as a criticism of Gary's conduct in the interaction, and of his character, has morphed into a complaint about men in general, a complaint with which Gary himself appears to strongly agree.

A sequential analysis of criticisms does not, however, on its own warrant claims about “impoliteness”. In order to analyse the potential “impoliteness” value of these criticisms we need to consider the indexical value of these criticisms from an emic perspective. In other words, we need to tease out the cultural premise these participants are likely to bring to bear in interpreting their indexical value. One key observation we can make is that the target ofjudgment has shifted from criticising a co-present interlocutor to complaining about non-co-present third parties. In this way, the two interlocutors are evidently taking the heat out of a sequence in which both parties are open to evaluation as “impolite” by the other. An evaluation of Natalie as “impolite” by Gary is licensed by the way in which criticisms indicate, according to Brown and Levinson (1987), that the speaker “doesn't like/want one or more of H[earer]'s wants, acts, personal characteristics, goods, beliefs or values”, and so indicates s/he “does not care about the addressee's feelings, wants, etc.” (p. 66). In other words, Gary could legitimately claim Natalie is being “impolite” (“rude”, “discourteous” etc.), given the general “constraint against criticism of others”, a constraint which was noted in passing by Brown and Levinson (1987: 37), and formulated more formally as a preference principle by Pillet- Shore (2015, 2016; see also Pomerantz 1984: 78). It is worth noting, however, that this potentially “impolite” criticism is occasioned by conduct -- not returning questions in a setting in which one expects them to be reciprocated (Haugh & Carbaugh 2015) -- which Natalie is construing as “impolite” through this series of barbs directed at Gary. In other words, Natalie's “impolite” barbs may well be licensed by Gary's “impolite” refusal to reciprocate by asking her questions.

The key point to note here is that the indexical value which can be legitimately attached to these barbs is shaped by a set of cultural premises that are presumed to be shared amongst Australian speakers of English. These include normative assumptions about how we should conduct ourselves in initial interactions (e.g. we are expected to reciprocate questions about the other) (e.g. Haugh & Carbaugh 2015; Svennevig 2014), as well as normative constraints on the extent to which we are licensed to criticise (or more broadly judge) others in different settings (Brown & Levinson 1987; Pillet- Shore 2015, 2016; Pomerantz 1984). These cultural premises underpin the oft made claim that other-criticisms threaten the “positive” face of recipients. We would suggest that criticisms also amount to a claim of moral authority, that is, an entitlement to judge others, by the speaker. For those reasons, criticisms are not only treated as dispreferred, but as acts that are clearly open to evaluation as “impolite” in initial interactions.

The question from a comparative perspective, then, is whether the same cultural premises about criticisms that we can see at work amongst Australian speakers of English in initial interactions also hold in the case of Taiwanese speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Our view is that they do not. We claim that while from a sequential perspective criticisms do indeed work in similar ways across the two languages, the cultural premises attached to those criticisms are different from an indexical perspective, and so the culturally relevant meanings made available by them also differ.

In the following excerpt taken from MCDC, for instance, Chang has been talking about the various after-school activities his sons are involved in.

The excerpt begins at the point Chang starts listing these after school activities, which include swimming and painting (lines 242--244). The barb in question arises

in line 245 when Wang suggests that it must be tiring to be Chang's sons, followed by a turn-final epistemic marker (la) that indexes a claim to epistemic authority by Wang (Endo 2013). The inference made available through that assessment is that Chang is an overly pushy parent. Chang responds, however, by redoing Wang's assessment as an upshot (lines 246--247), thereby resisting Wang's claim to epistemic authority by claiming first-hand knowledge of his own sons, and marking his son's tiredness as already known to his though a turn-final a particle (Wu 2004: 224). The negative evaluative import of Wang's initial assessment in line 245 becomes apparent in Wang's subsequent account in lines 248--251, in which she references a more general discourse about parents who see the need to prepare their children to compete in society through learning lots of different things, and Chang's account, in lines 252--261, in which he paints himself as a father who insists on his children learning things for their own good (in this case being able to swim a minimum distance).

However, while both participants appear to orient to Wang's initial assessment as implying a criticism of Chang's parenting style, what this criticism indexes here from an emic perspective is different to how it might be interpreted in Brown and Levinson's account, in which it would be treated as a threat to the recipient's positive face. Instead, we argue that what is indexed through Wang's implied criticism is a claim to knowledge about Chang. In presuming this knowledge about the other, Wang indexes familiarity with Chang, thereby projecting relational connection, as well as claiming epistemic authority (Chang forthcoming). With respect to the latter, by offering an assessment of how Chang's sons must feel, Wang is presuming knowledge not only about the state of Chang's sons, but also about Chang's parenting style. Previous research has indicated that displays of knowledge in a Chinese cultural context allow the speaker to “gain face” (Ho 1976; Kinnison 2017). The “face” that is gained is not positive or negative face in the sense outlined by Brown and Levinson (1987), however, but rather the emic notion of “mask/image face”, that is, “one's faзade to impress others” (Kinnison 2017: 32). In others words, through criticising I claim that I know something about you, and in the Chinese cultural context, showing you know things allows one to lay claim to “face” (mianzi). It follows, then, by implying criticism of Chang, Wang is not so much claiming moral authority to judge Chang, thereby threatening Chang's “positive” face, so much as she is laying claim to epistemic authority, and thereby making a claim to “face” (mianzi) on her own part, as well as indexing familiarity with Chang.

In sum, while criticisms clearly impact on face in interactions amongst both Australians and Taiwanese, the different cultural premises underpinning the indexical value of those criticisms means we are not just dealing with different cultural instantiations of face, but very different indexical values. In the case of criticisms amongst Australian speakers of English they index threats to the positive face of the recipient, and claims of moral authority by the speaker. In the case of Taiwanese speakers of Mandarin, in contrast, criticisms index displays of familiarity or relational connection with the recipient, and claims to epistemic authority and “mask/image face” by the speaker.

Implications for studying (im)politeness across cultures

In this case study, we have seen that barbs are treated as dispreferred in initial interactions, and that they recurrently occasion accounts (indeed, in every case we have examined). However, we have also seen that although criticisms arise and are responded to in similar ways in interactions amongst Australian speakers of English and Taiwanese speakers of Chinese, the evaluative and relational import of these criticisms is not the same across these two languages. In other words, while from an etic perspective they look similar, from an emic perspective the indexical value of those criticisms, and the relational work accomplished through them differs.

Haugh and colleagues have argued in ongoing work that a distinction can, and should, be maintained between emic understandings and participant understandings in analysing (im)politeness and related phenomena (Haugh 2009: 5; Haugh 2011: 262; Haugh 2012: 122--127; Haugh 2018: 161--162; Haugh & Chang 2015: 396--397; Kadar & Haugh 2013: 86--96). They propose that an emic understanding is properly grounded in the perspective of a cultural insider or member (in the ethnomethodological sense), and can be contrasted with the etic perspective of cultural outsiders or nonmembers, while a participant understanding is properly grounded in the footings of users in their instantiation of turns at talk (and in responses to prior talk and conduct), and can be contrasted with the perspective of observers of interaction. In formal terms, we can summarise the underlying set of distinctions as in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Emic-etic versus participant-analyst perspectives on talk and conduct

The analysis of criticisms in initial interactions in this paper indicates that this set of distinctions is one that is well worth maintaining: without taking into account the emic perspective of cultural insiders or members, we run the danger of missing important cross-cultural differences in the evaluative import of speech acts (i.e. their indexical properties), despite being interactionally accomplished in similar ways across different languages (i.e., their sequential properties). Our claim is that while criticisms are delivered through similar formats and responded to in similar ways through accounts by both Australians and Taiwanese, and thus have similar sequential properties, their evaluative and relational import are different, and so they have different indexical properties.

In the former case they are treated as threats to positive face (of the recipient), and index moral authority (on the part of the speaker), while in the latter they are interpretable as displays of familiarity (with the recipient), and index epistemic authority (on the part of the speaker).

Our aim here has been to illustrate an emic-participant perspective on these criticisms through our respective emic-analyst lenses A notable, perhaps contentious, assumption we are making is that Brown and Levinson's notions of positive and negative face are not legitimate etic categories for analysing “face” across languages and cultures, but rather represent emic categorisations relevant to Anglo-English speakers (Haugh 2006).. A significant challenge facing analysts, however, is that in practice participants are typically treated as members (of a particular cultural network), and so these two perspectives are, for all intents and purposes, very often laminated or fused together. Our proposal here has been that one way of operationalising the distinction between participant understandings and emic understandings is for analysts to focus on the sequential and indexical properties of social action, respectively. To analyse the sequential properties of social action one needs to build collections and identify recurrent patterns or procedures by which those social actions are interactionally accomplished. To analyse the indexical properties of social action one must identify links between locally situated meanings and the broader cultural premises which they invoke. Conversation analytic studies clearly prioritise the former, while discourse analytic studies tend to prioritise the latter. We argue that both perspectives need to be carefully integrated in order to undertake comparative analyses of speech acts across cultures. However, this raises some methodological challenges for (impoliteness researchers. For instance, how can we study the indexical properties of social action in systematic ways? Our view is that claims about these sorts of cultural premises need to be licensed themselves through much more in-depth ethnographic work about particular social actions across different interactional settings (Haugh 2007).

(Im)politeness researchers have tended to focus on differences in the linguistic forms or sequential structures by which different social actions are accomplished. Our aim here has been to draw attention to the fact that while there may be similarities in forms and sequential structure across languages, these can mask important cultural differences that are not readily apparent unless one undertakes an emic analysis of the indexical properties of social actions. While indexical analyses must be grounded in close sequential analyses of the social action in question, they also require recourse to an understanding of the cultural premises available to those participants. Cross-cultural studies of (im)politeness should, in our view, not only focus on differences in the forms or strategies by which speech acts are accomplished, but remain alert to the possibility that what is ostensibly the same speech act, may in fact be interpreted in different ways by members of different cultural groups.

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