Alle Publikationen
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2012
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(2012): Appropriate behaviour across varieties of English. In: Journal of Pragmatics 44 (9), S. 1022-1037. DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2011.09.015
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2011.09.015 Abstract: Corpus evidence is presented which suggests that from a first-order perspective ‘appropriateness’ and ‘inappropriateness’ are more salient notions than ‘politeness’ and ‘impoliteness’ or ‘rudeness’. It is then argued that norms of appropriate verbal behaviour in a community can be established empirically by employing experimental methods. Production questionnaire data may not reflect what participants would actually say in real life, but reveal what guides their expectations, perception and performance in a given social situation. It is shown that small talk between strangers at a party is governed by diverging norms in different national varieties of English, viz. American English, Irish English and English English. It is further shown that gender and age differences exist within a national variety and that norms of appropriate verbal behaviour seem to be subject to age-grading.
Keywords: Alter, Approriateness, Disziplin, English English, Experimental data, Gender, Gender and age variation, Höflichkeit, Höflichkeitsforschung, Im/politeness, Impoliteness, Inappropriateness, Irish English and American English, Kultur, Kulturdifferenz, Kulturelle Normen, kulturrelativ, kulturspezifisch, Kulturspezifizität, Kulturtheorie, Linguistik, Politeness, Small talk, Soziale Angemessenheit, Sprachgebrauch, Unangemessenheit, Unhöflichkeit, Variational pragmatics 2010
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(2010): Mystic Excess. Extravagance and Indecorum in Richard Crashaw. In: CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY 39 (4), S. 350-369
Abstract: This essay, a re-evaluation and partial justification of the traditionally controversial eccentricities of Richard Crashaw's poetry, examines the function of ‘excess’ in his work. ‘Excess’ is taken to mean both stylistic extravagance and transgression of the normal boundaries of decorum. The first section characterises Crashaw's stylistic extravagance, partly in terms of ‘revisional flux’, and explores Pseudo-Dionysian semiotics and the notion of ‘incongruity’. The second section introduces George Bataille's theory to explain the extravagance in erotic and mystical terms. The third section moves on to ‘indecorum’ of several kinds, including the use of financial and appetitive, or sensual, imagery. The final section offers observations about Crashaw's tonal ambiguity, use of irony, and combination of wit with seriousness.
2008
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(2008): Comedy in unfunny times. News parody and carnival after 9/11. In: CRITICAL STUDIES IN MEDIA COMMUNICATION 25 (3), S. 274-303
Abstract: Comedy has a special role in helping societies manage crisis moments, and the U.S. media paid considerable attention to the proper role of comedy in public culture after the 9/11 tragedies. As has been well documented, many popular U.S. comic voices were paralyzed in trying to respond to 9/11 or disciplined by audiences when they did. Starting with these obstacles in mind, this essay analyzes early comic responses to 9/11, and particularly those of the print and online news parody The Onion, as an example of how “fake” news discourse could surmount the rhetorical chill that fell over public culture after the tragedies. By exposing the news as “mere” production and by setting an agenda for learning about Islamic culture and Middle East politics, The Onion avoided violating decorum and invited citizen participation. This kind of meta-discourse was crucial after 9/11, when shifting rules for decorum created controversy and as official voices in government and media honed frames and narratives for talking about the attacks.
2003
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(2003): Defining dirt. Three early modern views of obscenity. In: TEXTUAL PRACTICE 17 (2), S. 253-275
Abstract: This essay examines the workings of bad language in the early modem period, along with its social and political contexts - why and under what circumstances some words were deemed inappropriate for polite or moral discourse and literature. In early modern English, words such as "shit' or "fuck' were not considered "swearing', but rather occupied a separate category of "wanton' or "obscene' language. Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour , Desiderius Erasmus' De Copia and George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie pay particular attention to this category. They investigate it from different perspectives, but reach similar conclusions: obscene words have an offensive power in excess of their literal meaning, exposing body parts and actions that should be concealed to a greater degree than do their more decorous synonyms. These texts also agree that the rules of decorum which govern obscenity are extremely flexible, so much so that obscene words may be the most useful and even the most appropriate terms in certain circumstances.
Keywords: Angemessenheit, Appropriateness, Appropriateness of inappropriateness, decorum, Fehlverhalten, fluchen, Grenzen, Grenzüberschreitung, Gruppenverhalten / Joint Action, Höflichkeitsforschung, (Im)Politeness Research, Inappropriateness, Interaktion, Konventionen, Literaturwissenschaft, Modelle/Theorien, Normen, Observablen/Kriterien für sozial angemessenes Verhalten und dessen Bewertung, Obszönität, Respekt, Sprache, Sprachgebrauch, Status / biologische Marker, swearing, Umgangsformen, Unangemessenheit 2001
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(2001): Arbitria-Vrbanitatis. Language, style, and characterization in Catullus ’cc.39 and 37’. In: CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY 20 (2), S. 239-272
Abstract: This article describes how cc. 39 and 37 create distinct tones of voice and use them to preclude the social pretensions of Egnatius in different spheres. The style of c. 39, markedly oratorical—and non-Catullan—in the syntax of its opening lines, develops into the voice of a respectable senex by way of archaisms of vocabulary and syntax and is capped by a figure of humor otherwise absent from the polymetrics, the apologus. The style thus creates a voice perfectly suited to chastise Egnatius' social ineptitudes and, more importantly, constitutes on the verbal level an embodiment of the standards of the urban elite. Catullus thus illustrates to Egnatius that a subtle system of social gestures can be learned - something which Egnatius, for all his apparent pretensions to social prominence, manifestly has not grasped, marred as he is by the habit of grinning inappropriately. C. 37, which ends with an attack on the same Egnatius, is far different in tone, commingling tokens of artfulness with vulgarity and forcefulness. That mixed style exercises ironic decorum towards Lesbia's lovers, who are themselves an oddly mixed group, well-off on the one hand, but "backstreet adulterers" on the other. But the two tones of voice, and indeed the two groups of lovers, also embody the paradoxes of the Roman construction of stylish behavior, which could be represented as elegant dalliance or reprehensible vice. Inasmuch as Egnatius' fashion affectations, ridiculed at the poem's end, fail to qualify him for the ranks of Lesbia's lovers, he is represented as outside sophisticated society, however it be constructed. In concert the two poems utterly derail Egnatius' social pretensions: c. 39 as it were outflanks him on the "right," barring him from respectable society, and c. 37 outflanks him on the "left," barring him from the "jet set."
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