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2013
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(2013): Foreign-language users confronting anti-normative politeness in a Mexican university. In: Intercultural Pragmatics 10 (1), S. 101-130. DOI: 10.1515/ip-2013-0004
Abstract: When foreign-language learners abandon the relative safety of the classroom and confront actual language use, they face decisions regarding how they wish to participate in a given target-language group. They may find that different interactional patterns and practices reflect a community's norms and how its members come across: Interactants may employ, for instance, seemingly impolite words and expressions in inoffensive ways. Although this phenomenon has been categorized as mock impoliteness, I will adopt the term anti-normative politeness (adapted from Zimmerman 2003) since interactants are ultimately engaging in polite rather than impolite practices. The foreign-language user's decision as to whether to engage in such practices will depend to a large extent on pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic understandings and how she wants to come across - and is allowed to come across in the target language. In this paper, I examine how French and German exchange students at a Mexican university approached and confronted the use of the normally insulting word guey, which seems to have become more and more prevalent in Mexican society. Findings indicate that foreign-language learners of Spanish understand the friendly intention underscoring the use of anti-normative politeness but fail to fully appreciate "positive politeness" (Brown and Levinson 1987) such a key feature of Mexican interpersonal language use.
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