The present study compares the thanking behavior across native speakers of Turkish and German and aims to discover similarities or differences based on the form and function of the respective realization strategies. The main focus of the research is to find out if each of the two cultures is oriented towards positive or negative politeness based on an analysis of expressions of thanks functioning as a speech act.
In the past, both the Turkish and the German language have been studied in terms of thanking behavior and politeness orientations, but little to no research has been conducted in comparing the languages in these aspects. It is hoped that the contrastive study at hand provides relevant results regarding differences in thanking behavior and politeness orientations between Turkish and German culture.
Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. Theoretical background
2.1 Thanking and politeness
2.1.1 Defining the speech act of thanking
2.1.2 Positive and negative politeness
2.1.3 Positive and negative thanking
2.2 Cross-cultural comparison of politeness and speech act of thanking
3. Methodology
3.1 Instrument
3.2 Participants and situations
4. Results
4.1 Thanking expressions
4.2 Modifying thanks
5. Discussion
6. Conclusion
7. References
8. Appendix
1. INTRODUCTION
Among other speech acts, the act of thanking is a communicative strategy used to create and maintain social harmony. In many cases, speakers thank their interlocutors because they feel as if they are indebted to them due to particular situational conditions the thanker feels responsible for. Therefore, by thanking, the speaker performs an act of showing gratitude and expressing their awareness of the indebtedness imposed to them.
The creation of social harmony through interaction inevitably raises issues about politeness. One of the most fundamental and most discussed developments of politeness theory has been that of Brown and Levinson (1987; in the following, “B&L” is used as an abbreviation for reference). As has often been assumed and researched, e.g. Siebold’s (2012) study of Spanish and German thanking behavior, politeness values can differ across cultures. Politeness is thus achieved in different ways amongst speakers of various cultural groups.
Subsequently, the present study compares the thanking behavior across native speakers of Turkish and German and aims to discover similarities or differences based on the form and function of the respective realization strategies. In this regard, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory is taken into account, more specifically, their definition of positive and negative politeness. The main focus of the research is to find out if each of the two cultures is oriented towards positive or negative politeness based on an analysis of expressions of thanks functioning as a speech act.
In the past, both the Turkish and the German language have been studied in terms of thanking behavior and politeness orientations, but little to no research has been conducted in comparing the languages in these aspects. It is hoped that the contrastive study at hand provides relevant results regarding differences in thanking behavior and politeness orientations between Turkish and German culture.
The paper starts with a theoretical background providing relevant information with regard to how the current study was formed. This certainly includes politeness theory and particular research on thanking and politeness related to cross-cultural analysis and linguistic studies of Turkish and German culture.
It continues with the methodology chapter, explaining which method has been used to collect data and why it has been used to carry out this particular study.
Then, the results are presented and discussed to a certain extent in the fourth chapter, which is followed by a section with further discussions. A conclusion and an outlook build the final part of the research.
The speaker is referred to as “he/him” and the hearer is referred to as “she/her” throughout the whole paper.
2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
2.1 Thanking and politeness
2.1.1 Defining the speech act of thanking
The act of thanking typically expresses gratitude, pleasure (cf. Searle 1969: 65) or appreciation. There are several forms of thanking, e.g. the speaker feels indebted to the hearer for carrying out an act in his favor, or it is used to decline an offer. It can also function merely as a “politeness device, which can be used conveniently to terminate a conversation” (Stenström 1994: 106), e.g. as a closing speech segment. Searle (1969: 65) explicates that “[w]hen I thank someone, I imply that the thing I am thanking him for has benefited me (or was at least intended to benefit me)”.
The type of thanks that is the focus in this paper is the speaker’s verbal “recognition of something which has already happened [or will happen]1 in his favour” (Siebold 2012: 157). Thus, the thanker acknowledges his indebtedness by letting the thankee be aware of his gratitude and the violation of her own freedom to act. In conveying the thanks, the speaker most likely wishes for the hearer’s acceptance. Consequently, the entire act of thanking is performed in order to smooth out social imbalance that has occurred due to a particular act (to be) done by the thankee for the profit of the thanker.
2.1.2 Positive and negative politeness
The wish for social harmony inevitably involves the role of politeness in communicating expressions of thanks. Siebold (2012: 156) describes the main function of politeness as “the use of a variety of strategies to weaken or counterbalance face-threatening acts which may compromise the dialogue partner’s social image, thus protecting both one’s own self-image and that of others and ensuring smooth and harmonious communication”. Brown and Levinson (1987) elaborate on that, according to whom there are two types of politeness, namely positive and negative politeness.
Positive politeness relates to the fact that members of a society possess certain wants, values and interests, which are approved and appreciated amongst each other by communicating that these are equally shared and desired (cf. B&L 1987: 101). Brown and Levinson (1987: 101) further assert that, in contrast to negative politeness, this phenomenon takes place in “normal everyday intimate language behaviour” and is thus not necessarily connected to redress a FTA. In terms of facework, the adherence to positive face is constituted by the desire that one’s selfimage is “appreciated and approved of[...] by interactants” (1987: 61).
On the other hand, negative politeness is indeed understood as “redressive action addressed to the addressee’s negative face” (B&L 1987: 129). With regard to her self-image, this means the desire for her “basic claim to [...] freedom of action and freedom from imposition” (B&L 1987: 61) to be respected and unimpeded. This draws an immediate relation to an imposition of a FTA and the resulting obligation to minimize it, thus making negative politeness more specific than positive politeness (cf. B&L 1987: 129). Leech (2005: 26) argues in this respect that negative politeness is “intended to avoid loss of face [...] by reducing the extent of imposition”.
In conclusion, where positive politeness is associated with sharing common ground, negative politeness relates to respecting each other’s personal rights and freedom to act. To achieve this, certain strategies in linguistic communication are used, which, as Siebold (2012: 157) puts it, “are geared towards positive face and which evince attentiveness and solidarity and those which tend towards negative face and maintain a respectful distance”.
Although Leech (2005: 1) remarks that Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory is widely criticized for a Western centered point of view2, they mention that the “content of face will differ in different cultures” (B&L 1987: 61), but assume that the concept and understanding of self-image and face remain universal (B&L 1987: 62). They explain that their notion of face is “universal, but which in any particular society [they] would expect to be the subject of much cultural elaboration” (B&L 1987: 13). As a reaction to this criticism, Leech (2005) compared Eastern languages (Korean, Japanese, Chinese) to English, a Western language, to analyze politeness in terms of universality. He found out that, generally speaking, there are no significant differences in facework across different cultures claiming that “there is a common pragmatic and behavioural basis for [different societies]” (2005: 26). Hence, adopting Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory of “face” for cross-cultural studies investigating politeness should not be considered ineligible by reason of cultural bias.
Thanking generally aims for negative politeness because of an indebt that is incurred, resulting in the speaker’s need to protect the hearer’s negative face. Through the act of thanking, he keeps social distance, as opposed to positive politeness, which pertains to minimizing social distance (cf. B&L 1987: 130). It is assumed that the more “creative” the expression of thanks is, i.e. lengthy, individual expressions, the more it tends towards negative politeness because it indicates a stronger need to redress the FTA and thus increases the social distance between the interlocutors. On the other hand, if the thanks is expressed in a rather conventionalized and short form, without further explanations attached to it, or involvesjoking or familiar utterances, it orients towards positive politeness because it implies the social distance to be minimal (cf. B&L 1987: 129).
Brown and Levinson (1987: 67) furthermore describe the thanking speech act as a threat to not only to the hearer’s, but also to the speaker’s negative face, as the latter “accepts a debt, humbles his own face”. Since negative politeness “is the heart of respect behaviour [...] it performs the function of minimizing the particular imposition that the FTA unavoidably effects” (B&L 1987: 129). So regarding the threat to the speaker’s negative face, the thanking may require mitigating strategies, which may be realized through modifiers (e.g. “thank you very much”). Siebold (2012: 158) adds to this with the claim that the addresser also threatens his positive face through self-humiliation and therefore subordinates himself to the addressee; he ends up being “at times in conflict with his [...] basic need for societal appreciation and approval” (Siebold2012: 158).
Brown and Levinson (1987: 246-247) distinguish between positive-politeness cultures and negative-politeness cultures. The former assign small values for the sociological variables D (social distance between S and H), P (relative power between S and H) and R (ranking of the degree of a FTA’s imposition according to a particular culture) (B&L 1987: 74), whereas D, P and R are ofbigger concern for their counterparts.
Given the above information, it can be said that the act of thanking is intrinsically associated with negative politeness, but realized through different strategies. These can be reflected by either negative or positive politeness. In some cultures, negative politeness may play a bigger role in the interaction; in other cultures, it may be the other way around.
2.2 Cross-cultural comparison of politeness and speech act of thanking
Several studies have been conducted to investigate politeness in Turkish and German culture, using Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory in particular, some of which focusing on the thanking speech act. One interesting study was carried out by Marti (2006: 1836), who analyzed the relationship between politeness and indirectness using discourse completion tasks eliciting requests. Her research subjects were Turkish monolingual and Turkish-German bilingual students. Based on a cross-cultural comparison, her goal was to find out whether pragmatic transfer from German to Turkish was present in the responses of the bilingual speakers. She found that there was no significant evidence in the results, but noticed that the bilingual returnees preferred indirect strategies at times, in contrast to the monolingual speakers (Marti 2006: 1862), who were perceived to be more direct.
Zeyrek (2012: 62) did relevant research on thanking expressions in Turkish in view of politeness using a corpus of modem written Turkish. Her hypothesis was that Turkish culture is neither exclusively oriented towards positive nor towards negative politeness (Zeyrek 2012: 62), but the act of thanking may be perceived as an “intrinsically polite and courteous act”, that is, the illocutionary function is characterized by “seeking opportunities for comity (Leech 1983: 104-105). To scrutinize Turkish as a “mixed” culture, Zeyrek (2012: 64-66) analyzed thanking formulae, modifiers and thanking strategies in the data collected from the corpus. With special attention paid to modifiers, she came to the conclusion that rather than indicating a FTA, “interlocutors seem to try to avoid offence and maximize the benefit of the hearer and express warmth, camaraderie and hence ‘conviviality’” (Zeyrek 2012: 82). Detecting a balanced difference between both unmodified direct and modified innovative expressions of thanks in the data, the results confirmed the hypothesis, for Zeyrek (2012: 83) claiming that politeness in Turkish culture is a gradient rather than a “categorical construct with negative and positive poles”.
In her cross-cultural study of thanking acts among Spanish and German native speakers, Siebold (2012: 156) also took Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory into consideration. Based on open role-plays eliciting thanks, she discovered that Spanish speakers place a higher value on solidarity than consider the benefactor’s restriction of personal freedom by doing a small favor for the indebted person of importance, as is the case in German culture (Siebold 2012: 163-164). She reasons this with German informants using more frequent and innovative expressions of thanks, whereas they appear as more routinized and less frequent in Spanish interaction (Siebold 2012: 160; 169). Hence, one might say that Spanish culture can be identified as a “warm” positive-politeness one and German culture is part of “standoffish” negative-politeness cultures (cf. B&L 1987: 246-247).
Inferring from the results of the studies above, it is hypothesized that, by examining their thanking behavior, German culture attaches great value to negative face in its perception of politeness, while Turkish culture affects positive or mixed politeness.
3. METHODOLOGY
3.1 Instrument
The method used to collect the data for this paper is a written discourse completion task (originally called “discourse completion test”, short: DCT). Since its development, it has been one of the most common data collection methods in pragmatic research. Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989: 13) explain:
The test consists of scripted dialogues that represent socially differentiated situations. Each dialogue is preceded by a short description of the situation, specifying the setting, and the social distance between the participants and their status relative to each other, followed by an incomplete dialogue. Respondents were asked to complete the dialogue, thereby providing the speech act aimed at.
Although the method comes with an ease of collecting large amounts of data (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989: 13), it definitely has its drawbacks regarding natural language use and production. In a DCT, only one interactant is active in what is supposed to be an interaction between two dialogue partners. Therefore, “offline responses” (Kasper 2008: 291) are requested, which results in the fact that pragmatic features are excluded, which would occur in real-life conversations, e.g. “turn-taking, sequencing of actions, speaker-listener coordination” (Kasper 2008: 291) etc. So only the written content of the given situation forms the participant’s answer. A remark of one of the current study’s informants is particularly relevant in this regard, telling the researcher that they were trying to think of ways to give more creative answers throughout the completion of the questionnaire. This proves that the responses may not be truthful to utterances that would emerge in natural situations.
In terms of discourse limitations, Yuan (2001: 284) further comments:
[T]he DCT technique, whether oral or written, is that it does not allow negotiation between the imaginary DCT character and the real-life interlocutor, so multiple turns become impossible unless a second-tum rejoinder is provided. As a result, respondents have to say everything in one turn, causing longer DCT responses than what is actually produced in natural speech.
On the other hand, it should be noted that naturally occurring data is difficult to collect, for example with the field method (observation of naturally occurring data; cf. Jucker 2009: 1615), considering that the focus of the study at hand is on particular speakers of a language exposed to precise contexts, which are the same for both parties for proper cross-cultural comparability. The sociological factors would vary greatly in an attempt to collect natural data. By using a DCT, the researcher can narrow them down to specific social relationships and situations.
For the reason that the object of interest in this study is the mere realization of expressing thanks, the informants were only provided with one turn. Although being inspired by Blum- Kulka et al.’s (1989) methodology for cross-cultural analysis of requests and apologies, several modifications differentiate the DCT used for the present study from the design of their DCT. Consider the following example:
(a) At the University
Ann missed a lecture yesterday and would like to borrow Judith’s notes.
Ann:
Judith: Sure, but let me have them back before the lecture next week.
(Blum-Kulkaetal. 1989: 14)
Using a DCT with this kind of example provides informants with roles and situations which may be unfamiliar to them. Furthermore, only one row is given for the answer; this limits possibilities for respondents to write longer utterances if they wish to. Following the gap, a rejoinder is provided to specify the speech act that is being elicited.
To tackle these problems, following considerations have been made: the present DCT aims for the informants be themselves to avoid the outcome of unnatural utterances, i.e. because of unrealistic situations for the individuals. They are also provided with more space to enable them in entering longer responses and given the option to opt out, so they may produce not only verbal (or non-verbal), but also no responses at all. The rejoinder is eliminated as well in order to not influence the individual’s response: in a real life situation, the speaker is not aware of the reaction to his utterance either. The latter aspect derives from Marti’s (2006: 1843) change to Blum-Kulka et al.’s original DCT style.
The result is reflected in the following example (translation in appendix):
A. Ihr Nachbar hat ein Paket für Sie angenommen, während Sie nicht zu Hause waren. Nachdem Sie bei ihm nachfragen, gibt er Ihnen das Paket. Was sagen Sie?
[...]
1 The type of thanks analyzed here is also related to not only actions that have already happened, but also future ones.
2 Especially data investigating linguistic behavior in Asian cultures, e.g. Ide (1989) and Matsumoto’s (1989) studies comparing Japanese and American English, reject Brown and Levinson’s facework theory to be universal. Hill, Ide, Ikuta, Kawasaki and Ogino’s (1986) data resulting from an analysis of the same languages, on the other hand, support the universality of Brown and Levinson’s theory.