Review of Topics in Linguistics Issue 2

Miššíková, G., Macura, M. (eds) (2008) Topics in Linguistics, Issue 2 – March 2008. Politeness and Interaction. Nitra: Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. Faculty of Arts. 79 pp.

Renata Jancaríková

Issue Two of Topics in Linguistics entitled Politeness and Interaction offers an interesting insight into the issue of linguistic politeness as investigated by Slovak, Czech and German scholars and university lecturers. The papers included explore various ways employed by speakers in order to achieve their communicative goals in diverse types of discourse, taking into account pragmatic, sociolinguistic and other factors that contribute to the nature and success of communication.

Richard Repka explores communication models and their use in various theories of language, i.e. functional structuralism, systemic functional grammar and functional cognitive grammar with focus on the process of communication.

Josef Schmied in his paper on politeness in academic interaction proposes the view that adapting complexity and coherence to the readership can be viewed as a special form of politeness in interaction.

Two contributors deal with the issue of politeness as being determined and influenced by the speaker’s cultural background. Alena Kacmárová discusses politeness from a Slovak speaker’s perspective as compared to the American society and advocates the necessity of developing cross-cultural awareness as part of language learning. An interesting comparison of English and Czech ways of complimenting is offered by Silvie Válková, who also emphasizes that non-native speakers of English should be aware of cross-cultural differences in order to be able to communicate successfully in a foreign language.

Three papers are concerned with politeness strategies in advertising discourse. Edita Homácková Klapicová explains how the principle of selectiveness together with certain effective means typical of advertising determines the communication of ideas in this type of discourse. Jana Leciánová studies TV commercials on cosmetic products in order to demonstrate how face-threatening acts are incorporated in modern TV advertising. A pragmatic view is offered by Katarína Nemcoková, who deals with advertising slogans as communicative acts. According to her, creating an advertising slogan is a locutionary act whereas decoding it can be described as an illocutionary act.

The discourse of legal English is discussed by two contributors. Eva Pavlícková focuses on the performative verb as one of the linguistic means that express the force and effectiveness of a law and thus can be seen as performing speech acts. Turn-taking management during cross-examination is analyzed by Tetyana Tkachuk. She offers a useful comparison of turn-taking strategies of lay people (i.e. self-represented litigants) and professional lawyers.

Politeness in interviews is explored in two papers. Pavlína Šaldová focuses on universal strategies in interviews by analyzing the use of direct and indirect quotations in newspaper articles which make reference to interviews and illustrates how the relationship between the participants and the purpose of the interview are reflected in the language. Political interviews are investigated by Magda Rázusová. She is particularly interested in the nature of question-answer exchanges of television political interviews in English and mainly the acts threatening negative and positive face of the interviewee. Lucia Štofanová discusses the nature of U.S. presidential debates with focus on the Memoranda of Understanding, i.e. secret agreements preceding the debates as these in her view illustrate how ‘unsafe’ situations can be avoided in them.

Communicative strategies in nursing discourse are explored in the paper by Klaudia Valdmanová. She analyzes patient-nurse communication and mainly strategies used to achieve planned nursing goals as they are presented and taught in nursing coursebooks analyzed by the author of the paper.

Renata Pípalová’s contribution is concerned with the textual theme as the entity unifying macrotextual units as well as all texts. By describing and comparing various approaches to the textual theme the author outlines its function and various aspects.

The variety of topics discussed in this issue of Topics in Linguistics convincingly demonstrates the role and importance of politeness strategies in the development of communication and its success in all kinds of discourse analyzed. Moreover, the issue illustrates the scope and variety of current research into a large number of linguistic phenomena as conducted by Slovak, Czech and German researchers.