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POLITENESS FORMS AND HEDGING STRATEGIES IN ENGLISH AMONG IGBO BILINGUALS
ABSTRACT
The objective of the study was to conduct a linguistic analysis of politeness and hedging strategies in the conversational English of Igbo bilinguals. Through a purposive sampling process, a total of 3000 copies of questionnaire in the form of a Discourse Completion Task – DCT were distributed to undergraduates of Igbo extraction at seven Universities systematically selected from the South-east and South-south geopolitical zones in Nigeria. In addition, 30 key persons participated in the in-depth interview study. Pretested and validated questionnaire written in English was administered to each respondent for the questionnaire – Discourse Completion Task DCT study. Questions were written to elicit any response on the guided options tagged A, B, C. In all, 2748 copies of questionnaire representing 92.00% were duly completed and returned. Results showed that Igbo bilinguals use politeness and hedging strategies very significantly in their English language conversation. Also, to fulfill a conversational demand, Igbo bilinguals adopt different politeness/hedging strategies given the discourse situation. Similarly, to satisfy the need for effective communication, these strategies adopted by this group of bilinguals in addition to enculturation and recourse to the nuances of the second language were clearly appropriate in discourse. Most importantly, Igbo bilinguals yielded to certain social factors such as hierarchy, power, age, rank, position, speaker-hearer relationships, and degree of impositions among others as they ultimately informed the use of a particular strategy or another. In general, females were found to be more linguistically polite than males. In conclusion, the findings of this study showed that politeness is a culture/context-bound phenomenon hence the theory of the universality of its expression or manifestation remains an illusion.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title page i
Certification ii
Approval iii
Dedication iv
Acknowledgements v
Table of Contents vi
List of Tables viii
Abstract ix
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study 1
1.2 Statement of the Problem 7
1.3 Purpose of the Study 8
1.4 Significance of the Study 9
1.5 Scope of the Study 9
1.6 Research Questions 9
1.7 Limitations of the Study 10
CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
2.1 Concepts of Politeness, Hedging and Conversion Analysis 12
2.2 Linguistic Politeness 21
2.3 Previous Research Studies on Politeness, Hedging and Conversation Analysis 27
CHAPTER THREE: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
3.1 Methodological Issues in Language and Speech Act Studies 66
3.2 Study Design 70
3.3 Theoretical Framework 71
| vi |
3.4 Sample and Sampling Techniques 74
3.5 Research Instrument 76
3.6 Data Collection 80
3.7 Data Analysis 82
CHAPTER FOUR: RESULT
4.1 Quantitative Data Analysis 86
4.2 Qualitative Data Analysis 99
CHAPTER FIVE: DISCUSSION
5.1 Quantitative Data 115
5.2 Qualitative Data 128
5.3 Summary 140
5.4 Conclusion 141
5.5 Recommendations 142
5.6 Contribution to Scholarship 143
5.7 Suggestions for Further Research 143
WORKS CITED 145
APPENDIX 153-179
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
Conversation is a basic feature of face to face interaction in all human societies. As a way of life, conversation is man’s second nature. In all works of life and all spheres of human existence, there is need for effective conversation. Problems arise in human interaction partly because of conversation failure. Leadership problems, family misalignments may equally emanate from conversation breakdown. The need to maintain peace and order and the need to let the society and organizations run effectively have led to the search for effective conversation and appropriate strategies. Scholars have investigated conversation strategies.
The field of conversation analysis was started in the United States by Harvey Sacks, an American sociologist, in the 1960’s and since then it has grown into a sophisticated field of discourse in language studies and different scholars have postulated different hypotheses and theories about conversation analysis. They have also tried to highlight the discourse features of conversation to include turn-taking, politeness, hedging, adjacency principle, code switching, and code mixing among others as they interplay to make for effective communication. Turn-taking recognizes and explains how it is that in conversation, only one speaker speaks at a time after which another takes a turn in order to avoid the possibility of a lapse. Thus, according to Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (362), a turn is each occasion that a speaker speaks and a turn ends when another speaker takes a turn. They observed that speakers are permitted to take turns when they are chosen or nominated by the current speaker, or if no one is directly selected, they may speak of their own choices but if neither of these conditions applies, the current speaker can simply continue. Politeness on the other hand emphasizes the interactants’ ability to engage in conversation observing the acceptable, social norms that facilitate a hitch-free conversation. In the words of Akpan, “politeness is an aspect of social behaviour which makes individuals, within and outside any given society live in harmony with other people” (201). Hedging entails the use of terms that make room for contributions from interactants and not necessarily the use of absolute terms. Holmes defines hedging as linguistic devices which may be used for reducing the force of an utterance and explains that they may be used to boost or intensify a proposition’s force (297).
On the other hand, Yvgne proposes that adjacency principle governs the most basic pattern in conversation analysis in which it is necessary to produce the ideal sequence of speech in the forms of adjacency pairs, solidarity routines, converging pairs, among others (454). This means that adjacency principle signals co-operation in conversations and is primarily manifested in adjacency pairs, solidarity routines, in which conversations can be segmented into pairs of exchange that are connected in some way even though spoken by different speakers. Code mixing is a term used in the literature to describe the alternate use of constituents from two languages within a sentence while code switching may describe the alternate use of sentences from two languages in a single discourse. As aptly defined by Nwoye (366), code mixing is an intra-sentential shift, while code-switching is the use of more than one language or variety of language in the course of a single discourse. All these strategies are geared towards effective and efficient communication. For the purpose of the present study, focus is on politeness and hedging as conversation strategies. An attempt is also made to highlight conversation analysis as a spectrum within which the concepts of politeness and hedging manifest.
Afolayan whose seminal study set the pace for more research in this discipline in Africa and beyond defined politeness as an aspect of social behaviour, generally, a sort of grace, the type of thing that classifies people along the dimension of refinement and courtesy (57). Politeness as a discourse strategy emphasizes the need to use words or make utterances that are not intended to offend or viewed as rude by the addressee. Politeness cuts across the speaker’s intention and the hearer’s interpretation of an utterance. Hence, the face work theory proposed in 1996 by Hudson which states that in every speech situation, interlocutors try to express themselves in ways that may not be offending to the other (113). In other words, interactants try to maintain a good self image by addressing others appropriately hoping to be treated alike in due course. Hudson explains that our face is a very fragile thing which other people can very easily damage and we lead our social lives according to the golden rule (Do to others as you would like them to do to you) by looking after other people’s faces in the hope that they will look after ours. Hudson’s theory further emphasizes that if our words and gestures express one kind of face but our clothes suggest a different one, the rest of us look for some way to reconcile the conflict rather than leaving us completely unclassified. The result of combining observable and unobservable characteristics in a prototype is that the way we speak tells the rest of us about our face, that is, about the kind of person you want us to think you are (231 – 232).
The politeness theory which was first formulated in 1978 by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson accounts for the redressing of the affronts to face posed by face-threatening acts to an addressee. In this regard, people who are engaged in conversation want to save ‘face’ in order to preserve their individual self-esteem.
However, when speakers want to say something that may potentially impose on the hearer, they must attempt to avoid threatening the hearer’s face while saving their own face. Brown and Levinson describe acts which threaten the speaker’s or hearer’s face as “face-threatening acts, (FTAs)”. In other words, a speaker must adopt certain strategies to avoid or minimize the ‘face threat’. Dang (2011) stresses that to become an excellent conversationalist, besides being a natural phenomenon or human attribute, we should be able to understand and use strategies that will help us know how to open, maintain as well as close a conversation. Among them politeness strategies for conversational maintenance appear to be the most important because they remain the key factors deciding the success of the entire conversational process. For a successful conversation, interactants must achieve a workable balance of contribution in every speech situation. That implies we should not be only active speakers but also active listeners as these roles are complimentary in conversation. The binary nature of the two skills mandates that a conversation will make no headway if it is just one-sided. It is only when all of the conversationalists participate enthusiastically do they really contribute to the sustenance of any conversational process, either in English, Igbo, or any other language as the case may be.
The pioneering work of these two has since enlarged the knowledge of politeness in the literature. Brown and Levinson (61) define face as “the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself”. They also distinguish between positive face and negative face. Positive face is the desire to gain the approval of others: the positive consistence self-image or personality claimed by interactants. Negative face on the other hand is the desire to be unimpeded by others in one’s action, ‘the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction, freedom of action and freedom of imposition. Mills states that politeness is the expression of the speaker’s intention to mitigate face threats carried by certain face threatening acts towards another. Being polite therefore consists of attempting to save face for another (4). Held notes that politeness may be understood as a specific type of linguistic structure which “expresses the speaker’s attitude and are thus not explicable by semantic, but rather by pragmatic means” (63). This goes to show that politeness as a sociolinguistic strategy is tied greatly to the use of language in a social context as opposed to its semantic implications which emphasize meaning. Thus, in this regard, Held reiterates that politeness is necessarily a social interaction as participants do not only convey meaning but also observe social rules and their utterances are informed by social factors/variables. Thus, according to Smith “People interacting with members of their own culture do not usually need to have a verbalized awareness of their individual, values and styles of communication because they are shared within the culture. However, when one communicates across cultures, a clear sense of self is crucial in negotiating meaning” (3). A fact of basic importance in the statement above is that language and culture are inextricable. Similarly, Wardhaugh reiterates that positive politeness leads to moves to achieve solidarity through offers of friendship, the use of compliments and informal language: we treat others as friends and allies; we do not impose on them, and never threaten their face. While negative politeness leads to deference, apologizing, indirectness, and formality in language use: we adopt a variety of strategies so as to avoid any threats to the face others are presenting to us (277). The implication of the above assertion is that conversational discourse is structured in such a way that spoken interaction is connected to speakers’ conversational contributions. More so, all these speech activities will be expected to be delivered with a degree of politeness that befits and sustains the situation or task in hand (Simpson 155-175). O’ Grady, Archibald and Katamba maintain that politeness involves among other things; avoiding speaking or behaving in a thoughtless and inconsiderate manner or being deliberately obnoxious to each other for no good reason. In their words, “politeness which in the context of pragmatics can be glossed roughly as tact is an important aspect of communication” (256).
Hedging and hedging strategies as defined by Holmes (297) are linguistic devices which may be used for reducing the force of an utterance. Holmes also identifies that these are features which may be used to boost or intensify a propositions force. In other words, hedging strategies will be devices adopted in order to either down play the force of an utterance, that is, to lessen its effects on the addressee or to increase the force of an utterance, that is, to heighten its effects on the addressee. According to Lakoff, ‘Hedging devices explicitly signal lack of confidence while boosting devices express the speaker’s anticipation that the addressee may remain unconvinced and therefore supply extra reassurance’. Lakoff opines that women use hedging devices to persuade their addressees to take them seriously. Thus, according to Lakoff, both hedges and boosters express women’s lack of confidence. Lakoff also notes that ‘a device in order to reduce friction in personal interaction’ may be used in order to maintain a good relationship between speaker and hearer (cited in Holmes, 299). This sudden twist on who uses hedges more suggests that hedging and hedging strategies are features of women’s language. However, many researchers agree that hedging is useful. Skelton (38) for instance, cannot see how language can function without hedging as ‘language without hedging is language without life’.
Bilingualism according to Bhatia and Ritchie (2) is ‘the ability to use two languages effectively’. Definitions of bilingualism abound and it is very important to state that these definitions express a single fact which revolves around the knowledge and use of two languages at varying degrees of proficiency. It is the ability and function of dual language acquisition. There is however, variation in the period in which learning must take place for bilingualism to be considered simultaneous or sequential as the case may be.
Studies on bilingualism have shown that the emotional intensity of L1 is different from the emotional intensity of subsequent languages learned. These studies conclude that L1 has the highest emotional impact and is the language of personal involvement while L2 is the language that can create distance and detachment as it has lesser emotional impact as compared to L1 (Pavlenko, 163). The assertion above goes to say that the L1 is that language that bears much of an individual’s maternal/reactional instincts and is natural to the bilingual. It is that language with which one expresses effortlessly one’s desires, emotions and appeal without constraint. While L2 expresses a certain degree of disconnect and distance factor. In addition, cultural backgrounds play a role in the conversational discourse of bilinguals. Cultural values also affect the ways of conducting a conversation and the linguistic devices that are used to show politeness. This is to say that the bilingual’s L1 may rub off on his/her L2 in a speech situation. And in which case, if the individual’s cultural background pays attention to social status, age, power and degree of closeness between speaker and hearer; these social variables may determine both the level of politeness and the stylistic choice. Hence, the speaker is required to be sensitive to social context and norms.
However, as these strategies (Politeness and Hedging) characterize the speech of bilinguals across the globe, the study of appropriateness of language and communicativeness, especially as it concerns conversational language become necessary. As observed by Grice, all conversationalists are rational beings who are primarily interested in the efficient transmission of messages from a sender to a receiver (52). Again, this medium promises to be a very rich source of materials for corpus analysis of the features of the English of Igbo bilinguals, and, therefore, another avenue to understand the influence the Igbo-bilingual phenomenon has on English. The Igbo bilingual in this case is that individual whose L1 is the Igbo language and who enjoys a native–like competence in another language – the English language.
1.2 Statement of the Problem
The notion of conversational discourse is of linguistic interest. In a bilingual situation, as in Nigeria, although discourse seems more fluid than other linguistic levels this is not to say that it has no underlying structure. Ochs observes that speech can be planned or unplanned. This means that a lot of human conversation/dialogue has a certain amount of the planning in it. For Ochs, unplanned speech has certain characteristics: repetition, simple active sentences, speaker and listener combining to construct proposition, stringing of clauses together with ‘and or but’ or the juxtaposition of clauses with no overt links at all, deletion of subjects and referents and use of deictic elements such as ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘here’ and ‘there’. It may also be filled with equivocations/hedges and intercalary expressions (63) such as; ‘well’, ‘like’, ‘may be’, ‘but’, ‘sort of’, ‘you know’, ‘I guess’, ‘ehh’, ‘I mean to say’, ‘uum’, ‘hum’, ‘em’.
These two seemingly contending issues of politeness and hedging form the nucleus of this work. In spite of the relatedness of these conversation strategies in the real sense of the word, there remains the need for understanding of the roles these strategies play in everyday conversational discourse of Nigerians in general and more specifically the Igbo bilinguals.
Research and experience have shown that conversational breakdown causes conflict and brings about misunderstanding in families, work places and in the wider society. Furthermore, lack of the use of politeness strategies as well as hedging appears to be at the epicenter of conversational breakdown. The crises among friends, inter-institutional conflicts, conflicts at all sectors of the national economy and among leaders could emanate from the failure to appropriate the resources of hedging and politeness in dialogues, official routines and in the conduct of the affairs of the nation. Hence this study is conducted to find out to what degree Igbo bilinguals use politeness and hedging strategies in conversational situations. Again, the study hopes to find out the specific politeness/hedging strategies this group of bilinguals adopt and determine to what degree such strategies are appropriate.
1.3 Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this research is to conduct a linguistic analysis of politeness and hedging strategies in the conversational English of Igbo bilinguals. The specific objectives are:
- To find out the degree to which Igbo bilinguals use politeness and hedging strategies in conversational situations.
- To discover the specific politeness/hedging strategies this group adopt in conversations.
- To determine the degree to which the strategies used by this group of bilinguals are appropriate.
- To find out if there are factors that necessitate politeness in the conversational English of Igbo bilinguals.
1.4 Significance of the Study
The outcome of this study will be of interest to linguists in the areas of sociolinguistics and pragmatics. This is because language in this instance will be viewed as a social phenomenon and will be applied more in the context of use. It would highlight how certain conversational principles apply within the Nigerian context and help identify the linguistic peculiarities and mannerisms of the Igbo bilinguals especially as this is an area not much research has been conducted. This study will further emphasize the basic requirements of conversational discourse and its impact on language users.
1.5 Scope of the Study:
This study focuses on the politeness and hedging strategies in English language as used by Igbo learners of English as a second language referred to in this study as Igbo bilinguals. It takes a sociolinguistic and pragmatic view of the conversational discourse of Nigerian bilinguals of Igbo extraction. The Igbo bilinguals are drawn from the five states that make up the south-east geo-political zone of Nigeria, namely; Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo states and the Igbo speaking areas of Delta and Rivers states in the south-south geo-political zone.
1.6 Research Questions
The study is guided by the following research questions:
- What are the politeness/hedging strategies in the English language conversation of Igbo bilinguals?
- To what extent do the bilinguals in the study sample use politeness/hedging strategies?
- What are the sociolinguistic variables that lead to the politeness/hedging forms in the conversational English of the Igbo bilinguals?
- To what extent do sociolinguistic factors as well as gender interplay to account for the use of politeness/hedging in discourse?
1.7 Limitations of the Study:
- Considering that one of the data collection methods involved the Discourse Completion Task – DCT with guided options, responses may differ from natural speech patterns.
- Individual personality differences may have influenced the subjects’ choice of politeness/hedging strategies in English language conversation.
POLITENESS FORMS AND HEDGING STRATEGIES IN ENGLISH AMONG IGBO BILINGUALS
