Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 803–809

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Book review

Linguistic Politeness across Boundaries. The Case of Greek and Turkish

Review of Bayraktaroǧlu, Arın, Sifianou, Maria, Eds., Amsterdam: Benjamins 2001.
xiv + 435 pp. ISBN 1-58811-040 (US), 90-272-517 (EUR).

In the preface to this collective volume, Sachiko Ide remarks that ‘‘[t]his book is
unique in that it unites papers on linguistic politeness from neighbouring countries
at the crossroads of the East and the West, Turkey and Greece’’ (p. xii). And the
longstanding historical relationship between the Turks and the Greeks indeed pro-
vides an interesting testing ground for a study which could be called an empirically
orientated exercise in contrastive pragmatics. In their introduction, Bayraktaroǧlu
and Sifianou explicitly mention the following three goals of the book (p. 7): ‘‘The
purpose of this book is many-fold, with equally important messages on all fronts.
One is that it provides a dual opportunity to test politeness in areas other than
English, which has hitherto been the playground of theory-makers. The second is
that it makes available to observers regional patterns of behaviour, which are loca-
ted between the East and the West. The third is that it demonstrates the results of
cultural interaction, even when the interaction is the past’’.
Quoting culture-specific scales of ‘‘Individualism vs. Collectivism’’ and ‘‘Masculinity
vs. Femininity’’, Bayraktaroǧlu and Sifianou situate Greece and Turkey in the middle,
classifying them as ‘‘moderately masculine and collectivist societies’’ (p. 7). They also
point out that these scales would attribute slightly stronger characteristics of Mascu-
linity to Greek culture. However, one of the main findings of the book is that Turkish
culture ‘‘is inclined towards Masculinity a fraction more than Greek culture’’ (p. 6).
As far as their theoretical background is concerned, most papers rely on standard
theories of politeness, such as Brown and Levinson (1987) (=BL) or Leech (1983),
but these theories are not accepted uncritically and, sometimes, modifications or
critical revisions of politeness theories are suggested on the basis of more recent
contributions, such as Watts (1992). Some contributions also take up alternative
frameworks, such as Relevance Theory (cf. Sperber and Wilson, 1995).
The chapters of the book have been arranged in pairs treating related issues. In
this way, 6 pairs of papers focus on (1) general aspects of politeness in Greece and
Turkey (R. Hirschon and D. Zeyrek), (2) classroom interaction (S. Doǧançay-Aktuna
and S. Kamışlı, and T.-S. Pavlidou), (3) approbatory and advice-giving expressions (M.
Makri-Tsilipakou, A. Bayraktaroǧlu), (4) service encounters (Y. Bayyurt and A.
804 Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 803–809

Bayraktaroǧlu, E. Antonopoulou), (5) TV-interviews/panel discussions (A. Tzanne, A.

Yemenici) and (6) compliments (Ş. Ruhi and Gürkan Doǧan, M. Sifianou).
The article written by Renée Hirschon, ‘‘Freedom, solidarity and obligation: The
socio-cultural context of Greek politeness’’ provides an overall view of the relation-
ship between key cultural values, social behaviour and language usage in Greek. The
key values of Greek culture most relevant for politeness conduct are freedom and
personal autonomy on the one hand and sociability and solidarity on the other
hand. Ongoing research on insults in Greek and Turkish indicates that Turks tend
to take verbal insults more seriously (p. 32). In a similar way, the following article by
Deniz Zeyrek, ‘‘Politeness in Turkish and its linguistic manifestations: A socio-cul-
tural perspective’’, provides an overview of socio-cultural values, communication
and polite language usage in Turkish. She concludes that the Turkish culture can be
characterized as a culture of ‘‘relatedness’’ (a defining feature of ‘‘Collectivism’’).
Families, neighbours, friends and colleagues are identified as the most important
networks shaping communicative behaviour in Turkish culture.
Doǧançay-Aktuna and Kamışlı (‘‘Linguistics of power and politeness in Turkish.
Revelations from speech acts’’) collected data on the use of politeness strategies of
80 native speakers of Turkish, via discourse completion tests and questionnaires.
Subjects were asked to respond to given situations by writing down exactly what
they would say in that particular situation. This method enabled them to control
parameters, such as higher or lower status, type of speech event (interaction in the
classroom vs. interaction at the workplace) or type of speech act (disagreement,
correction). Amongst other results, their study shows that professors differ from
workplace bosses in their more direct use of potentially face-threatening acts
(=FTAs), a fact which can be explained with the institutional role of professors,
who have to be as clear as possible for pedagogical purposes and, after all, have the
responsibility of giving corrective feedback (pp. 85, 89).
In her paper on ‘‘Politeness in the classroom? Evidence from a Greek high
school’’, Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou preferred naturally recorded data and recorded
eight teaching hours with three teachers and 75 students. In spite of the different
methodological approach, some of her results are in line with the findings of
Doǧançay-Aktuna and Kamışlı: the classroom interaction observed by Pavlidou can
be characterized by ‘‘minimal politeness investments, especially on the students’
part’’ (p. 129). In addition, Pavlidou found that, contrary to what has been claimed
in earlier studies on gender and politeness, ‘‘girls do not emerge as unequivocally
more polite than boys’’ (p. 130). However, boys and girls differ as to the type of
directive or non-compliant turns which they tend to use more often (pp. 122–126).
Marianthi Makri-Tsilipakou deals with two expressions of praise or approval/
approbation in Modern Greek (‘‘Congratulations and bravo!’’), namely, sug-
warZtZ ria (‘‘congratulations’’) and mprabo (‘‘bravo’’, ‘‘well done’’, ‘‘good for
you’’). She presents a detailed description of their syntactical, semantic and prag-
matic properties and then deals with authentic data from various types of discourse.
The main difference in their usage lies in the fact that sugwarZtZ ria belongs to a
more formal register and is restricted to conventionalized expressions in standard
situations, whereas mprabo seems to be ‘‘more of an exclamation done on the spur
 Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 803–809 805

of the moment’’ (p. 149) and can be used much more flexibly. Therefore, it has
acquired a number of additional functions, for example, thanking, exclaiming,
agreeing, as well as ‘abusive’ uses with a sarcastic or coercive touch.
In his paper on the speech act of ‘‘advice-giving’’, Arın Bayraktaroǧlu (‘‘Advice-giving
in Turkish: ‘‘Superiority’’ or ‘‘solidarity’’?’’) first deals with the rather negative view pre-
vailing in the literature on advice-giving, where it is placed among the FTAs. Then she
presents a corpus of 23 h of taped conversations of 46 native speakers, which shows that
advice-giving is seen much more positively in collectivist Turkish culture. This is true
especially in the case of close partners, who carry out the process of advice-giving ‘‘with-
out any signs of confrontation’’ and consider advice to be ‘‘a show of solidarity’’ (p. 205).
The next pair of papers, written by Yasemin Bayyurt and Arın Bayraktaroǧlu
(‘‘The use of pronouns and terms of address in Turkish service encounters’’) and by
Eleni Antonopoulou (‘‘Brief service encounters: Gender and politeness’’), respec-
tively, deals with Turkish and Greek service encounters.
Bayyurt and Bayraktaroǧlu, using a questionnaire, asked 70 persons to fill in an
utterance they would naturally use in 6 situations involving service encounters, from
an open market place to a fashion shop of high reputation. The most important
factors determining the use of T/-V-pronouns (i.e. Turkish sen and siz, respectively)
and other terms of address are power and solidarity. In a society with a relatively
high level of ‘‘Masculinity’’, it is no wonder that women were found to use more
formal terms of address, while men tended to use informal terms of address. Fur-
thermore, the relative economic strength or weakness of commercial settings was
decisive for the (in)formality of terms of address (pp. 230–234).
Antonopoulou focussed on gender-specific differences in encounters in a small
news agency in Athens. Using an observation sheet, she documented encounters
between 180 women and 200 men and the shop owners. While the data do not sim-
ply support earlier claims that women are more positively polite than men, women
seem to construe the encounter as a more explicitly verbalized speech event, whereas
men use more elliptical language and non-verbalized requests. More specifically,
both men and women were found to adapt their communicative behaviour in a way
which they considered to be more comfortable for the opposite sex (pp. 264–265).
Two authors deal with politeness strategies and simultaneous speech in TV-interviews
and TV-panel discussions in Greece and Turkey, namely Angeliki Tzanne (‘‘‘What you
are saying sounds very nice and I’m delighted to hear it’: Some considerations on the
functions of presenter-initiated simultaneous speech in Greek panel discussions’’) and
Alev Yemenici (‘‘Analysis of the use of politeness maxims in Turkish political debates’’).
Tzanne recorded 5 hourly all-male panel discussions (one presenter and four guest
speakers). All in all, Tzanne’s findings support the general view of Greek culture as
being orientated towards solidarity and positive politeness, where even politicians who
differ in backgrounds and political beliefs frequently use jokes, teases and expressions
of agreement (p. 303). This differs very much from the results in Yemenici’s paper,
who recorded six hours of TV-interviews (with one interviewer and one or more
interviewees). Distinguishing rapport-building and aggressive interruptions, Yeme-
nici found that interruptions made by the interviewer often have cooperative goals
and are redressed with the help of politeness strategies; however, when interviewees
806 Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 803–809

interrupt each other, they are highly impolite. This reflects the competitive nature of
both the rating struggle of private TV-channels in Turkey, which favour settings
leading to heated debates, and the attempts of politicians to appeal to their own
voters and to potential voters (p. 335).
The last two papers deal with the speech act of complimenting in Turkish and
Greek: Şükriye Ruhi and Gürkan Doǧan characterise compliments as phatic
communication and integrate Relevance Theory and Politeness Theory (‘‘Relevance
theory and compliments as phatic communication: The case of Turkish’’), Maria
Sifianou focuses on the multifunctional nature of compliments in Greek (‘‘ ‘Oh!
How appropriate!’ Compliments and politeness’’).
More specifically, Ruhi and Doǧan point out that, as far as compliments are
concerned, the propositional content of an utterance becomes less relevant than its
contextual implications for the relationship level. Compliments fulfil a variety of
functions in interpersonal communication and are constrained by factors like age,
gender and status. For example, the 660 instances of complimenting in their data
show that compliments are much more frequent in women-to-women interaction
(35.2%) and men-to-women interaction (40.3%) than in men-to-men or women-to-
men interaction (p. 367).
Sifianou collected a corpus of more than 450 compliment exchanges (using an
observation sheet). Interpreting these data, she stresses the fact that, in Greek cul-
ture, compliments are primarily face-enhancing positive politeness devices. More-
over, Sifianou emphasizes the close relationship between compliments and gifts, a
relationship she tentatively connects with Greek cultural history (p. 424). Finally,
Sifianou observes that compliments are often formulated creatively and playfully,
especially by Greek youth (pp. 415–423).
I now turn to the critical evaluation of the collective volume. All in all, it is a sti-
mulating book which enhances the cross-cultural study of politeness considerably.
The choice of Greek and Turkish is well motivated because their area of usage is
situated at the crossroads of the West and the East; they share a long history of
linguistic and cultural interaction but are neither genetically related nor typologi-
cally similar languages, which makes a contrastive study even more interesting.
Furthermore, standard theories of politeness, like BL, are not simply presupposed
as the underlying framework, but some of the criticism formulated in recent studies
of politeness is taken up and the BL framework is revised and partially modified. To
give but two examples:
BL’s rather pessimistic and potentially ethnocentric view, which conceives of all
politeness strategies as techniques to mitigate, redress or avoid FTAs is criticized by
several contributors, who stress that there not only FTAs but also ‘‘face suppor-
tive’’, ‘‘face boosting’’ or ‘‘face enhancing’’ acts (cf. Bayyurt and Bayraktaroǧlu, p.
212; Tzanne, p. 293; Sifianou, p. 398). Furthermore, Watts’ important distinction
between ‘‘politic’’ behaviour, which merely tries to keep personal relationships in a
state of conflict-free equilibrium, and ‘‘polite’’ behaviour, where the ego tries to do
more than what is normally expected of him/her (cf. Watts, 1992, 1999), is taken
into account for the analysis of Turkish service encounters by Bayyurt and Bayr-
aktaroǧlu (pp. 213–216).
 Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 803–809 807

A feature of this collective volume which I particularly appreciate is its strong

empirical orientation. Using different empirical methods and taking into account
differing social settings and institutional contexts, the contributors have enriched the
discussion of universality vs. relativity of politeness phenomena with a wealth of
empirical data from Greek and Turkish. Even if somebody prefers to study polite-
ness from a different theoretical point of view, he or she is provided with a highly
diversified picture of politeness phenomena in Greek and Turkish discourse.
The papers united by Bayraktaroǧlu and Sifianou also provide highly interesting
results for gender studies. While it is true that the papers on Greek classroom
interaction (Pavlidou), on Turkish (Bayyurt and Bayraktaroǧlu) and Greek (Anto-
nopoulou) service encounters and on compliments in Turkish (Ruhi and Doǧan)
and Greek (Sifianou) partially support earlier findings concerning male and female
politeness strategies, they also partially correct or refine the results of earlier studies.
For example, Pavlidou’s data clearly reveal that ‘‘[r]egardless of certain quantita-
tive differences which are usually taken to be indicative of a greater politeness on the
girls’ part, female students sometimes seem to be less sensitive to teachers’ positive
face wants than boys, and attempt more serious face assaults to the teacher’’ (p.
130); rather, boys and girls use differing strategies of (im)politeness. Another exam-
ple, taken from Antonopoulou’s study on Greek service encounters, concerns the
fact that ‘‘[a]pologies and excuses were employed by both males and females when
they viewed their acts as imposing’’ (p. 260).
Contrastive studies like this one are not only fruitful as far as differences between
languages and cultures are concerned, but also enhance our knowledge about par-
allels and similarities. These might be explained as the result of the longstanding
cultural interaction between Turks and Greeks.
An interesting case is the close parallels in the formulation of polite phrases. From
her corpus of Greek compliments, Sifianou quotes an example involving a meta-
phorical formulation: To stóma sou stazEi mEli (‘‘Your mouth leaks honey’’) (p.
420) and adds a footnote explaining that, according to Bayraktaroǧlu, ‘‘exactly the
same phrase agzından bal akiyor is found in Turkish’’ (p. 426).
Other similarities could be explained as part of communicative strategies which
are typical for a larger culturally connected region, in our case the Mediterranean
area. Zeyrek (p. 51) notes the importance of diminutives in Greek for expressing
endearment and affection, and Ruhi and Doǧan (p. 382) stress the relevance of
diminutives for (positive) politeness strategies in Turkish. Similar statements could
be made about Italian and Spanish (cf. Coseriu, 1987: 216–218).
I now turn to a few more critical remarks. On a very general level, the following
fact could be criticised: in spite of the thematic parallels between the six pairs of
papers, only rarely can you find explicit and direct comparisons between Greek and
Turkish politeness phenomena. I am aware of the fact that it would have been very
difficult to find exactly parallel institutional settings and to conduct and coordinate
research relying on precisely the same type of data and using the same kind of
methods, but still, the scarcity of direct comparisons between Greek and Turkish
politeness phenomena can be deplored (the papers of Hirschon, Tzanne and
Yemenici and some additional cross references in other papers notwithstanding).
808 Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 803–809

More direct comparisons will also be needed to substantiate the general conclusion
(p. 6) that Turkish culture is inclined a bit more towards Masculinity than Greek
culture.
As far as politeness theories are concerned, I would have appreciated some more
decisive steps towards a revision and elaboration of standard theories like BL. In this
context, attempts to overcome BL’s focus on FTAs are most welcome (cf. above my
remarks on Bayyurt and Bayraktaroǧlu, Tzanne, Sifianou). But this more positive eval-
uation of ‘‘face enhancing acts’’ could have led towards an attempt to replace BL with
alternative theories (cf. e.g. Held, 1995; Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1997; Eelen, 2001; Ter-
kourafi, 2001, and the contributions in Kienpointner, 1999, especially Arundale, 1999).
Moreover, many politeness studies favour politeness as the unmarked case and
treat impoliteness/rudeness simply as the marked, competitive and destructive
counterpart of politeness. This bias is challenged in some recent papers, which
should have been taken into account (cf. Schiffrin, 1984; Sarangi and Slembrouck,
1992; Culpeper, 1996; Kienpointner, 1997). Especially the tension between personal
autonomy and solidarity, which often underlies conflictive behaviour in Greek cul-
ture, could have encouraged a more positive view of and a closer look at some
varieties of rudeness or impoliteness. In this respect, the following statement made
by Makri-Tsilipakou is highly pertinent (p. 169; cf. also Hirschon, pp. 32–34):
‘‘Hence the relative scarcity of ‘thank yous’ and ‘pleases’ and ‘sorrys’, and the
abundance of bald-on-record imperatives but also of positive-polite diminutives; the
ordinariness of touching, kissing and hugging, but also of their obligatory opposites
of shouting, arguing, fighting and the like’’.
Finally, I would like to criticize two minor points. Hirschon quotes I. Millas’
ongoing contrastive work on Greek and Turkish insults, which allows the pre-
liminary conclusion that insults are taken much more seriously in the Turkish cul-
ture (pp. 32–34). This may be true as a general statement, but there seem to exist
(exceptional) contexts where in Turkish culture, too, even very rude insults are
harmless and rather used as a ‘safety valve’ to prevent fighting and violence, namely,
the duelling rhymes of Turkish boys (cf. Dundes et al., 1972). For example, the very
rude Greek utterance gamo tZ mana sou (‘‘I fuck your mother‘‘) has close parallels
to Turkish duelling rhymes, such as Ananın amını patlattık (‘‘We blew up your
mother’s cunt’’; cf. Dundes et al., 1972: 146).
My last point concerns Ruhi and Doǧan’s claim that ‘‘Complimenting is necessa-
rily an act of polite communication’’ (p. 352). Of course, this claim is not refuted by
the undeniable existence of ‘faked’, that is, ironic or sarcastic compliments, but there
are also instances of ‘sincere’ compliments which can be experienced as impolite (e.g.
the inappropriate compliments of a former student, who ‘praised’ her former teacher
at a journalism school for having written a feature article in a major newspaper; cf.
Tannen, 1992: 85).
To summarize my evaluative remarks, I would like to repeat that Bayraktaroǧlu
and Sifianou have edited a stimulating and highly valuable book on Greek and
Turkish politeness phenomena, which not only provides many interesting empirical
findings, but also, in spite of a few shortcomings, could be used as a model for future
studies in contrastive politeness.
 Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 803–809 809

References

Arundale, R., 1999. An alternative model and ideology of communication for an alternative to politeness
theory. Pragmatics 9, 119–153.
Brown, P., Levinson, S.D., 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Coseriu, E., 1987. Der romanische Sprachtypus. In: Albrecht, J. (Ed.), Energeia und Ergon. Bd I, Narr,
Tübingen, pp. 207–224.
Culpeper, J., 1996. Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 25, 349–367.
Dundes, A., Leach, J.W., Özkök, B., 1972. The strategies of Turkish boys’ verbal duelling rhymes. In:
Gumperz, J., Hymes, D. (Eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York,
pp. 130–160.
Eelen, G., 2001. A Critique of Politeness Theories. St.Jerome Publishing, Manchester.
Held, G., 1995. Verbale Höflichkeit. Narr, Tübingen.
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C., 1997. A multilevel approach in the study of talk in interaction. Pragmatics 7, 1–
20.
Kienpointner, M., 1997. Varieties of rudeness. Functions of Language 4, 251–287.
Kienpointner, M. (Ed.), 1999. Ideologies of Politeness. Pragmatics 9 (Special Issue).
Leech, G., 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. Longman, London.
Sarangi, S.K., Slembrouck, S., 1992. Non-cooperation in communication: a reassessment of Gricean
pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics 17, 117–154.
Schiffrin, D., 1984. Jewish argument as sociability. Language and Society 13, 311–335.
Sperber, D., Wilson, D., 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford.
Tannen, D., 1992. That’s Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks your Relations
with Others. Virago, London.
Terkourafi, M., 2001. Politeness in Cypriot Greek. Ph. Diss. University of Cambridge, Cambridge.
Watts, R.J., 1992. Linguistic politeness and politic verbal behaviour: Reconsidering claims for uni-
versality. In: Watts, R.J., Ide, S., Ehlich, K. (Eds.), Politeness in Language. Studies in its History,
Theory and Practice. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 43–69.
Watts, R.J., 1999. Language and politeness in early eighteenth century Britain. Pragmatics 9, 5–20.

Manfred Kienpointner (Associate Professor for General and Applied Linguistics, Department of Lan-
guages and Literatures, Section Linguistics, University of Innsbruck, Austria) is currently doing research
on ancient and modern rhetoric and argumentation theory (argument schemes, figures of speech), polite-
ness theory and feminist linguistics. Recent publications include: ‘Figures of speech’. In: Verschueren, Jef
et al. (Eds.), 1999, Handbook of Pragmatics, Annual Installments, Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 1–19; Le
latin classique–est-il une langue sexiste? In: Moussy, C. (Ed.), 2001, De lingua latina novae quaestiones,
Peeters, Louvain, pp. 95–106; Article ‘Linguistics’. In: Sloane, Th. O. (Ed.), 2001, Encyclopedia of
Rhetoric. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 426–449; Unhöfliche Partikeln? Kompetitive Verwen-
dungen von Partikeln in der Alltagskonversation. In: Held, Gudrun (Ed.), Partikeln und Höflichkeit (in
press).

Manfred Kienpointner
Department of Languages and Literatures
Section Linguistics, University of Innsbruck
Innsbruck, Austria
E-mail address: manfred.kienpointner@uibk.ac.at

PII: S0378-2166(02)00174-1