Linguistic politeness in adolescence. Empirical studies of use and understanding in school age

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Eva Neuland
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 278671742

Politeness and even more impoliteness of young people are actual and sensitive topics in public discussions. But neither the research of linguistic politeness nor of youth language focus on the use of conventional forms of linguistic politeness by young generations. The purpose of our project is to get more information about the use and understanding of linguistic politeness and impoliteness of school agers. It is assumed that young people know different styles of politeness varying between situations and recipients and differ from conventional forms of politeness.Especially we want to find out the importance for young people concerning politeness and impoliteness in interaction with adults and peers. Which verbal (and nonverbal) expressions do they know for selected speech acts regarding politeness (i.e. greetings) and in critical incidents (i.e. criticizings, excusings)? Do they differentiate between different repertoires according to recipients and situational contexts (i.e. peer group situations and instructional settings)? How important is the variation of modalities of seriousness? Over all we are interested in sociolinguistical differentiations of age and gender, types of schools, and German as first or second language of school agers.After extensive preparatory studies we started the elicitation of data by combining two different questionnaires (one for pupils and one for teachers) and three different types of collecting spontaneous speech data ( group discussions, conversations in school breaks, instructional communications). For the moment the survey includes more than 300 questionnaires of pupils and teachers, observations of group discussions with peers, conversations in breaks and instructions in school lessons. An extension of the data is planned. Because of the three different types of conversations we are able to distinguish between spontaneous manifestations and metalinguistic reflections of politeness and conventional politeness as results of instructional processes. Exemplary analyses could be tested concerning preferred forms of greetings from the questionnaires, sequences of teasing in conversations in school breaks, variations of modalities in instructional settings.Finally we are interested in conclusions for the research of linguistic politeness and youth language with regard to the thesis of sociocultural differentiation and change of conventional manners.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants