On Politeness in Canadian and Australian English: a Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

Although politeness is a well-known concept within the field of communication, it is often approached from a specific cultural angle. While politeness theory is a popular basis for cross-cultural comparisons, not many studies have involved intercultural communication in their investigation into politeness theory. This paper explored politeness from a linguistic approach by doing a comparative study between Australian and Canadian English, using Brown and Levinson’s 1987 politeness theory as foundation. Exploring the differences in politeness between two native-speaker varieties of the same language could broaden the knowledge of cognitive processes during an intercultural exchange as any differences would show that cultural background plays a big role in intercultural communication, even if two people speak the same language at a similar level. To investigate the differences in politeness between Australian and Canadian English, this study compared the use of pragmatic markers in both varieties by using the International Corpus of English for spoken Australian and Canadian English (ICE-AUS and ICE-CAN). A few discourse markers were selected, after which the frequency and context were examined by utilizing log likelihood calculations and qualitative analysis. The results indicated that speakers of Canadian English use pragmatic markers more frequently, and that both varieties seem to use these linguistic devices for different purposes. While Canadian English speakers use markers in order to avoid imposition and conflicts (negative politeness), the markers found in Australian English indicated friendliness and solidarity (positive politeness). The results of this research support the idea that speakers of Canadian English are more formal and indirect, whereas speakers of Australian English prefer informal and familiar speech.