So I am curious to know what you all think about where this saying (how are you today?) would fit within the Politeness Principle. The reason I ask is that this is something that everyone says sometime to someone during their daily activities. But on many occasions this is used as a greeting and the speaker is not really asking a literal question. Does this violate any kind of maxim in your opinion?
]]>Reading about this maxim made me think of a funny experience I had when studying abroad in Japan. In Japanese society it is somewhat mandated, through social constructs, that modesty reign supreme when one receives any type of compliment. If someone told you that you cooked a wonderful meal or created a beautiful painting, etc. then the typical Japanese response would be to deflect any praise and say no no, it's really nothing or something to that effect. Of course I did this on most occasions since it is culturally unacceptable to do otherwise. But, one of my friends, who was Japanese told me something that I could say when a native Japanese speaker complimented me on my use of Japanese. I must also say that she had a great sense of humor which is something that I found intriguing because hers was one that was comparable to the western culture more than that of Japanese. Anyway, she told me to say "I like to think so" when someone gave me this compliment because it will somewhat stump them because they'll never expect it and she was right. I would get the strangest glares when I would say this and the person paying the compliment would not know what to say after hearing such a statement. It was quite funny.
]]>So when doing the homework for chapter 17 I found something I disagree with concerning classifying speech acts. On the fourth exercise we are asked to classify some lexical items into as many categories to which we seem them belonging. So for "complain" I think this could be included as an Expressive because to me it does denote the speaker's psychological attitude toward a situation, event, etc. Cruse states that this "intuitively does not belong in this category." So what do you all think.
]]>So I had an instance yesterday during a conversation where what is understood to be the "weekend" was not the same between me and the person to which I was talking. I was talking to my neighbor and we were discussing the nice weather yesterday and I said that it wouldn't be lasting long because it was going to turn bad again over the weekend. She replied " I don't know if that's right. I think we are going to have one more day of nice weather." Of course I was referring specifically to Saturday and Sunday, but the weekend for her obviously included Friday. It was just funny because it is exactly what we discussed in class. I didn't go on to clarify because I didn't really see it as necessary but immediately recognized the misunderstanding.
]]>