Title: Politeness strategies in Ugandan English: making requests and responding to thanks
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2021, vol. 47, iss. 1, pp. 7-29
Extent
7-29
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2021-1-2
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/144292
Type: Article
Language
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
This study examines politeness strategies and specific expressions employed by Ugandans when making requests and responding to thanks, against the backdrop that contact phenomena, as one of the key factors that characterize L2 varieties such as Ugandan English, make it virtually inevitable to have peculiarities in this respect. Specifically, in relation to the illocutionary acts of request, Ugandan English relies more on direct strategies (due to substrate influence), with various idiosyncratic mitigating devices such as the use of the past progressive with performative verbs, the use of the lexical mitigator first with imperatives, and the use of verbs with inherent supplicatory semantics in the imperative mood. As regards responses to thanks, while there is a clear preference for exonormative standards, formulae arising from substrate influence are visibly present, while several of the formulae used in L1 English (e.g. Standard British English) are not used in Ugandan English.
References
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[2] Anchimbe, A. Eric and Richard W. Janney (2011) Postcolonial pragmatics, Journal of Pragmatics 43, 145–159.
[3] Anchimbe, A. Eric (2019) Offers and Offer Refusals: A Postcolonial Pragmatics Perspective on World Englishes. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
[4] Anderson, A. Jemima (2009) Polite requests in non-native varieties of English: The case of Ghanaian English. Linguistica Atlantica 30, 50–86.
[5] Anthony, Laurence (2004) AntConc: A learner and classroom friendly, multi-platform corpus analysis toolkit. Proceedings of IWLeL, 7–13.
[6] Bamwoyeraki, Sophie, Edith Nakangu and Julius Ocwinyo (2010) Fountain Progressive English for Secondary Schools. Kampala: Fountain Publishers.
[7] Barron, Anne (2014) Variational pragmatics. In: Chapelle, A. Carol (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. New Jersey: Blackwell Publishing, 1–7.
[8] Barron, Anne and P. Klaus Schneider (2009) Variational pragmatics: Studying the impact of social factors on language use in interaction. Intercultural Pragmatics 6 (4), 425–442.
[9] Bieswanger, Markus (2015) Variational pragmatics and responding to thanks – revisited. Multilingua 34 (4), 527–546.
[10] Blum-Kulka, Shoshana (1987) Indirectness and politeness in requests: same or different? Journal of Pragmatics 11, 131–146. | DOI 10.1016/0378-2166(87)90192-5
[11] Blum-Kulka, Shoshana and Elite Olshtain (1984) Requests and apologies: A cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP). Applied Linguistics 5(3), 196–213. | DOI 10.1093/applin/5.3.196
[12] Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House and Gahriele Kasper (1989) Cross-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
[13] Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson (1978) Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena. In: Esther N. Goody (ed.), Questions and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 56–311.
[14] Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson (1987) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[15] Bukenya, Austin, David Njeng'ere and Angelina Kioko (2015) Head Start Secondary English: Book Three. Nairobi: Oxford University Press East Africa Ltd.
[16] Buregeya, Alfred (2004) Written requests in Kenyan English: An illustration of L1 culture adaptation in L2 acquisition. Occasional Papers in Language and Linguistics 2, 103–123.
[17] Carter, Ronald, Michael McCarthy, Geraldine Mark and Anne O'Keeffe (2011) English Grammar Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[18] Dikin, J. Aaron (2017) It's no problem to be polite: Apparent-time change in responses to thanks. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 23 (2) 2019, 58–67.
[19] Eberhard, M. David, Gary F. Simons and Charles D. Fennig (eds.) (2015) Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 18th ed. Dallas, TX: SIL International.
[20] Farenkia, Mulo Bernard (2013) "All thanks goes to the Almighty" – A variational and postcolonial pragmatic perspective on responses to thanks. Sino-US English Teaching 10 (9), 707–724.
[21] Fisher, E. C. Allestree (2000) Assessing the State of Ugandan English. English Today 16 (1), 57–61. | DOI 10.1017/S0266078400011470
[22] Goffman, Erving (1967) Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
[23] Gough, H. David (1995) Some problems for politeness theory: deference and directness in Xhosa performative requests. South African Journal of African Languages 15, 123–5. | DOI 10.1080/02572117.1995.10587067
[24] Greenbaum, Sidney and Gerald Nelson (1996) The international corpus of English (ICE) project. World Englishes 15 (1), 3–15.
[25] Isingoma, Bebwa (2013) Innovative pragmatic codes in Ugandan English: A relevance-theoretic account. Argumentum 9, 19–31.
[26] Isingoma, Bebwa (2014) Lexical and grammatical features of Ugandan English. English Today 30 (2), 51–56. | DOI 10.1017/S0266078414000133
[27] Isingoma, Bebwa (2016a) Lexical borrowings and calques in Ugandan English. In Christiane Meierkord, Bebwa Isingoma and Saudah Namyalo (eds.), Ugandan English: Its Sociolinguistics, Structure and Uses in a Globalizing Post-protectorate. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 149–172.
[28] Isingoma, Bebwa (2016b) The use of ditransitive constructions in Ugandan English. In: Christiane Meierkord, Bebwa Isingoma and Saudah Namyalo (eds.) Ugandan English: Its Sociolinguistics, Structure and Uses in a Globalizing Post-protectorate. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 201–226.
[29] Isingoma, Bebwa and Christiane Meierkord (2019) Capturing the Lexicon of Ugandan English: ICE-Uganda and its Effective Complements. In: Alexandra U. Esimaje, Ulrike. Gut and Bassey E. Antia (eds.) Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 88]. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 294–328.
[30] Karlson, Monica (2013) Quantitative and qualitative aspects of L1 (Swedish) and L2 (English) idiom comprehension. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching 3 (2), 293–319.
[31] Kamoga, Katabazi Frederickand Earl W. Stevick (1968) Luganda: Basic Course. Washington: Foreign Service Institute.
[32] Kasanga, A. Luanga (2006) Requests in a South African variety of English. World Englishes 25(1), 65–89. | DOI 10.1111/j.0083-2919.2006.00447.x
[33] Kioko, Angelina and Margaret J. Muthwii (2010) Spot on Grammar for Secondary Schools. Nairobi: Oxford University Press East Africa Ltd.
[34] Kyaligonza, Robert and Edson Kamagara (2017) Staff turnover in public universities in Uganda. Makerere Journal of Higher Education 9 (2), 59–72. | DOI 10.4314/majohe.v9i2.5
[35] Lwanga-Lumu, C. Joy (1999) Politeness and indirectness revisited. South African Journal of African Languages 19 (2), 83–92. | DOI 10.1080/02572117.1999.10587385
[36] Lwanga-Lumu, C. Joy (2000) Requests and apologies in Luganda and English. PhD dissertation. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
[37] Lwanga-Lumu, C. Joy (2002) Internal request modification by first and second language speakers. Journal of Language Teaching/Tydsrif vir Taalonderring 36 (3-4), 289–304.
[38] Meierkord, Christiane (2016a) Speech acts in Ugandan English social letters: Investigating the influence of sociocultural context. In: Christiane Meierkord, Bebwa Isingoma and Saudah Namyalo (eds.) Ugandan English: Its Sociolinguistics, Structure and Uses in a Globalizing Post-protectorate. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 227–248.
[39] Meierkord, Christiane (2016b) Diphthongs in Ugandan English: Evidence for and against variety status and Interactions across Englishes. In: Christiane Meierkord, Bebwa Isingoma and Saudah Namyalo (eds.) Ugandan English: Its Sociolinguistics, Structure and Uses in a Globalizing Post-protectorate. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 121–147.
[40] Meierkord, Christiane (2016c) A social history of English(es) in Uganda. In Christiane Meierkord, Bebwa Isingoma and Saudah Namyalo (eds.) Ugandan English: Its Sociolinguistics, Structure and Uses in a Globalizing Post-protectorate. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 51–71.
[41] Meierkord, Christiane (2020) Attitudes towards exogenous and endogenous uses of English: Uganda's judgements of English structures in varieties of English. International Journal of English Linguistics 10 (1), 1–14. | DOI 10.5539/ijel.v10n1p1
[42] Namyalo, Saudah, Bebwa Isingoma and Christiane Meierkord (2016) Towards assessing the space of English in Uganda's linguistic ecology: Facts and issues. In: Christiane Meierkord, Bebwa Isingoma and Saudah Namyalo (eds.) Ugandan English: Its Sociolinguistics, Structure and Uses in a Globalizing Post-protectorate. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 19–49.
[43] Nassenstein, Nico (2016) A preliminary description of Ugandan English. World Englishes 35 (3), 396–420. | DOI 10.1111/weng.12205
[44] Ouafeu, T. S. Yves (2009) Thanking responders in Cameroon English. World Englishes 28 (4), 544–551. | DOI 10.1111/j.1467-971X.2009.01611.x
[45] Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
[46] Schneider, P. Klaus (2005) No problem, you're welcome, anytime: Responding to thanks in Ireland, England, and the USA. In: Anne Barron and Klaus P. Schneider (eds.) The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 99–139.
[47] Schröder, Anne and Klaus P. Schneider (2018) Variational pragmatics, responses to thanks, and the specificity of English in Namibia. English World-Wide 39(3), 338–363. | DOI 10.1075/eww.00017.sch
[48] Ssempuuma, Jude, Bebwa Isingoma and Christiane Meierkord (2016) The Use of the progressive in Ugandan English. In Christiane Meierkord, Bebwa Isingoma and Saudah Namyalo (eds.) Ugandan English: Its Sociolinguistics, Structure and Uses in a Globalizing Post-protectorate. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 173–199.
[49] Swan, Michael (2005) Practical English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[50] The Daily Monitor. https://www.monitor.co.ug/Magazines/PeoplePower/Ruhindi-to-MPs-I-did-not-do-anything-extraordinary/689844-3817940-pnb6oqz/index.html (accessed on 19/06/19).
[51] The International Corpus of English – Uganda (ICE-UG): https://www.rub.de/englin/research UG3.html (accessed on 17/06/19).