Читать книгу The Politeness/Impoliteness Divide. English-Based Theories and Speech Acts Practice in Moroccan Arabic онлайн

3 страница из 36

This book seeks to avoid this kind of bias in cross-cultural pragmatics. It contains a proposal for an encounter between English-based theories, developed from a Western cultural perspective, and communicative practices characterising the cultural ethos and language of Morocco. The study will focus on three types of speech acts, relating to the use of thanks and apologies, to the formulation of invitations, and to complimenting behaviour. Together these will provide three perspectives from which to establish a consistent and internally cohesive account of a particular interpretation of the concept of politeness, of the social image involved when performing these speech acts and, finally, of the nature of these communicative acts in the Moroccan cultural context. The book offers, by means of this combination of perspectives on Moroccan communicative practice, an integrated empirical field with which the theoretical models can establish a truly fruitful dialogue. This entails, as a first step, avoiding the assessment of the communicative behaviour of others in terms of deviant or ‘exotic’ interpretations. This study by Saida Anssari-Naim constitutes a valuable contribution to research in cross-cultural pragmatics, but, moreover, should be praised for its unique attempt to transform our perspective on the alien, from the uncritical view of oddity to the insight of a true alterity.