Re: CHAT: Introduction

From:    Rene Uittenbogaard <ruittenb@...>
> > It's not clear to me why this should be any more bizarre than the
> > use of questions for polite imperatives; Russians, e.g., would find
> > that Western European habit particularly foreign.
>
> In the Netherlands, we don't ask strangers about how they are doing;
> and he knew that the supermarket personnel wasn't really interested in
> him, they were just trying to b polite.  So he simply found the
> question too hypocritical.
I think you totally missed my point.  When someone who speaks a
Western European language asks a polite question like "Could you
please close the window?", he or she is not being hypocritcal by
phrasing a polite imperative in this way.  It is a conventionalized
construction which the speaker of the language must use (if they
wish to avoid offense) for a certain kind of meaning. Likewise,
the use of 'How do you do' by English-speakers is a conventionalized
language-wide construction, used by many non-American speakers of
English, and the fact that your friend interpreted it as hypocrisy
is rather evidence of his ignorance of the language, and perhaps also
of his lack of worldliness, since a world-wise person would know about
that fact and adjust to it.  When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

> > > So, refusing to answer, but trying to acknowledge that they were
> > > just trying to be polite, he simply started answering
> > > "Thank you" :)
> >
> >  More appropriate would be "Fine, thank you" or the like.
>
> Oh, he knew that. He was just refusing to play his role along.
Such behavior would probably be seen a weird, but not necessarily
offense-causing, since he said "Thank you". It would be perhaps
analogous to such flouting of implicatures as in:

A: "Could you close the door?"
B: "Yes, I could." [B doesn't close the door.]
A: "Um, I asked you to please close the door." [A is weirded out.]
B: "Oh, that's what you meant! I will do so now." [B closes the door.]
A: "Uh, thanks." [A rolls his eyes.]

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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