The element of meta-communicative strategy of tactfulness in the German prepositional group aus Höflichkeit

Abstract

The article concerns the element of the meta-communicative strategy of tactfulness in the German prepositional group aus Höflichkeit (by courtesy) placed in various contexts to correspond the following situations: 1) In the combination with the verb schweigen to express image-sensitive “on face-work”; 2) In the combination with the verb verschweigen to express intentional insincerity and evasiveness. Politeness and tact are close in meaning, but not identical. Tact is an innate feeling, a constant and unconscious consideration of feelings and rights of other people. The research is innovative in the approach to traditional types of speech behaviour in the framework of “silent and evasive behaviour” as a manifestation of tactfulness within the meta-communicative category of politeness. The analysis of the material in the article is conducted following the assumption that tactfulness is a category evaluated in relation to the expectations of the partners in communication. The basis for the study is Erving Goffman’s theory of facial interaction rituals. The aim of the article is to describe the patterns of tactful behaviour in communicative interaction where the speaker seeks to preserve the image through concealment and non-dissemination of information, and demonstrates evasive behaviour. A corpus of 110 examples has been selected from the German electronic corpus Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (DWDS). Methods used in the investigation include lexical-semantic analysis, hypothetic-deductive method, methods of contextual and distributional analysis. Specific features of the use of the prepositional group aus Höflichkeit in combination with “act of silence” verbs are considered. The author concludes that in collocations of the aforementioned verbs with the prepositional group aus Höflichkeit express the relationship of tactfulness and inter-personal interaction as forms of alienation in silence and evasiveness speech patterns.