Browsing by Author "Faria, Rita"
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- Address and impoliteness in inline polyloguesPublication . Faria, RitaThis paper examines instances of address in European Portuguese and how these may connect to impoliteness in computer-mediated communication (CMC), namely online polylogues comprised of publicly-available commentaries left on Portuguese online newspapers in response to articles pertaining to the European Union. The paper posits an inclusive notion of address which takes into account the particular features of the medium and finds it to be heavily relational and complex, and resorting to both negotiated and conventional forms. Drawing from previous research on online impoliteness in polylogues, the paper examines impoliteness online and its intersections with address. Its main findings are that impoliteness does not seem to be a paramount communicative goal of participants and that, despite some coherent fit with address, the interaction between both is residual. It is the complexity of online address which conveys the heavily interpersonal, relational character of Portuguese CMC.
- ‘How to (not) win friends and (not) influence people’: linguistic politeness in European Portuguese at the crossroads between fixity and performativityPublication . Faria, RitaIn October 2020, the football manager Jorge Jesus testified in a court of law, using the pronoun você to address the judge and was reprimanded for it. This episode illustrates relevant aspects regarding linguistic politeness in European Portuguese (EP): politeness as an intersubjective, socio-cultural judgement derived from a perceived “moral order” to which speakers adhere (or not) in ongoing interactions; the social penalties which EP speakers can incur when their addressive/polite behaviour is deemed to be in breach of that order; finally, the centrality of forms of address (subsumed under the intersubjectivity of politeness) in shaping interpersonal relationships in EP. In view of this, the aim of this paper is to provide a description of linguistic politeness in EP using a mixed-method approach (a number of datasets gathered via ethnographic methods, literature, media and cinema, namely a comparison of address usage in the films A Canção de Lisboa, O Pátio das Cantigas, O Leão da Estrela and their contemporary remakes). In particular, the study attempts to examine politeness as a linguistic manifestation of cultural values at the crossroads between concerns for a fixed, normative match between form and context/interlocutor (“discernment politeness” and fixity) and patterns of increased negotiation and performativity guided by localised, more equalitarian interactional goals (“volition” and fluidity). This study thus explores whether the tension between normativity and linguistic fixity and less ritualised and more performative verbal interactions evinced in the use of politeness strategies can be seen as a reflection of a growing democratisation (or lack thereof) of interpersonal relationships felt in Portugal since the 1974 Revolution.
- ‘How to (not) win friends and (not) influence people’: linguistic politeness in European Portuguese at the crossroads between fixity and performativityPublication . Faria, RitaIn October 2020, the football manager Jorge Jesus testified in a court of law, using the pronoun você to address the judge and was reprimanded for it. This episode illustrates relevant aspects regarding linguistic politeness in European Portuguese (EP): politeness as an intersubjective, socio-cultural judgement derived from a perceived “moral order” to which speakers adhere (or not) in ongoing interactions; the social penalties which EP speakers can incur when their addressive/polite behaviour is deemed to be in breach of that order; finally, the centrality of forms of address (subsumed under the intersubjectivity of politeness) in shaping interpersonal relationships in EP. In view of this, the aim of this paper is to provide a description of linguistic politeness in EP using a mixed-method approach (a number of datasets gathered via ethnographic methods, literature, media and cinema, namely a comparison of address usage in the films A Canção de Lisboa, O Pátio das Cantigas, O Leão da Estrela and their contemporary remakes). In particular, the study attempts to examine politeness as a linguistic manifestation of cultural values at the crossroads between concerns for a fixed, normative match between form and context/interlocutor (“discernment politeness” and fixity) and patterns of increased negotiation and performativity guided by localised, more equalitarian interactional goals (“volition” and fluidity). This study thus explores whether the tension between normativity and linguistic fixity and less ritualised and more performative verbal interactions evinced in the use of politeness strategies can be seen as a reflection of a growing democratisation (or lack thereof) of interpersonal relationships felt in Portugal since the 1974 Revolution.
- “Most voted women” - representations of gender in the Portuguese media coverage of the 2021 presidential electionsPublication . Faria, RitaThe aim of this research is to examine the media representation of women politicians in the Portuguese press with a view to understand whether there are differing linguistic practices in how media discourse describes and represents gender. The focus of this study is the 2021 campaign for presidential elections in Portugal, in which five men candidates, including the incumbent President, faced two women candidates of opposing political fields, Ana Gomes and Marisa Matias. The study analyses the coverage of the presidential campaign in the run up to the election by extracting reports from a number of print media outlets (for the sake of comparability and viability, the media selected were traditional, print media outlets – Van der Pas & Aaldering 2020 – such as established broadsheets in the Portuguese public sphere). The reports are then examined by means of a mixed method approach, hinging on 1) a more discursive-analysis based approach looking at words, lexicalisation, presupposition (Lakoff 2003) and collocations, and 2) a more content-based approach examining topic selection such as personal and/or family traits and/or a focus on personal lives (Rohrbach et al. 2020) in order to learn whether the Portuguese media covers gender differently and whether there is any gender bias of significance (Fernandez-Garcia 2016). Preliminary research conducted so far suggests the following: an interplay between gender and class of some significance, with the ‘working class’ woman candidate often described by means of her ties to her hometown and family background; emotionally loaded language to describe the performance of the two women politicians in the coverage of campaign debates; in the aftermath of the election, the media coverage of the two women politicians resorted to collocations and adjectives which again lent a sentimental load to their representation (for example, magoada – “hurt” –, arrumada – “being over and done with,” an idiom), a discursive choice which was mostly absent from the coverage of the remaining men politicians. Because this is ongoing research, the paper will focus on the differing gendered linguistic representations in the media which have been collected so far relative to the women politicians who ran for President in 2021.
- Perceptions of forms of address in European Portuguese in online metadiscourse or what happens when you use você in CourtPublication . Faria, RitaThe point of departure for this study is an incident in 2020 when a football manager testifying in a Lisbon court used the pronoun address você and was reprimanded. With the aid of corpus linguistics, we qualitatively analyse the comments (understood as metacomments) that this case generated on media outlets and social media. The main conclusion is that the sociocultural foundations of EP address are polarised and unstable based on the following: the nexus between forms of address and the expression of (im)politeness is often rejected, with concerns that a complex system of address might impede an egalitarian society; despite this, discernment remains a core facet, expressed in the concern of finding appropriate sociolinguistic rules so as to arrive at forms understood as intrinsically (im)polite. Furthermore, a binary T/V dimension does not apply to the EP system, and although a N(neutral) dimension should be added, the polarised perceptions of EP address preclude clear candidates not only for the N platform but also, to an extent, for the V dimension. Fifty years after the 1974 ‘Carnation’ Revolution that initiated the transition to democracy in Portugal, EP conceptualisations of address show that sociocultural concerns for an egalitarian society coexist with persistent concerns for hierarchy and rules.
- Troy: myth and reality. British Museum, London (21/09/2019 to 8/3/2020)Publication . Faria, Rita
- Vocês vão sair a bem ou a mal: an examination of (im)polite forms of address online in european portuguesePublication . Faria, RitaThis article examines forms of address in European Portuguese online and their potential to convey, or facilitate, verbal aggression. Departing from an incident at Bairro da Jamaica in the outskirtsof Lisbon,in January 2019,where police were filmed attackingresidents, two corpora are constituted based on comments left on YouTube and online Portuguese broadsheets. The analysis of the data shows that forms of address are important devices to facilitate verbal aggression and impoliteness; that online platforms cannot be seen homogeneously but rather as specific contexts imposing specific discursive constraints; and that issues of identity and cognition are fundamental aspects to be developed in future research attempts into forms of address
- What Portuguese as a foreign language tells us about forms of address: an analysis of discourses of legitimationPublication . Faria, RitaThis study examines how didactic materials of Portuguese as a Foreign Language (textbooks, grammars) describe forms of address in European Portuguese and the discourses they postulate to legitimise verbal addressive behaviour, in particular when it comes to the pronoun você. The main findings are: textbooks and grammars legitimise the usage of você whilst excluding vós, despite the fact that some acknowledge the ambiguous status of você as neither a T nor a V form; the complexity and instability of the system of forms of address means that they are present in textbooks primarily apropos of other linguistic content (grammatical items such as verb conjugations, speech acts such as requests, introductions, greeting), usually precluding the field of Portuguese as a Foreign Language from postulating clear, transparent explanations guiding foreign learners in how to address others.