Přehled o publikaci

Textbook authors pay only marginal attention to the pragmatic and sociolinguistic components of communication, even though they are just as important for communication as grammar or vocabulary. This paper focuses on the possibilities of presenting politeness in language textbooks. Based on an analysis of the eight most widely used textbooks and textbook series of Czech for foreigners, we identify five problematic areas of Czech linguistic politeness: greetings and farewells, small talk, forms of address, informal and formal forms of address, and a phenomenon we refer to as adequate directness of communication. Speech politeness norms are one of the most important ways in which we can avoid the straightforward application of Grice's cooperative principle. They vary across cultures and are a frequent source of misunderstanding between ethnic groups, especially when expressions of politeness are interpreted literally. In this paper, problematic phenomena will be illustrated with examples from the analyzed textbooks and the Czech National Corpus.