This study investigates evaluation of attentiveness by British and Japanese university students. Attentiveness (kikubari) (defined as a demonstrator’s preemptive response to a beneficiary’s verbal/non-verbal cues or situations) is demonstrated without being requested and it is one of the important politeness strategies. A questionnaire including six attentiveness situations was distributed to 74 British and 138 Japanese participants, who were asked to evaluate the attentiveness situations on a five-point Likert scale and to state the reasons for their evaluation. The Likert-scale evaluations were analyzed using a three-way ANOVA and subsequently, the reasons for evaluations were analyzed qualitatively. It was anticipated that the Japanese would evaluate attentiveness more positively than the British, as attentiveness has been important in Japanese culture. The results, however, did not necessarily confirm this. That is, there were significant differences between British and Japanese participants in four situations, the British participants having evaluated attentiveness more positively than the Japanese participants in two situations and the reverse being the case in two other situations.
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Cited by
Cited by 9 other publications
Fukushima, Saeko
2015. In search of another understanding of politeness: From the perspective of attentiveness. Journal of Politeness Research 11:2
Fukushima, Saeko
2019. A Metapragmatic Aspect of Politeness: With a Special Emphasis on Attentiveness in Japanese. In From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness, ► pp. 226 ff.
Fukushima, Saeko
2022. Evaluation of (im)politeness. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)► pp. 275 ff.
2014. The role of emic understandings in theorizing im/politeness: The metapragmatics of attentiveness, empathy and anticipatory inference in Japanese and Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics 74 ► pp. 165 ff.
Fukushima, Saeko & Maria Sifianou
2017. Conceptualizing politeness in Japanese and Greek. Intercultural Pragmatics 14:4
Haugh, Michael
2019. The Metapragmatics ofConsiderationin (Australian and New Zealand) English. In From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness, ► pp. 201 ff.
Ran, Yongping & Linsen Zhao
2019. Impoliteness Revisited: Evidence fromQingmianThreats in Chinese Interpersonal Conflicts. Journal of Politeness Research 15:2 ► pp. 257 ff.
Zhao, Linsen
2020. Mock Impoliteness and Co-Construction of Hudui Rituals in Chinese Online Interaction. Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics 43:1 ► pp. 45 ff.
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