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(Un)expected behavior: Some general issues and a papal example
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(Un)expected behavior: Some general issues and a papal example Claudia Caffi a,b,* a
Dipartimento di Italianistica, Romanistica, Antichistica, Arte e Spettacolo, Università di Genova, Via Balbi 6, I-16126 Genova, Italy b Istituto di Studi Italiani (ISI), Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Via Lambertenghi 10A, CH-6904 Lugano, Switzerland
Abstract The definitional debate as to which concept -- politeness or appropriateness -- it to be chosen as the superordinate one is far from over in politeness studies. In this paper I will raise the question of whether unexpectedness could be a candidate as the encompassing category. I will also tackle two related issues: that of unexpected behavior as a marked choice in a given context, and that of the relevance of the emotive aspects of interaction to the construction of the context. To this end, I will advance the hypothesis that the following notions can together help understand interaction functioning: (a) the interplay/co-variance among different interactional parameters (Caffi, 2001, 2007), (b) the divergence of different kinds of expectations from anticipatory schemata (Caffi and Janney, 1994), and (c) the notion of interactional temperature (an extension of Watzlawick et al.’s, 1967 thermostat metaphor). After some preliminary remarks meant to illustrate the above-mentioned points, I will discuss an example of unexpected behavior, Pope Francis’s first greeting after his election. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Expectedness; Unexpectedness; Markedness; Metapragmatics; Emotive communication; Interactional temperature
1. Introduction The definitional debate as to which concept -- politeness or appropriateness -- it to be chosen as the superordinate one is far from over in second-generation theories of politeness, both in second-order approaches, which give prominence to theoretical constructs (cf. Culpeper, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2015) and in first-order approaches, which give prominence to layparticipants’ perspectives (cf. Eeleen, 2001; Watts, 2003, 2010). Although appropriateness may have an intuitive appeal as the encompassing category (e.g. Schneider, 2012), this would not be ‘‘an easy panacea’’ (Culpeper, 2012:1129).1 Also, the matter is not so easy to settle, given that something could be at the same time impolite and appropriate or, alternatively, polite and inappropriate. More crucially, the problem is to turn an intuitive notion into something theoretically satisfying. A first step in the right direction is to answer the question of how we can deal with the politeness/impoliteness dichotomy and its link with the appropriateness/inappropriateness dichotomy.
* Correspondence to: Dipartimento di Italianistica, Romanistica, Antichistica, Arte e Spettacolo, Università di Genova, Via Balbi 6, I-16126 Genova, Italy. Tel.: +39 10 20951460. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1 It should be observed in passing that the theorization of appropriateness as the encompassing category against which to evaluate a given speech was first advanced in classical rhetoric: it consists in the concepts of prέpon (in Greek) and aptum (in Latin), and designates appropriate wording; this, in turn, is based on the mastery of different registers and styles (polytropy), and the ability to choose the right, apt one among them, adjusting the wording to the target addressees. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.06.008 0378-2166/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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Paradoxically, and probably also due to the insights gained from Culpeper’s work (in particular Culpeper, 2011), it seems easier, both theoretically and practically, to conceptualize impoliteness than politeness. A reason for this could be that impoliteness, as (not necessarily) intentional behavior meant to cause offense, is marked behavior (e.g. a sudden loss of self-control). The point here is that, as has often been noted, although to different degrees of salience (e.g. by Fraser, 1990; Terkourafi, 2003; Haugh, 2003; Mey, 2010), while politeness can be thought of as expected behavior, and it is thus likely to go unnoticed, impoliteness is often divergent from the expected behavior. The question should be raised whether un/expectedness is a suitable candidate as an encompassing category with respect to both im/politeness and in/appropriateness. This choice would bring two advantages: the concept would not be value-laden, unlike im/politeness and in/appropriateness, and would be selected on empirical and phenomenological, rather than logical and semantic, grounds. Let me make a step back. My approach to politeness research has involved proposing the framework of mitigation. This makes salient how politeness is (or is not) brought about through (micro-)choices in actual speech. More importantly, it shows how a single stylistic choice in a given interaction simultaneously affects a set of parameters that may co-vary (Caffi, 1999, 2001, 2007, 2013a), such as epistemic certainty, emotive distance, formality, power roles, etc. Im/politeness is one of the possible outcomes of a cluster of variously conventionalized stylistic choices (e.g. downgraders or upgraders, weakening or reinforcing markers and strategies), as produced by the speaker and perceived by the listener. These choices can be ‘philologically’ detected in a given discourse or interaction and are coded in a language system as the repertoire of expressive means of that language. The concept of un/expectedness is intrinsic to the notion of style. That is, a stylistic choice is in a dialectic relationship between what is expected and what is unexpected (‘‘attente’’ and ‘‘surprise’’), in Bally’s words (1965 [1925]:69): it is the divergence from what is expected that matters, both cognitively and emotively (Caffi, 2007:34). In what follows, I will deal with three recurrent key notions which are recognized as crucial in the debate on im/ politeness, namely: (1) metapragmatic awareness, which encompasses prototypical sets of knowledge (e.g. frames/ scripts) and is based on (2) expectation systems which trigger anticipatory schemata in a given context/co-text and are part of (3) emotive competence. 2. Metapragmatic awareness: dictionary and encyclopedia As has often been noted, it is the divergence from an expectation system triggered in a given frame which calls attention to itself and requires interpretation (cf. Arndt and Janney, 1987, among others). From a pragmatic viewpoint, expected choices are determined by our metapragmatic knowledge. This is organized in what cognitive psychology (starting from the studies by Minsky, van Dijk and Kintsch, Schank and Abelson, among others) has conceptualized as prototypical sets such as frames, scripts, schemata, which in turn trigger clusters and/or sequences of preferential steps. This type of processing holds both in metapragmatics as common knowledge (roughly corresponding to the second sense of metapragmatics as proposed in Caffi, 1994) and metapragmatics as monitoring of ongoing interaction (corresponding to the third sense of metapragmatics as proposed in Caffi, 1994). As shown in Culpeper’s work, investigation into lexicon helps prevent equating a researcher’s subjective preference for a metalinguistic label with the label widely employed in a linguistic community. Yet, important as it may be in tracing the coding of a semantic-pragmatic field, lexicon is not necessarily enlightening on the conceptual hierarchy of terms (there may be a gap in the lexicon) or on actual interactional use: metalinguist coding and metapragmatic use may and do often diverge. When we have to assess, on the basis of our metapragmatic competence, the appropriateness of an exchange or a choice, we can rely on our knowledge of both the language and the world, both the dictionary and the encyclopedia, to use the distinction advanced by Eco (1986). When a given frame, enacted in a given interaction, runs smoothly, i.e. is brought about and unfolds as expected, both content-wise and stylistically, we do not notice it. It is expected behavior, and it does not need to be interpreted, no comments or glosses are called for. The point is somehow captured in Garfinkel’s (1967) concept of ‘‘’seen but unnoticed,’ expected, background features’’, which is interestingly recalled by Fukushima and Haugh (2014:166) in dealing with ‘‘emic understandings of the moral order that relate to evaluations of im/politeness’’. 3. Emotive competence, divergence and temperature In the complex interplay of factors (social, cognitive, anthropological, cultural, personal, etc.) which ground our metapragmatic competence and contribute to making a given choice ‘appropriate’, both on the (second order) level of abstract conceptualization, and on the (first order) level of the monitoring of ongoing interaction, emotions play a crucial role. Please cite this article in press as: Caffi, C., (Un)expected behavior: Some general issues and a papal example. Journal of Pragmatics (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.06.008
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One way of conceptualizing emotions from a pragmatic perspective is that of ‘emotive competence’ as defined in Caffi and Janney (1994:328) starting from Marty’s (1908) distinction between emotional and emotive: emotional competence ‘‘is a type of spontaneous, unintentional leakage or bursting out of emotion in speech’’, while emotive competence is ‘‘the intentional, strategic signaling of affective information in speech and writing [. . .] in order to influence partners’ interpretations of situations and reach different goals’’. Emotive competence plays a key role in metapragmatic competence as the interface between the social emotive dimensions of interaction, on the one hand, and the individual emotional dimension, on the other. Briefly put, emotive capacity mediates between the participants’ outer and inner worlds. Actually, relevant as it may be in conceptualizing the emotive side of ‘face work’ (Goffman, 1967), or ‘relational work’ (Locher and Watts, 2008:96) and in the perception of appropriateness, emotive competence should also be integrated with the emotional aspects of communication. This is particularly clear in the case of impoliteness (see the analysis on basic emotions, like anger, in Culpeper, 2011). How can we deal with both emotive and emotional dimensions? Here, suffice it to say that the interplay of interactional parameters which is at the core of the mitigation approach easily lends itself to the integration of heterogeneous dimensions, including the emotive/emotional ones. As shown in section 4 below, two more notions will prove to be useful to start working on this possible integration. The notions are divergence and temperature. In Caffi and Janney (1994:350--352), following Sapir’s (1927) concept of ‘nuclear patterns of behavior’, we proposed the concept of ‘anticipatory schemata’ from which marked, unexpected choices, may diverge, giving rise to emotive contrasts. More precisely, marked choices may diverge from: (a) linguistic, (b) contextual and (c) co-textual anticipatory schemata. Linguistic anticipatory schemata ‘‘consist of common assumptions about language, general expectations about words and meanings, pronunciations, syntactic arrangements, graphological conventions, and syntactically/ semantically appropriate accompanying prosodic behavior and kinesic activities’’ (p. 351). Contextual anticipatory schemata ‘‘consist mainly of expectations about kinds of communicative behavior that different types of speakers or writers are likely to produce in different discourse situations’’ (p. 352). Co-textual anticipatory schemata ‘‘consist mainly in expectations about types of successions of verbal/or nonverbal activities that are likely to occur in particular stretches of discourse, given the communicative events preceding them’’ (p. 352). I will use these different types of divergence in the description of Pope Francis’s greeting (section 4). The question is not only what a given choice diverges from, but also to what extent. The notion of ‘temperature’, which allows us to introduce the issue of degrees, can be another way of integrating emotive and emotional layers of communication. Following Watzlawick et al. (1967:147), the calibration of an interactional system can be compared to the process of thermostatic adjustment in physics. Every time an interactional system is re-tuned, scalar functions are triggered as when a thermostat is adjusted to a higher or lower temperature. After retuning, the system as a whole will function in a different way. In Caffi (2001, 2013b), I have proposed to add the notion of temperature to the thermostat metaphor. Briefly put: from a systemic point of view, interaction tends toward homeostasis. The notion I want to add to this hypothesis is that this is particularly true of the temperature of the system.2 In what follows, an attempt will be made to show how the notions mentioned above, namely: (a) the interplay of interactional parameters which is at the core of my mitigation approach, (b) the types of divergence briefly illustrated and (c) the notion of temperature can collectively help understand the functioning of a peculiar interaction. 4. An unexpected choice: Pope Francis’s first greeting To illustrate my point, i.e. the contrastive significance and the multiple pragmatic effects of a stylistic, unexpected choice, I will apply the categories I have mentioned in the preceding sections to an integrated treatment of the first greeting (in Italian) of Jorge Mario Bergoglio -- a native speaker of Spanish, and a member of a ‘rapprochement culture’ in the sense developed by Barros García and Terkourafi (2014) -- as the newly elected Pope Francis (in Italian, Papa Francesco) in the Central Loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica, on 13 March 2013 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbK2T8w-I5U). The complex context of the election and the different frames and cultural scripts (Wierzbicka, 2010) which it is made up of, are part of the metapragmatic knowledge and encyclopedia of the Western world. The announcement of the election of a new Pope is one of the most solemn occasions for the Catholic Church. Once the white smoke ( fumata bianca) goes up into the air, thousands of people reach St. Peter’s square from all over the city. The crowd is waiting for the new Pope’s appearance in the Loggia with trepidation and fervor. The expectancies and the gazes focus up there, where, after a while, the Cardinal Vicar announces to the world the ‘great joy’, using the ritual formula in Latin: ‘‘Nuntio vobis gaudium magnum. Habemus papam’’. Lit. ‘‘I announce to you a great joy. We have the Pope.’’ That formula is immediately followed by the 2 In my previous works (Caffi, 2001, 2013b), the notion of temperature has proven to be helpful in accounting for defective interactional systems such as that of Myshkin (the prince in Dostoyewsky’s Idiot).
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announcement of the secular name of the Pope and the name he has chosen for himself in his capacity as the Holy Father: ‘‘eminentissimum ac reverendissimum dominum Giorgium Marium Bergoglium qui sibi nomen imposuit Franciscum’’ (‘the most eminent and reverend lord who gave himself the name of Francis’). On 13 March 2013, up to this point, the rite has been faithfully accomplished in its expected solemn steps. The actors of the greatly spectacular moment are neatly separated both spatially and symbolically in the magnificent scenography of the Bernini square -- the columns and the basilica. On one side, and up on the loggia, there are the officiating priests of the Church, wearing their vestments; on the other side, the ratified listeners, the people, thankful for the joy and waiting for the first blessing of Saint Peter’s heir. Once the announcement has been given, the news of the new Pope’s name generates further enthusiasm. For the first time in history the Catholic Church’s Pope is called Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi, the ‘Saint of the poor’. The new Pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, enters the scene. A great applause and the hymns (Vatican and Italian) welcome him. Francis says: ‘‘Fratelli e sorelle. . .buonasera’’. Lit. ‘‘Brothers and sisters. . . good evening’’. According to the line of reasoning adopted here, it can be argued that this utterance is unexpected, and in this sense inappropriate, since it diverges from: (a) linguistic, (b) contextual and (c) co-textual anticipatory schemata mentioned in section 3. As to (a), linguistic divergence: the utterance is made up of two parts, i.e. the allocution and the greeting, separated by a long pause. After the ritual allocution (‘fratelli e sorelle’), the usual completion of the speech act should have been a ritual formula such as ‘‘sia lodato Gesù Cristo’’ (‘may Jesus Christ be praised’), as pronounced by Karol Woiytila after the election, or ‘‘il Signore sia con voi’’ (‘may God be with you’). Even at the micro-level of the utterance, Francis’s choice is marked. The long pause opens the way to the unexpected. At this micro-level, the stylistic contrast between the allocution and the greeting also relies, at least for middle-aged addressees, on the intertextual common knowledge of a totally different frame: the whole greeting formula, in the intertextual encyclopedia of native speakers of Italian, echoes the greeting used by TV show hosts: ‘buonasera’ anaphorically, retroactively, collocates with ‘signori e signore’. The whole formula of TV quiz shows, talk-shows, etc. has been for years ‘signori e signore buonasera’ (‘ladies and gentlemen, good evening’). The contrast in register between the two parts of the utterance has important pragmatic effects: on the one hand, ‘brothers and sisters’ are redefined, since they can be addressed in a very mundane way. The lay address term implies a new interpretation of the roles of the speaker and of the addressees. On the one hand, His Holiness speaks like one of us. On the other hand, the set of ratified hearers, the ‘model listener’, by analogy with Eco’s (1979) concept of ‘model reader’, potentially opens up to include a larger group: the addressee can be everyone, not only a recognized member of the community of believers. And, as a further inferrable effect, if everyone can be greeted in such a way, everyone can be entitled to be deemed a ‘brother’ or a ‘sister’. As to (b), contextual divergence: the choice of an extremely colloquial register (‘buonasera’ is one of the most popular greetings in Italy) instead of a routine formula, completely subverts the ritual. As noted by Kuisper (2013:601), formality is one of the features of ‘‘speech events in which religious or ritual registers are used’’. In a multidimensional approach taking heterogeneous parameters into account (Caffi, 2001, 2007), it appears that the strong downgrading modulation brought about by that choice on the interactional parameter of ‘formality’ has multiple effects. It co-varies with the ‘emotive closeness’ parameter. It should also be noted that Francis’s linguistic choice is accompanied by gestures that stress the intended meaning of self-abasement. These include: the palm up open hand (Kendon, 2004; Müller, 2004), the head canting, a gesture of submission, the eyebrow raising which indexes wonder (Poggi, 2007:94), as if even he were surprised by the election. As to (c), co-textual divergence: Francis’s greeting is in marked contrast with the style and register used in the announcement previously made by the Cardinal Vicar, and which strictly adheres to the Latin formula (‘‘Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum. . .Eminentissimum. . .’’). The temperature rises more and more. The cathartic moment relieves emotional tensions. The interactional homeostatic system is broken and readjusted on a new basis. The resulting adjustment is increased closeness. Let us look at this more in depth. The ‘buona sera’ in Francis’s first greeting, far from being an emotionally charged, so to speak ‘hot’, emphatic choice, presupposes and sustains reduced social and relational distance: the highest authority of the Catholic Church behaves like one of us. A deminutio (diminution, belittlement) can be also retraced in the act of reference: Francis designates himself as ‘the Bishop of Rome’, not as the Pope, the Holy Father who sits on Peter’s chair. This form of self-abasement contrasts with the elevation of others. In his subsequent speech, Francis will explicitly and firmly state, and bring to effect, not just a redefinition of roles on a more symmetrical footing, but also their reversal: as a director who assigns roles to actors, he, so to speak, casts the crowd as the protagonist, and casts them to pray for him and not vice versa (‘‘prima che. . .’’). He says, in a syntactically marked sentence (the unmarked form would have been ‘la vostra preghiera per me’): ‘‘la preghiera di voi su di me’’, lit. ‘the prayer of you over me’. With a change of footing (Goffman, 1974:496--559; Goffman, 1981:124--57), personal pronouns are used, another uncommon choice in such a highly conventional, fixed ceremonial occasion. Incidentally, he says ‘‘su di me’’ (‘over me’), not ‘‘per me’’ (‘for me’): the phrase Please cite this article in press as: Caffi, C., (Un)expected behavior: Some general issues and a papal example. 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shifts from an ‘ethic dative’ sense (dativus commodi) to a local, spatial meaning. Interference from Spanish is unlikely, since the literal translation would also be strange in that language (lit. sobre mí). Thus, one can argue that the syntactically marked construction is meant to stress both iconically and spatially the Pope’s self-abasement and the symmetrical symbolic elevation of the interlocutors (cf. Duranti, 1997). In so doing, the new Pope becomes, so to speak, the director of an unusual performance: following Francis’s instructions, the people silently pray for Francis, who meanwhile bends down to receive the crowd’s collective prayer. Through a stylistic choice, the ceremonial (in its highest sense) activity becomes a substantial activity (Goffman, 1967). The frame ‘first greeting of the Pope’ is reinvented -- distances are shortened and hearts touched. From that day on, Pope Francis has often displayed unexpected behavior. But the surprise of that first greeting in his first encounter with people is still in effect, as the key of his papacy. 5. Conclusion In this contribution I have raised the question whether unexpectedness, a neutral category intrinsic to the notion of style, could be the encompassing category with respect to im/politeness and in/appropriateness. In discussing a real example, I have tried to show the contrastive significance and the multiple pragmatic effects of a stylistic, unexpected choice. Much research remains to be done in order to understand how social and psychological factors contribute to determining what is expected, and hence appropriate, in actual interactions, and the allowable threshold of deviance of the different types of norm in effect in a given frame. We also still need to integrate cognitive and sociological notions of frame, (cultural) script, scenario, scheme, etc. including an intercultural pragmatics perspective (e.g. Kecskes, 2014; Sifianou, 2013; Terkourafi (Ed.), 2015, among others). The distinction advanced by Barros García and Terkourafi (2014) between ‘rapprochement and distancing’ cultures is particularly promising. On the link between emotions and expectations, many insights can be gained in recent research in cognitive psychology, for instance, in Castelfranchi and Miceli (2014), who assign a normative role only to positive expectations. And finally, much interdisciplinary work is called for in order to bridge in a comprehensive pragmatic treatment the different ‘layers’ of emotions involved in speakers’ actual communicative choices. References Arndt, Horst, Janney, Richard W., 1987. InterGrammar: Toward an Integrative Model of Verbal, Prosodic and Kinesic Choices in Speech. 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(Un)expected behavior: Some general issues and a papal example Claudia Caffi a,b,* a
Dipartimento di Italianistica, Romanistica, Antichistica, Arte e Spettacolo, Università di Genova, Via Balbi 6, I-16126 Genova, Italy b Istituto di Studi Italiani (ISI), Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Via Lambertenghi 10A, CH-6904 Lugano, Switzerland
Abstract The definitional debate as to which concept -- politeness or appropriateness -- it to be chosen as the superordinate one is far from over in politeness studies. In this paper I will raise the question of whether unexpectedness could be a candidate as the encompassing category. I will also tackle two related issues: that of unexpected behavior as a marked choice in a given context, and that of the relevance of the emotive aspects of interaction to the construction of the context. To this end, I will advance the hypothesis that the following notions can together help understand interaction functioning: (a) the interplay/co-variance among different interactional parameters (Caffi, 2001, 2007), (b) the divergence of different kinds of expectations from anticipatory schemata (Caffi and Janney, 1994), and (c) the notion of interactional temperature (an extension of Watzlawick et al.’s, 1967 thermostat metaphor). After some preliminary remarks meant to illustrate the above-mentioned points, I will discuss an example of unexpected behavior, Pope Francis’s first greeting after his election. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Expectedness; Unexpectedness; Markedness; Metapragmatics; Emotive communication; Interactional temperature
1. Introduction The definitional debate as to which concept -- politeness or appropriateness -- it to be chosen as the superordinate one is far from over in second-generation theories of politeness, both in second-order approaches, which give prominence to theoretical constructs (cf. Culpeper, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2015) and in first-order approaches, which give prominence to layparticipants’ perspectives (cf. Eeleen, 2001; Watts, 2003, 2010). Although appropriateness may have an intuitive appeal as the encompassing category (e.g. Schneider, 2012), this would not be ‘‘an easy panacea’’ (Culpeper, 2012:1129).1 Also, the matter is not so easy to settle, given that something could be at the same time impolite and appropriate or, alternatively, polite and inappropriate. More crucially, the problem is to turn an intuitive notion into something theoretically satisfying. A first step in the right direction is to answer the question of how we can deal with the politeness/impoliteness dichotomy and its link with the appropriateness/inappropriateness dichotomy.
* Correspondence to: Dipartimento di Italianistica, Romanistica, Antichistica, Arte e Spettacolo, Università di Genova, Via Balbi 6, I-16126 Genova, Italy. Tel.: +39 10 20951460. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1 It should be observed in passing that the theorization of appropriateness as the encompassing category against which to evaluate a given speech was first advanced in classical rhetoric: it consists in the concepts of prέpon (in Greek) and aptum (in Latin), and designates appropriate wording; this, in turn, is based on the mastery of different registers and styles (polytropy), and the ability to choose the right, apt one among them, adjusting the wording to the target addressees. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.06.008 0378-2166/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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Paradoxically, and probably also due to the insights gained from Culpeper’s work (in particular Culpeper, 2011), it seems easier, both theoretically and practically, to conceptualize impoliteness than politeness. A reason for this could be that impoliteness, as (not necessarily) intentional behavior meant to cause offense, is marked behavior (e.g. a sudden loss of self-control). The point here is that, as has often been noted, although to different degrees of salience (e.g. by Fraser, 1990; Terkourafi, 2003; Haugh, 2003; Mey, 2010), while politeness can be thought of as expected behavior, and it is thus likely to go unnoticed, impoliteness is often divergent from the expected behavior. The question should be raised whether un/expectedness is a suitable candidate as an encompassing category with respect to both im/politeness and in/appropriateness. This choice would bring two advantages: the concept would not be value-laden, unlike im/politeness and in/appropriateness, and would be selected on empirical and phenomenological, rather than logical and semantic, grounds. Let me make a step back. My approach to politeness research has involved proposing the framework of mitigation. This makes salient how politeness is (or is not) brought about through (micro-)choices in actual speech. More importantly, it shows how a single stylistic choice in a given interaction simultaneously affects a set of parameters that may co-vary (Caffi, 1999, 2001, 2007, 2013a), such as epistemic certainty, emotive distance, formality, power roles, etc. Im/politeness is one of the possible outcomes of a cluster of variously conventionalized stylistic choices (e.g. downgraders or upgraders, weakening or reinforcing markers and strategies), as produced by the speaker and perceived by the listener. These choices can be ‘philologically’ detected in a given discourse or interaction and are coded in a language system as the repertoire of expressive means of that language. The concept of un/expectedness is intrinsic to the notion of style. That is, a stylistic choice is in a dialectic relationship between what is expected and what is unexpected (‘‘attente’’ and ‘‘surprise’’), in Bally’s words (1965 [1925]:69): it is the divergence from what is expected that matters, both cognitively and emotively (Caffi, 2007:34). In what follows, I will deal with three recurrent key notions which are recognized as crucial in the debate on im/ politeness, namely: (1) metapragmatic awareness, which encompasses prototypical sets of knowledge (e.g. frames/ scripts) and is based on (2) expectation systems which trigger anticipatory schemata in a given context/co-text and are part of (3) emotive competence. 2. Metapragmatic awareness: dictionary and encyclopedia As has often been noted, it is the divergence from an expectation system triggered in a given frame which calls attention to itself and requires interpretation (cf. Arndt and Janney, 1987, among others). From a pragmatic viewpoint, expected choices are determined by our metapragmatic knowledge. This is organized in what cognitive psychology (starting from the studies by Minsky, van Dijk and Kintsch, Schank and Abelson, among others) has conceptualized as prototypical sets such as frames, scripts, schemata, which in turn trigger clusters and/or sequences of preferential steps. This type of processing holds both in metapragmatics as common knowledge (roughly corresponding to the second sense of metapragmatics as proposed in Caffi, 1994) and metapragmatics as monitoring of ongoing interaction (corresponding to the third sense of metapragmatics as proposed in Caffi, 1994). As shown in Culpeper’s work, investigation into lexicon helps prevent equating a researcher’s subjective preference for a metalinguistic label with the label widely employed in a linguistic community. Yet, important as it may be in tracing the coding of a semantic-pragmatic field, lexicon is not necessarily enlightening on the conceptual hierarchy of terms (there may be a gap in the lexicon) or on actual interactional use: metalinguist coding and metapragmatic use may and do often diverge. When we have to assess, on the basis of our metapragmatic competence, the appropriateness of an exchange or a choice, we can rely on our knowledge of both the language and the world, both the dictionary and the encyclopedia, to use the distinction advanced by Eco (1986). When a given frame, enacted in a given interaction, runs smoothly, i.e. is brought about and unfolds as expected, both content-wise and stylistically, we do not notice it. It is expected behavior, and it does not need to be interpreted, no comments or glosses are called for. The point is somehow captured in Garfinkel’s (1967) concept of ‘‘’seen but unnoticed,’ expected, background features’’, which is interestingly recalled by Fukushima and Haugh (2014:166) in dealing with ‘‘emic understandings of the moral order that relate to evaluations of im/politeness’’. 3. Emotive competence, divergence and temperature In the complex interplay of factors (social, cognitive, anthropological, cultural, personal, etc.) which ground our metapragmatic competence and contribute to making a given choice ‘appropriate’, both on the (second order) level of abstract conceptualization, and on the (first order) level of the monitoring of ongoing interaction, emotions play a crucial role. Please cite this article in press as: Caffi, C., (Un)expected behavior: Some general issues and a papal example. Journal of Pragmatics (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.06.008
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One way of conceptualizing emotions from a pragmatic perspective is that of ‘emotive competence’ as defined in Caffi and Janney (1994:328) starting from Marty’s (1908) distinction between emotional and emotive: emotional competence ‘‘is a type of spontaneous, unintentional leakage or bursting out of emotion in speech’’, while emotive competence is ‘‘the intentional, strategic signaling of affective information in speech and writing [. . .] in order to influence partners’ interpretations of situations and reach different goals’’. Emotive competence plays a key role in metapragmatic competence as the interface between the social emotive dimensions of interaction, on the one hand, and the individual emotional dimension, on the other. Briefly put, emotive capacity mediates between the participants’ outer and inner worlds. Actually, relevant as it may be in conceptualizing the emotive side of ‘face work’ (Goffman, 1967), or ‘relational work’ (Locher and Watts, 2008:96) and in the perception of appropriateness, emotive competence should also be integrated with the emotional aspects of communication. This is particularly clear in the case of impoliteness (see the analysis on basic emotions, like anger, in Culpeper, 2011). How can we deal with both emotive and emotional dimensions? Here, suffice it to say that the interplay of interactional parameters which is at the core of the mitigation approach easily lends itself to the integration of heterogeneous dimensions, including the emotive/emotional ones. As shown in section 4 below, two more notions will prove to be useful to start working on this possible integration. The notions are divergence and temperature. In Caffi and Janney (1994:350--352), following Sapir’s (1927) concept of ‘nuclear patterns of behavior’, we proposed the concept of ‘anticipatory schemata’ from which marked, unexpected choices, may diverge, giving rise to emotive contrasts. More precisely, marked choices may diverge from: (a) linguistic, (b) contextual and (c) co-textual anticipatory schemata. Linguistic anticipatory schemata ‘‘consist of common assumptions about language, general expectations about words and meanings, pronunciations, syntactic arrangements, graphological conventions, and syntactically/ semantically appropriate accompanying prosodic behavior and kinesic activities’’ (p. 351). Contextual anticipatory schemata ‘‘consist mainly of expectations about kinds of communicative behavior that different types of speakers or writers are likely to produce in different discourse situations’’ (p. 352). Co-textual anticipatory schemata ‘‘consist mainly in expectations about types of successions of verbal/or nonverbal activities that are likely to occur in particular stretches of discourse, given the communicative events preceding them’’ (p. 352). I will use these different types of divergence in the description of Pope Francis’s greeting (section 4). The question is not only what a given choice diverges from, but also to what extent. The notion of ‘temperature’, which allows us to introduce the issue of degrees, can be another way of integrating emotive and emotional layers of communication. Following Watzlawick et al. (1967:147), the calibration of an interactional system can be compared to the process of thermostatic adjustment in physics. Every time an interactional system is re-tuned, scalar functions are triggered as when a thermostat is adjusted to a higher or lower temperature. After retuning, the system as a whole will function in a different way. In Caffi (2001, 2013b), I have proposed to add the notion of temperature to the thermostat metaphor. Briefly put: from a systemic point of view, interaction tends toward homeostasis. The notion I want to add to this hypothesis is that this is particularly true of the temperature of the system.2 In what follows, an attempt will be made to show how the notions mentioned above, namely: (a) the interplay of interactional parameters which is at the core of my mitigation approach, (b) the types of divergence briefly illustrated and (c) the notion of temperature can collectively help understand the functioning of a peculiar interaction. 4. An unexpected choice: Pope Francis’s first greeting To illustrate my point, i.e. the contrastive significance and the multiple pragmatic effects of a stylistic, unexpected choice, I will apply the categories I have mentioned in the preceding sections to an integrated treatment of the first greeting (in Italian) of Jorge Mario Bergoglio -- a native speaker of Spanish, and a member of a ‘rapprochement culture’ in the sense developed by Barros García and Terkourafi (2014) -- as the newly elected Pope Francis (in Italian, Papa Francesco) in the Central Loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica, on 13 March 2013 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbK2T8w-I5U). The complex context of the election and the different frames and cultural scripts (Wierzbicka, 2010) which it is made up of, are part of the metapragmatic knowledge and encyclopedia of the Western world. The announcement of the election of a new Pope is one of the most solemn occasions for the Catholic Church. Once the white smoke ( fumata bianca) goes up into the air, thousands of people reach St. Peter’s square from all over the city. The crowd is waiting for the new Pope’s appearance in the Loggia with trepidation and fervor. The expectancies and the gazes focus up there, where, after a while, the Cardinal Vicar announces to the world the ‘great joy’, using the ritual formula in Latin: ‘‘Nuntio vobis gaudium magnum. Habemus papam’’. Lit. ‘‘I announce to you a great joy. We have the Pope.’’ That formula is immediately followed by the 2 In my previous works (Caffi, 2001, 2013b), the notion of temperature has proven to be helpful in accounting for defective interactional systems such as that of Myshkin (the prince in Dostoyewsky’s Idiot).
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announcement of the secular name of the Pope and the name he has chosen for himself in his capacity as the Holy Father: ‘‘eminentissimum ac reverendissimum dominum Giorgium Marium Bergoglium qui sibi nomen imposuit Franciscum’’ (‘the most eminent and reverend lord who gave himself the name of Francis’). On 13 March 2013, up to this point, the rite has been faithfully accomplished in its expected solemn steps. The actors of the greatly spectacular moment are neatly separated both spatially and symbolically in the magnificent scenography of the Bernini square -- the columns and the basilica. On one side, and up on the loggia, there are the officiating priests of the Church, wearing their vestments; on the other side, the ratified listeners, the people, thankful for the joy and waiting for the first blessing of Saint Peter’s heir. Once the announcement has been given, the news of the new Pope’s name generates further enthusiasm. For the first time in history the Catholic Church’s Pope is called Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi, the ‘Saint of the poor’. The new Pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, enters the scene. A great applause and the hymns (Vatican and Italian) welcome him. Francis says: ‘‘Fratelli e sorelle. . .buonasera’’. Lit. ‘‘Brothers and sisters. . . good evening’’. According to the line of reasoning adopted here, it can be argued that this utterance is unexpected, and in this sense inappropriate, since it diverges from: (a) linguistic, (b) contextual and (c) co-textual anticipatory schemata mentioned in section 3. As to (a), linguistic divergence: the utterance is made up of two parts, i.e. the allocution and the greeting, separated by a long pause. After the ritual allocution (‘fratelli e sorelle’), the usual completion of the speech act should have been a ritual formula such as ‘‘sia lodato Gesù Cristo’’ (‘may Jesus Christ be praised’), as pronounced by Karol Woiytila after the election, or ‘‘il Signore sia con voi’’ (‘may God be with you’). Even at the micro-level of the utterance, Francis’s choice is marked. The long pause opens the way to the unexpected. At this micro-level, the stylistic contrast between the allocution and the greeting also relies, at least for middle-aged addressees, on the intertextual common knowledge of a totally different frame: the whole greeting formula, in the intertextual encyclopedia of native speakers of Italian, echoes the greeting used by TV show hosts: ‘buonasera’ anaphorically, retroactively, collocates with ‘signori e signore’. The whole formula of TV quiz shows, talk-shows, etc. has been for years ‘signori e signore buonasera’ (‘ladies and gentlemen, good evening’). The contrast in register between the two parts of the utterance has important pragmatic effects: on the one hand, ‘brothers and sisters’ are redefined, since they can be addressed in a very mundane way. The lay address term implies a new interpretation of the roles of the speaker and of the addressees. On the one hand, His Holiness speaks like one of us. On the other hand, the set of ratified hearers, the ‘model listener’, by analogy with Eco’s (1979) concept of ‘model reader’, potentially opens up to include a larger group: the addressee can be everyone, not only a recognized member of the community of believers. And, as a further inferrable effect, if everyone can be greeted in such a way, everyone can be entitled to be deemed a ‘brother’ or a ‘sister’. As to (b), contextual divergence: the choice of an extremely colloquial register (‘buonasera’ is one of the most popular greetings in Italy) instead of a routine formula, completely subverts the ritual. As noted by Kuisper (2013:601), formality is one of the features of ‘‘speech events in which religious or ritual registers are used’’. In a multidimensional approach taking heterogeneous parameters into account (Caffi, 2001, 2007), it appears that the strong downgrading modulation brought about by that choice on the interactional parameter of ‘formality’ has multiple effects. It co-varies with the ‘emotive closeness’ parameter. It should also be noted that Francis’s linguistic choice is accompanied by gestures that stress the intended meaning of self-abasement. These include: the palm up open hand (Kendon, 2004; Müller, 2004), the head canting, a gesture of submission, the eyebrow raising which indexes wonder (Poggi, 2007:94), as if even he were surprised by the election. As to (c), co-textual divergence: Francis’s greeting is in marked contrast with the style and register used in the announcement previously made by the Cardinal Vicar, and which strictly adheres to the Latin formula (‘‘Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum. . .Eminentissimum. . .’’). The temperature rises more and more. The cathartic moment relieves emotional tensions. The interactional homeostatic system is broken and readjusted on a new basis. The resulting adjustment is increased closeness. Let us look at this more in depth. The ‘buona sera’ in Francis’s first greeting, far from being an emotionally charged, so to speak ‘hot’, emphatic choice, presupposes and sustains reduced social and relational distance: the highest authority of the Catholic Church behaves like one of us. A deminutio (diminution, belittlement) can be also retraced in the act of reference: Francis designates himself as ‘the Bishop of Rome’, not as the Pope, the Holy Father who sits on Peter’s chair. This form of self-abasement contrasts with the elevation of others. In his subsequent speech, Francis will explicitly and firmly state, and bring to effect, not just a redefinition of roles on a more symmetrical footing, but also their reversal: as a director who assigns roles to actors, he, so to speak, casts the crowd as the protagonist, and casts them to pray for him and not vice versa (‘‘prima che. . .’’). He says, in a syntactically marked sentence (the unmarked form would have been ‘la vostra preghiera per me’): ‘‘la preghiera di voi su di me’’, lit. ‘the prayer of you over me’. With a change of footing (Goffman, 1974:496--559; Goffman, 1981:124--57), personal pronouns are used, another uncommon choice in such a highly conventional, fixed ceremonial occasion. Incidentally, he says ‘‘su di me’’ (‘over me’), not ‘‘per me’’ (‘for me’): the phrase Please cite this article in press as: Caffi, C., (Un)expected behavior: Some general issues and a papal example. 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shifts from an ‘ethic dative’ sense (dativus commodi) to a local, spatial meaning. Interference from Spanish is unlikely, since the literal translation would also be strange in that language (lit. sobre mí). Thus, one can argue that the syntactically marked construction is meant to stress both iconically and spatially the Pope’s self-abasement and the symmetrical symbolic elevation of the interlocutors (cf. Duranti, 1997). In so doing, the new Pope becomes, so to speak, the director of an unusual performance: following Francis’s instructions, the people silently pray for Francis, who meanwhile bends down to receive the crowd’s collective prayer. Through a stylistic choice, the ceremonial (in its highest sense) activity becomes a substantial activity (Goffman, 1967). The frame ‘first greeting of the Pope’ is reinvented -- distances are shortened and hearts touched. From that day on, Pope Francis has often displayed unexpected behavior. But the surprise of that first greeting in his first encounter with people is still in effect, as the key of his papacy. 5. Conclusion In this contribution I have raised the question whether unexpectedness, a neutral category intrinsic to the notion of style, could be the encompassing category with respect to im/politeness and in/appropriateness. In discussing a real example, I have tried to show the contrastive significance and the multiple pragmatic effects of a stylistic, unexpected choice. Much research remains to be done in order to understand how social and psychological factors contribute to determining what is expected, and hence appropriate, in actual interactions, and the allowable threshold of deviance of the different types of norm in effect in a given frame. 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