Visual Rhetoric project

Mahmood Aldhamen

WRA 125 Sec 1

12/4/2013

Interviews

Five African American women over the age of 18 were interviewed about their perceptive of the testimony of Rachel Jeantel during the State of Florida v. George Zimmerman trial.

1. Zainab Coleman, age 22:

“She [Rachel Jeantel] seems to be very rude and impolite. She sits there picking her ear and letting her mouth hang open. She doesn’t look like she even cares about what is going on. She also is very rude to the judge and the prosecutor. If she wanted to make her case sound good she would’ve at least have been polite and professional. It just seems like she doesn’t care and just wants to go home. She even said she wanted to go home. I don’t blame the guys for questioning her because if she really cared about Treyvan maybe she would have taken this seriously.”

2. Malikah Jones, age 28:

“Ms. Jeantel looks like she is stressed. I feel for her but I mean she should of at least tried to put some effort in it. I swear she looks like she is going to fall asleep with her eyes looking half closed the whole time. The lawyer seemed to know she is tired and tries to confuse her. But it looks like she is just confused herself at the end. She just leans back and makes it like this is all a waste of her time. She didn’t even try to speak well either. Yeah I can imagine she’s feeling bad because of her boyfriend being murdered but she’s in court and should have better manners. At least if it was me I’d try to make an effort to get the killer in jail.”

3. Carrie Dallas, age 31:

“This girl [Rachel Jeantel] looks like a joke. She came into the court dresses like she’s going to the club with her weave done and her loops on. She’s snapping at the judge and acting like she has better things to do than try to get the guy who killed her boyfriend, Treyvon Martin, in jail. She doesn’t even know what she is saying and didn’t think it mattered. She’s got some attitude and no manners. You got to be polite in court and she just acts like whatever. And she can’t even talk. Her grammar is off. At least be professional in court girl and drop the attitude.”

4. Janay Nichole, age 19: Janay Nichole, age 19

“The poor girl [Rachel Jeantel] just looks like she’s being messed with by the judge and the lawyer. They are not polite to her and they just seem to try and make her sound dumb. I know I wouldn’t say nothing if those guys were asking me the same thing over and over like I don’t know what I said. They don’t give her a break. That pig killed her man Treyvon and they just treat her like a criminal. If they were polite to her than maybe she’d be polite to them. I think she is doing good. She looks stressed and tired of all the drama. She just wants to go home. The dudes need to back off.”

5. Sharmin Mayars, 35:

“Seems like everyone is being rude in this video. The lady [Rachel Jeantel] acts like she doesn’t care and is lazy. The judge and lawyer act like she’s doing things wrong. No one seems to want to be polite at all to anyone. The lady was moving around like she was nervous and wanted to leave. She lawyer was looking like he knew she was nervous and kept trying to make her nervous. She made herself look like a bad witness and their questions made her look even worse. She didn’t even want to read the book and acted like she couldn’t read. The lawyers just acted like she was a bad witness too. It’s not a nice court room setting.”

Summary:

The general idea of the interviews stated that Rachel Jeantel was not acting professional. While some sympathized with her, stating she was going through hard times and that she was under stress, most said she was not polite or proper for the situation. While the exact nature of her impoliteness varied from person to person, most agreed it was in how she spoke and how she acted. As stated in the interviews, Rachel Jeantel acted as if she did not care to be in court and that she was not putting any effort into her testimony. Some have said that the judge and the prosecutor (lawyer) were not fair to her and questioned her repeatedly to exploit her; others said that she should have acted better regardless.

Analysis:

She broke some social norms in her testimony regardless. In a professional situation, especially that of a courtroom, her language was not appropriate. Her verbal and nonverbal actions were not professional for a court. In regards to interactional sociolinguistics, she used poor grammar and was speaking rudely to the judge. This made her sound impolite and improper. It did not help her image to speak this way. Also, she complained about wanting to go home, which in a court can be taken as refusal to testify (as noted in the video). Also, her non-verbal actions seemed to show that she was tired and frustrated with the situation. In a court, a person should appear to be alert and paying attention to the situation.

In regards to the prosecutor, they did take opportunities to exploit her position. They were using negative politeness. They kept questioning her repeatedly with the same questions and attempted to convince her she was wrong about her testimony by confusing her. They spoke to her as an inferior.

A picture can say a lot and so can a video. Some people focus on different parts of a video and base their argument. The images shown previously show how seeing and focusing on different parts can change the meaning of the video. Actions represent a person and can effect how people interpret them.

Citations

1. Coleman, Z. (2013, Nov 30). Interview by M. A. Zainab Coleman, age 22.

2. Jones, M. (2013, Nov 31). Interview by M. A.  Malikah Jones, age 28.

3. Dallas, C. (2013, Dec 1). Interview by M. A. Carrie Dallas, age 31.

4. Nichole, J. (2013, Dec 1). Interview by M. A. Janay Nichole, age 19

5. Mayars, S. (2013, Dec 1). Interview by M. A. Sharmin Mayars, 35

Video and Screen captures:

WESH 2 News. (2012). Trayvon martin's friend testifying: I'm leaving today [Web]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY3XPf912-k

visual rhetoric

Have you ever heard of politeness theory? When somebody is being impolite, do you ever consider “why is he/she not polite? Is it just my personal standard of politeness or it is a social standard?” In the process of communication, a theory called politeness theory study about politeness and impoliteness in communication.

Politeness theory is the theory that accounts for the redressing of the affronts to face posed by face-threatening acts to addressees. Politeness theory was first formulated in 1978 by Penelope Brown & Stephen Levinson. (Foley, William. 1997. Anthropological Linguistics: An introduction. Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-15122-7). The theory has been developed since 1978. We will discuss the politeness theory with the idea of face and 3 other core ideas.

When we talk about face here, we are not talking about the part of human body. However, the face refers to the special phenomenon of interpersonal relationship. "The concept of face is, of course, Chinese in origin" (Ho 1975:867), yet many languages have "face" terms that metaphorically mean "prestige; honor; reputation". The phenomenon of face is more obvious and normal in the society with a strong hierarchy, such as China, Japan. However in the society with relatively weak hierarchy such as US, the face still exists.

One’s face is an aggregate of his social power, authority and standard. Others can ignore, respect or give face to another by either verbal or nonverbal. For example, in the class, one student stand up and say,” this class is boring, let’s all go out and play!” And students leave while the teacher is still teaching. Let’s ignore the politeness of such behavior for now, and this will be an example of ignoring the face, or in another words, not giving face. The students who leaves were not giving face to the teacher by disrespect for his/her authority and not giving equally value to the teacher’s behavior.

Let’s image, if you are the only person in the world, does face still exist? The answer is no, we do not lose our face when there is no other people. Then we can conclude that the face is related to other people instead of oneself.

Everyone have the need to be approval by others, when others approval someone by approval his action, emotion, knowledge or social authority. Face is given by people; one cannot give himself face because it is pointless. However, face is also earned by oneself; people do not give face for free.

Some people may not agree with me, because in reality people do give free face to others and that is the most case in the society. Why is that? Let’s think why are we giving face to random people? There must be something that I approval to give face for, and that is the fact that we are both human. Because of the fact that we are both human, we approval each other, and we give “free” face.

Then you may ask “we are always human, that does not need to be approval right?” The answer is yes. We approval each other as human due to the education we get, the education gives us a cognize of human. And it is not always so, if we go back 2000 years ago, and ask a master if his slaves are the same human as him, the master will mostly say no. That is why he does not need give any face to his slaves; he could sell, buy, kill and order his slave however he wants. So, in modern world, some face is probably “free” for most human beings.

Now let’s get into the 3 other core ideas of politeness theory. They are “FTA (face threaten action)”, “politeness strategy” and “damage calculation”.

Politeness theory divided face into negative face and positive face, with threaten to either speakers’ or hearers’ face, we get 4 categories of FTA: Negative FTA to hearers, negative FTA to speakers, positive FTA to hearers and positive FTA to speakers.

Negative FTA to hearers means disapproval to hearers’ free action, such as order, suggest and warn.

Negative FTA to speakers means disapproval to speakers’ free action, such as make promise, accept advice.

Positive FTA to hearers means disapproval to hearers’ needs and feeling, such as disagree and argue.

Positive FTA to speakers means disapproval to speakers’ needs and feeling, such as apologize, regret.

Politeness strategy means the action and strategy we take to limit the FTA, goes from “bald on record” to “avoid”. And Damage calculation is just some formulas to calculate the amount of FAT.

One limitation is that the politeness theory does not work in different cultural background as well as in same cultural background. As I mention at the beginning of the introduction of face idea. Different society weight face differently, and politeness theory will be more or less inaccurate in the intercultural communication.

For example, Rachel Jeantel was being said “rude” and “uneducated” due to her behavior in the court. In politeness theory, people say those words to “revenge”, because they think Rachel Jeantel was threatening their face as hearers, so they threaten Rachel Jeantel face to “revenge”. However, did Rachel Jeantel really threatening their face? Maybe in her background or condition, it is not a FTA at all.

Politeness theory does not involve the different social and cultural background.

I would also like to introduce you with the speech community theory and first-order politeness. A speech community refers to “a group of people who share a set of norms and expectations regarding the use of language” (Yule, G 2006, 'the study of language', third edition, Cambridge University press).

A very good example of speech community is the British English and American English. Although member of these 2 communities can speak and understand each other, but there are things are unique in the speech community, they can be difference in between grammars, pronunciation or spelling

The born of speech community origins from the separation of language. The American English speech community separated from British because of the ocean in-betweens. (John Rickfort, professor, Stanford University).

There is also a speech community called AASC which is the African-American speech community. Sometimes we are noticing that African American speak the kind of English different than the major English, with the difference in some grammars, rhythm and attitude. The most recent example of Africa American speech community member is Rachel Jeantel, who involves in a crime and had to speak on court. She was speaking classical African American English, plus the attitude of her, some people judge her as “uneducated”, “rude” for her language and performance on the court. And that is where the politeness theory connects with speech community theory.

As the politeness theory mentioned above, politeness/impoliteness involve the process of approval. The reason people get upset with Rachel Jeantel and critical her as impolite due to their approval of her language, and the idea that Rachel Jeantel is within the same speech community with them. However, the fact is, Rachel Jeantel, was speaking as she speak within the African American speech community, and the words and attitude she use was polite.

Reference

GU, Y. (1990). Politeness phenomena in modern Chinese, Journal of pragmatics, 14(2), 237-257

McNamara, D. (1976). On returning to the chalk face: theory not into practice. British Journal of Teacher Education, 2(2), 147-160.

Politeness theory, (2013, October 6), In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:58, December6, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Politeness_theory&oldid=575996161

Yagang Wang, University of Ningbo, “Critical on Brown and Levinson’s

(1987) theory” (2005)

Haugh, M. (2007), the discursive challenge to politeness research: An interactional alternative. Journal of Politeness Research, Language, Behavior, Culture, 3(2), 295-317.

O'Driscoll, Jim (2002) First-order and second-order politeness: The dispute over 'modeling' politeness. In: Sociolinguistics Symposium 14, 4th - 6th April 2002, Gent, Belgium. (Unpublished)

Gumperz, J. J. (2001). The speech community. Linguistic anthropology: A reader, 66-74.

Visual Rhetoric

Have you ever heard of politeness theory? When somebody is being impolite, do you ever consider “why is he/she not polite? Is it just my personal standard of politeness or it is a social standard?” In the process of communication, a theory called politeness theory study about politeness and impoliteness in communication.

Politeness theory is the theory that accounts for the redressing of the affronts to face posed by face-threatening acts to addressees. Politeness theory was first formulated in 1978 by Penelope Brown & Stephen Levinson. (Foley, William. 1997. Anthropological Linguistics: An introduction. Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-15122-7). The theory has been developed since 1978. We will discuss the politeness theory with the idea of face and 3 other core ideas.

When we talk about face here, we are not talking about the part of human body. However, the face refers to the special phenomenon of interpersonal relationship. "The concept of face is, of course, Chinese in origin" (Ho 1975:867), yet many languages have "face" terms that metaphorically mean "prestige; honor; reputation". The phenomenon of face is more obvious and normal in the society with a strong hierarchy, such as China, Japan. However in the society with relatively weak hierarchy such as US, the face still exists.

One’s face is an aggregate of his social power, authority and standard. Others can ignore, respect or give face to another by either verbal or nonverbal. For example, in the class, one student stand up and say,” this class is boring, let’s all go out and play!” And students leave while the teacher is still teaching. Let’s ignore the politeness of such behavior for now, and this will be an example of ignoring the face, or in another words, not giving face. The students who leaves were not giving face to the teacher by disrespect for his/her authority and not giving equally value to the teacher’s behavior.

Let’s image, if you are the only person in the world, does face still exist? The answer is no, we do not lose our face when there is no other people. Then we can conclude that the face is related to other people instead of oneself.

Everyone have the need to be approval by others, when others approval someone by approval his action, emotion, knowledge or social authority. Face is given by people; one cannot give himself face because it is pointless. However, face is also earned by oneself; people do not give face for free.

Some people may not agree with me, because in reality people do give free face to others and that is the most case in the society. Why is that? Let’s think why are we giving face to random people? There must be something that I approval to give face for, and that is the fact that we are both human. Because of the fact that we are both human, we approval each other, and we give “free” face.

Then you may ask “we are always human, that does not need to be approval right?” The answer is yes. We approval each other as human due to the education we get, the education gives us a cognize of human. And it is not always so, if we go back 2000 years ago, and ask a master if his slaves are the same human as him, the master will mostly say no. That is why he does not need give any face to his slaves; he could sell, buy, kill and order his slave however he wants. So, in modern world, some face is probably “free” for most human beings.

Now let’s get into the 3 other core ideas of politeness theory. They are “FTA (face threaten action)”, “politeness strategy” and “damage calculation”.

Politeness theory divided face into negative face and positive face, with threaten to either speakers’ or hearers’ face, we get 4 categories of FTA: Negative FTA to hearers, negative FTA to speakers, positive FTA to hearers and positive FTA to speakers.

Negative FTA to hearers means disapproval to hearers’ free action, such as order, suggest and warn.

Negative FTA to speakers means disapproval to speakers’ free action, such as make promise, accept advice.

Positive FTA to hearers means disapproval to hearers’ needs and feeling, such as disagree and argue.

Positive FTA to speakers means disapproval to speakers’ needs and feeling, such as apologize, regret.

Politeness strategy means the action and strategy we take to limit the FTA, goes from “bald on record” to “avoid”. And Damage calculation is just some formulas to calculate the amount of FAT.

One limitation is that the politeness theory does not work in different cultural background as well as in same cultural background. As I mention at the beginning of the introduction of face idea. Different society weight face differently, and politeness theory will be more or less inaccurate in the intercultural communication.

For example, Rachel Jeantel was being said “rude” and “uneducated” due to her behavior in the court. In politeness theory, people say those words to “revenge”, because they think Rachel Jeantel was threatening their face as hearers, so they threaten Rachel Jeantel face to “revenge”. However, did Rachel Jeantel really threatening their face? Maybe in her background or condition, it is not a FTA at all.

Politeness theory does not involve the different social and cultural background.

I would also like to introduce you with the speech community theory and first-order politeness. A speech community refers to “a group of people who share a set of norms and expectations regarding the use of language” (Yule, G 2006, 'the study of language', third edition, Cambridge University press).

A very good example of speech community is the British English and American English. Although member of these 2 communities can speak and understand each other, but there are things are unique in the speech community, they can be difference in between grammars, pronunciation or spelling

The born of speech community origins from the separation of language. The American English speech community separated from British because of the ocean in-betweens. (John Rickfort, professor, Stanford University).

There is also a speech community called AASC which is the African-American speech community. Sometimes we are noticing that African American speak the kind of English different than the major English, with the difference in some grammars, rhythm and attitude. The most recent example of Africa American speech community member is Rachel Jeantel, who involves in a crime and had to speak on court. She was speaking classical African American English, plus the attitude of her, some people judge her as “uneducated”, “rude” for her language and performance on the court. And that is where the politeness theory connects with speech community theory.

As the politeness theory mentioned above, politeness/impoliteness involve the process of approval. The reason people get upset with Rachel Jeantel and critical her as impolite due to their approval of her language, and the idea that Rachel Jeantel is within the same speech community with them. However, the fact is, Rachel Jeantel, was speaking as she speak within the African American speech community, and the words and attitude she use was polite.

Reference

GU, Y. (1990). Politeness phenomena in modern Chinese, Journal of pragmatics, 14(2), 237-257

McNamara, D. (1976). On returning to the chalk face: theory not into practice. British Journal of Teacher Education, 2(2), 147-160.

Politeness theory, (2013, October 6), In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:58, December6, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Politeness_theory&oldid=575996161

Yagang Wang, University of Ningbo, “Critical on Brown and Levinson’s

(1987) theory” (2005)

Haugh, M. (2007), the discursive challenge to politeness research: An interactional alternative. Journal of Politeness Research, Language, Behavior, Culture, 3(2), 295-317.

O'Driscoll, Jim (2002) First-order and second-order politeness: The dispute over 'modeling' politeness. In: Sociolinguistics Symposium 14, 4th - 6th April 2002, Gent, Belgium. (Unpublished)

Gumperz, J. J. (2001). The speech community. Linguistic anthropology: A reader, 66-74.