PRAGMATICS 3

PRAGMATICS 3

ANCA DINU March 2012

Politeness

• We will deal with linguistic instantiations of politeness and with the fundamental sets of strategies widely employed in verbal communication in order to maintain or, on the contrary, disrupt social harmony.

• Special emphasis will be laid on the connection between using specific politeness strategies and pursuing specific acts of preserving or damaging the interlocutor‘s image or one‘s own image.

Politeness as social norm

• As social norm, politeness embodies notions such as good manners or social etiquette.

• Each society espouses a particular set of social norms, consisting of more or less explicit rules that prescribe certain types of behaviour in certain contexts.

• Politeness arises when an act of behaviour complies with such accepted shared norms, while impoliteness arises when an act is incongruent with such norms (Fraser 1990).


• Politeness is in most cases anticipated by sociocultural norms:

• A child, for example, is not ordinarily entitled to authorize a parent to do something;

• Two close friends do not issue orders to each other; • An employee is not free to criticize an employer; • A felon does not christen a ship; • While a podiatrist is entitled to ask questions, there are

restrictions on the content: questions about your history and the reason for the visit are expected; questions about your intimate moments are not (Fraser 1990: 233).


• Politeness-related practices combine individual behavioural tendencies with socially imposed and internalised norms and parameters, the individual being under social pressure while to some extent free to exert personal choices:

• Thus, if a person whom we would normally categorise as very polite is impolite in a particular instance, this might have greater force than a less offensive statement by someone whom we would categorise as habitually impolite.


• Politeness presupposes that there is a potential for aggression, as it seeks to disarm it.

• Politeness makes possible communication between potentially aggressive parties.

Linguistic politeness and communicative strategies

• Robin Lakoff (1989) proposes three categories of speech acts according to the politeness theory:

– polite,

– non-polite

– and rude


• Polite speech acts are defined as utterances that follow the rules of politeness, irrespective of the expectation factor.

• The difference between non-polite and rude speech acts is that only the latter display clear violation of politeness norms.

• Non-polite behaviour occurs when politeness is not expected, whereas rude behavior appears in contexts where politeness is expected or required.


• Haverkate divides speech acts fall into three categories:

– polite,

– impolite

– and non-impolite.


• Polite acts such as confessing or apologizing may endanger the speaker‘s image.

• Insulting or threatening are considered impolite acts since they intend to harm the hearer.

• The third category is considered neutral in point of pernicious intentions. Non-impolite speech acts are frequent cases of directives and assertives. For instance, when a superior asks an employee to bring him a file he may use a polite tone of voice or use indirect formulation, most of which may embed as softening devices, so that an order becomes more similar to a request.

Brown&Levinson’s face-saving view

• The most influential approach to politeness is the face-saving view, elaborated by Brown and Levinson (1978/1987), revolving around three basic notions: – the view of communication as rational activity, Speakers are endowed

with rationality, a precisely definable mode of reasoning.

– Grice‘s (1975) Cooperative Principle and maxims of conversation. According to the Cooperative Principle people operate on the assumption that ordinary conversation is characterized by no deviation from rational efficiency without a reason.

– Goffman‘s (1967) notion of face: ―Face is an image of the self delineated in terms of approved social attributes. Brown and Levinson borrow the notion of face from Goffman and redefine it as the public self-image that every member [of society] wants to claim for himself.


• As already pointed out in the discussion of indirectness, face is a crucial concept in pragmatics, since it captures all aspects of a person‘s public image, being likely to unveil self-esteem and the way an individual strives to maintain self-esteem in the public sphere.

• Every individual‘s feeling of self-worth or self-image can be damaged, maintained or enhanced through interaction with others.


• One should normally try to avoid face-damaging situations, more precisely situations when a person‘s face risks revealing undesirable, socially unacceptable aspects, thus making the person in question feel embarrassed or uncomfortable.

• All individuals are said to constantly invest in face preservation, and all actions taken to preserve one‘s face are generically called ‘facework‘.

• ‘Facework‘ comprises the multiplicity of the actions undertaken by a person in order to either preserve or save their face.

Positive/negative politeness

• Positive politeness anoints the face of the addressee by indicating that in some respects, S[peaker] wants H[earer]’s wants.

• On the contrary, negative politeness is essentially avoidance-based and consist(s)...in assurances that the speaker...will not interfere with the addressee’s freedom of action.

• Positive politeness is thus concerned with demonstrating closeness and affiliation whereas negative politeness is concerned with distance and formality (Mills 2003: 89).

Face threats

• Assessment of the amount of face threat involves three sociological variables: – the social distance between the speaker and the hearer,

– the relative power of the hearer over the speaker, and

– the absolute ranking of imposition in the particular culture

– affect

– mood

• “Distance is a symmetric social dimension of similarity/difference between the speaker and the hearer”

Politeness strategies in Brown&Levinson

• Brown and Levinson claim that any rational Speaker/Hearer will select an appropriate strategy to counterbalance the expected face threat. Consequently, the lesser the imposition, the less powerful and distant the interlocutor, the less polite one will need to be.

Politeness strategies in Brown&Levinson

• They propose five superstrategies (or general orientations to face) that are systematically related to the degree of face threat:

Strategy 1

• 1. Bald on record: The FTA is performed “in the most direct, clear, unambiguous and concise way possible”, in other words in compliance with Grice’s maxims.

• When using a bald-on-record strategy, Speakers provide no effort to reduce the impact of the FTAs, and are likely to shock the addressee, embarrass them, or make them feel uncomfortable.

• However, this type of strategy is commonly found with people who know each other very well, and are at ease in their environment, such as close friends and family.

Strategy 1, examples

• Emergencies: (1) ‘Help!!’

• Task-oriented commands: (2) ‘Give me that!’

• Requests: (3) ‘ Put your coat away’.

• Alerting: (4) ‘Turn your headlights on!’ (When alerting someone to something they should be doing)

Strategy 2

• 2. Positive politeness is designed to redress the Hearer’s positive face.

• It is frequently employed in groups of friends, or where people in the given social situation know each other fairly well.

• They usually attempt to minimize the distance between interlocutors by expressing friendliness and solid interest in the hearer’s need to be respected, in other words to minimize the FTA. Therefore, positive politeness strategies function as a kind of ‘social accelerator’.


• Attend to the hearer: ‘You must be hungry, it's a long time since breakfast. How about some lunch?’

• Avoid disagreement: A: ‘What is she, small?’ B: ‘Yes, yes, she's small, smallish, um, not really small but certainly not very big.’

• Assume agreement: ‘So when are you coming to see us?’

• Hedge opinion: ‘You really should sort of try harder.’

Strategy 3

• 3. Negative politeness strategies involve the use of strategies designed to redress the Hearer’s negative face. The Speaker indicates respect for the Hearer’s face wants and the wish not to interfere with the Hearer’s freedom of action, thus redressing or compensating for potential interfering or transgressing the Hearer’s personal space.

• The main focus for using this strategy is to assume that there may be some imposition on the hearer, or some intrusion into their space, hence the assumption of either social distance or awkwardness in the situation, unlike positive politeness strategies, which tend to speed up solidarity and accelerate bonding.

Strategy 3

• When we think of politeness in Western cultures, it is negative-politeness behaviour that springs to mind. In our culture, negative politeness is the most elaborate and the most conventionalised set of linguistic strategies for FTA redress;

• It is the stuff that fills the etiquette books - but not exclusively - positive politeness gets some attention. Its linguistic realisations (conventional indirectness, hedges on illocutionary force, polite pessimism, the emphasis on H’s relative power) are very familiar to a westerner.


• Be indirect: ‘I’m looking for a comb’

• Forgiveness: ‘You must forgive me but....’

• Minimize imposition: ‘I just want to ask you if I could use your computer?’

• Using the Passive Voice: ‘I’m afraid your book had to be returned a week ago’. • Pluralise the person responsible: ‘We forgot to tell you that you needed to buy your

plane ticket by yesterday.’

Strategy 4

• 4. Off-record strategies presuppose that “there is more than one unambiguously attributable intention so that the actor cannot be held to have committed himself to one particular intent”

• In this case, the utterance bears an implicature that evades clarity and thus can be immediately dismissed because, theoretically, the speaker doesn’t commit him/herself to a specific intent.


• Give hints:

‘It’s cold in here.’

• Be vague:

‘Perhaps someone should have been more responsible.’

• Be sarcastic or jocular: ‘Yeah, he’s a real rocket scientist!’

Strategy 5

• 5. Withholding the FTA is the strategy that can be most easily implemented because all the speaker has to do is resist or renounce their wish to make an utterance that risks being face-threatening, since,“… an option every communicator has is not to talk” .

• This stratagem can be best applied when considering all other options inefficient.

Positive Politeness Output Strategies

• Notice, attend to the Hearer: ‘You’ve had your hair cut’. • Exaggerate (interest, approval, sympathy for the

Hearer): ‘That was so awful, my heart bled for you’ • Use in-group identity markers: ‘Joey, pal, come over here’ • Seek agreement (select a safe topic on which

agreement is expected) ‘Nice weather today”

Positive Politeness Output Strategies

• Avoid disagreement (white lies, hedging opinions): ‘Yes, it’s kind of nice’. • Joke (meant to put the Hearer ‘at ease’): ‘So you’re free to do me a favour tomorrow’. • Assert knowledge of the Hearer’s wants ‘I know you’re looking for a good dentist, here’s his

address’. • Offer, promise: ‘Come over for a cup of coffee’. • Include both Speaker and Hearer in the activity: ‘Let’s have a drink’

Negative Politeness Output Strategies

• Be conventionally indirect: ‘Do you mind opening the window?’ • Use questions, hedges: ‘I was wondering, could you help?’ • Be pessimistic (use conditional or subjunctive,

negation and remote possibility markers): ‘I don’t suppose there would be any remote

chance for a nice quiet date?’ • Minimize the imposition: ‘Could I borrow your pen for only one second?’

Negative Politeness Output Strategies

• Apologize:

‘I don’t want to trouble you, but...’

• Impersonalize Speaker and Hearer:

‘It would be great if this job were done’.

• Go on-record as incurring a debt:

‘I’d be forever grateful if you helped me with my exam’

Importance of context

• No sentence is inherently polite or impolite. We often take certain expressions to be impolite, but it is not the expressions themselves but the conditions under which they are used that determines the judgement of politeness.

Importance of context

• The notion of inherent impoliteness irrespective of context only holds good for a minority of acts, specifically those when the Hearer is engaged in some anti-social activity (picking nose or ears, belching, farting, even smoking).

No change of context can remove the impoliteness from an utterance such as

‘Do you think you could possibly not pick your nose?’

Critiques to Brown and Levinson

• Culpeper has criticised their model for not making room for the investigation of inference, the level at which a great deal of linguistic politeness and impoliteness occurs.

• Thus, a statement such as ‘Do you think it would be possible for you to contact Keith

Williams today?’ would be interpreted as polite if used by a boss to her/his

secretary, since mitigating features are included in this possibly threatening direct request;

however, this might be interpreted as impolite, if addressed by a boss to his/her secretary with whom he usually engages in an informal style of communication, and this is not the first time that the request has been made.

PRAGMATICS 3

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