Lecture Five: Politeness

As many other concepts in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, the concept of politeness is not easy to define. There is a surprising amount of disagreement as to the criteria used to define it. Nevertheless, it has become an essential part of the knowledge required to analyze discourse. Watts (2003) notes that, when people are asked what they imagine polite behavior to be, their usual way out of the dilemma is to resort to giving examples of behavior which they, personally, would consider “polite”, such as “He always shows a lot of respect towards his superiors” or “She’s always very helpful and obliging.” Watts also remarks that “there are even people who classify polite behaviour negatively, characterizing it with such terms as ‘standoffish’, ‘haughty’, ‘insincere’, etc.” (2003:1). However,  politeness as a linguistic phenomenon has been researched by looking at it from wider perspectives than those attached to  the everyday use of the term. 
Notwithstanding, there is not a uniform criterion to define and identify politeness phenomena. Georgia Green explains that when we talk about politeness within pragmatic studies we refer to strategies for maintaining or changing interpersonal relations (1989: 141). The goals of the speakers when using these strategies may be ends in themselves (purely social conversation or “small talk”) or they may be a link in a chain of goals whose ultimate end is to influence someone’s behavior or attitude. Bruce Fraser (1990) analyzes the different points of view through which the phenomenon of politeness has been researched and studied in Linguistics, and he findsfour main perspectives, to which we now turn.
Therefore, while there is quiet visible evidence for (im)politeness within patterns of everyday language use, both sociolinguistics and pragmatics have held much promise to allocating a room for identifying speakers’ key strategies and perceptions in order to create social rapport and dodge interaction offences. Based on such reasons, Politeness was formulated in 1978 and revised in 1987 by Brown and Levinson. In addition, without questioning the need, linguistic politeness makes a crucial part of language users’ socialization. There has been a confusion about the nature of politeness so that people have discussed distinctive separate areas such as “Politeness as a surface level phenomenon” and “Politeness as an illocutionary phenomenon”. Holmes (2013) identifies that:
Politeness involves contributing to social harmony and avoiding social conflict. More specifically, linguistic politeness involves discourse strategies or linguistic devices, which are perceived or evaluated by others as having been used to maintain harmonious relations and avoid causing trouble. In many cases, being polite involves adapting sensitively to evolving social relationships (p, 285)
In support of this, Leech (2014) evokes the idea that politeness is about “to speak or behave in such a way as to (appear to) give benefit or value not to yourself but to the other person(s), especially the person(s) you are conversing with” (p, 3). On the same subject, Leech (1983, p.108) explicates how politeness interrelates with the degree of formality shared amongst speakers. Whereas formality draws a complex and peculiar address forms and style, informality entails a low and equal linguistic display. Thus, politeness would be differently marked as illustrated below:

The concept of “face” in pragmatics refers to someone’s self image. Your face therefore is your emotional and social sense of self worth that you expect someone else to recognize (Yule, 1996). If anyone says something to you that constitutes a threat to your self image, that is called face-threatening act. If someone tells you: 
1.	Leave the road! And another tells you:
2.	Could you please, move a little bit to your right
The first person speaks to you as if s/he has some authority or social power over you. If he doesn’t really have that power, s/he is indeed threatening your face. The other person who adopts an indirect speech act (in form of a question) removes the face-threatening act, thus making his request less threatening. The person that removes your tendency to feel threatened has performed a face-saving act. This face saving strategy constitutes politeness.
Models of Politeness Strategies
They insisted that for politeness to take place, someone has recognized the other person’s “self-esteem and the need to protect it. In most of our encounters with people, Brown and Levinson argue that our face is put at risk. Asking me to take a longer process of registration because my country is branded fraudulent, or telling you to wait indefinitely outside the lecturer’s office constitute face threatening to you. In some cases, those who threaten us attempt to reduce the effect of such impoliteness by using some redressive language designed to compensate the threat. So they say: “I do apologise for the inconveniences” or “sorry about that” or they make a joke of our complaints. This type of politeness strategy, i.e. use of redressive expressions is targeted at compensating for face-threatening behavior. When performing face-threatening act, Brown and Levinson propose three strategies, namely: 
(a) Do the act on record (without attempting to hide what we are doing) 
(b) Do the act off record (in such a way to pretend to hide it)
(c) Don’t do it at all 
In the “do the acts on record” strategy, you do it baldly- without redress with positive redress or with negative politeness redress. This could be with expressions such as “I’m sorry”, or make a joke or call the addressee’s pet name etc.
In his own model of politeness strategies, Lakoff (1973) argues that politeness principle like conversational principle operates with some maxims, which are assumed to be followed by interactants in their conversations with others. As with the cooperative principles any flouting of these maxims will definitely affect meaning provided it is perceived for what it is (Cook, 1989). Lakoff therefore formulates the maxims as follows:
 (a) Don’t impose
 (b) Give options
 (c) Make your receiver feel good
In English, we often use such expressions as “would you mind…” “could you possibly…” “May I ask if…” etc. which give the addressee the option of refusal and then we often apologize for imposing (“I’m sorry for interfering …”) and add praise to make our hearer feel good (e.g. “I’m indeed not as kind as you…”). However, we know that politeness principle often violates much of conversational maxims. In our effort to be polite we often ignore what we may call “truth” or be as brief as possible in order to achieve some face-saving goal. A friend of yours stands in front of you with a horrible look in his new cap and seeks your opinion. Although you may later tell him the truth, but at that instant, a polite: “beautiful, you look great” will help him take-in whatever bland comment you may need to make later. Then, you have flouted the maxim of quality.
The aforementioned strategies are summarized in the schematic representation below considering the example “how to get a pen from someone else” as figured bellow:

As mapped out above, interlocutors can opt for any of these strategies to exhibit a set of functions such as speech acts. Speakers hence can go “off record” through, as a matter of example, the use of hints. Or, they can select the “on record” strategy (the use of language) to then be “bald on record” ( directness is held) or to consider the “ face saving act” strategy. The latter underlines two sub-strategies whereby interlocutors can opt for “positive politeness” or “negative politeness”. While the former identifies the addressee as having positive face wants i.e., they estimate to be accepted or even liked by the addresser, the latter is used with people with negative face wants i.e., they do not tolerate imposition and they seek independence in their behaviours (Yule, 1996).

Self-Assessment
1.	Explain the difference between positive face and negative face. Give examples to support your answer.
2.	Do you agree that politeness is tied to culture? Support you answer with examples

References
1.	Grundy, P. (2000) Doing Pragmatics 2nd Ed. London: Arnold 
2.	Yule, G. (1996) The Study of Language 2nd Ed. Cambridge: CUP 
3.	Cook, G. (1989) Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press