politeness beyond brown &levinson dr jim o’driscoll a-level teachers’ symposium, june 2015
TRANSCRIPT
Politeness beyond Brown &Levinson
Dr Jim O’Driscoll
A-level teachers’ symposium, June 2015
Brown & Levinson: summary
• Everybody has 2 kinds of face: positive & negative
Brown & Levinson: summary
• Everybody has 2 kinds of face: positive & negative
• Many speech acts are intrinsically face-threatening (FTAs)
Brown & Levinson: summary
• Everybody has 2 kinds of face: positive & negative
• Many speech acts are intrinsically face-threatening (FTAs)
• People mostly wish to maintain face (both S and H)
Brown & Levinson: summary
• Everybody has 2 kinds of face: positive & negative
• Many speech acts are intrinsically face-threatening (FTAs)
• People mostly wish to maintain face (both S and H)
• So people perform speech acts so as to redress the FTA
Brown & Levinson: summary
• Everybody has 2 kinds of face: positive & negative
• Many speech acts are intrinsically face-threatening (FTAs)
• People mostly wish to maintain face (both S and H)
• So people perform speech acts so as to redress the FTA• The bigger the perceived threat, the more the redressive
action: None: bald-on-record
>>> small: positive politeness
>>> bigger: negative politeness
>>> even bigger: off-record
>>> terribly big: don’t do the act
Brown & Levinson: summary
• Everybody has 2 kinds of face: positive & negative
• Many speech acts are intrinsically face-threatening (FTAs)
• People mostly wish to maintain face (both S and H)
• So people perform speech acts so as to redress the FTA• The bigger the perceived threat, the more the redressive
action: None: bald-on-record
>>> small: positive politeness
>>> bigger: negative politeness
>>> even bigger: off-record
>>> terribly big: don’t do the act
• To compute the size of an FTAx: P(H,S) + D + Rx
Brown & Levinson’s achievement
• detailed model with many specific claims amenable to empirical testing a/o discursive refutation
• claim of universality
• dissemination of notion of face,
>>>> boosted the study of the interpersonal in interaction
Critical reactions to B&L: methodology
• Explanation with reference to internal states. But we can’t see or hear these (Arundale 2006:199)
• The hierarchy of strategies often does not work (O’Driscoll 1996, Byon 2004, Terkourafi 2004, Economidou-Kogetsidis 2005)
- negative politeness doesn’t always signal bigger FTA than positive
- off-record strategy sometimes attends to positive face
• The computation of weightiness does not work (Terkourafi 2004; Arundale 2006: 207–208; O’Driscoll 2007a)
Critical reactions to B&L: face
• limited to western cultures- Face-as-wants is western individualist (see O’Driscoll 2007b: 468 for
references)
- Negative face is western only (see O’Driscoll 2007b: 470 for references)
• too restrictive: omits the situational dependency in Goffman’s original concept (Bargiela-Chiappini 2003, O’Driscoll 2007b)
Critical reactions to B&L: affective
emphasis on face threat is too gloomy (‘paranoid’)>>> politeness just upholds social harmony (e.g. Matsumoto 1988; Ide 1989; Gu 1990; Nwoye 1992)
some acts are face-beneficial effects >>> - face-boosting acts (Bayraktarogˇlu 1991)
- face-enhancing acts (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1997, Sifianou 2002)
Critical reactions to B&L: affective
emphasis on face threat is too gloomy (‘paranoid’)>>> politeness just upholds social harmony (e.g. Matsumoto 1988; Ide 1989; Gu 1990; Nwoye 1992)
some acts are face-beneficial effects >>> - face-boosting acts (Bayraktarogˇlu 1991)
- face-enhancing acts (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1997, Sifianou 2002)
OR emphasis on mutual face-maintenance is too sunny>>> impoliteness (Culpeper 1996, subsequently Culpeper et al 2003, Bousfield 2007, 2008, Bousfield & Locher 2008, Culpeper 2011)
Critical reactions to B&L: affective
emphasis on face threat is too gloomy (‘paranoid’)>>> politeness just upholds social harmony (e.g. Matsumoto 1988; Ide 1989; Gu 1990; Nwoye 1992)
some acts are face-beneficial effects >>> - face-boosting acts (Bayraktarogˇlu 1991)
- face-enhancing acts (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1997, Sifianou 2002)
OR emphasis on mutual face-maintenance is too sunny>>> impoliteness (Culpeper 1996, subsequently Culpeper et al 2003, Bousfield 2007, 2008, Bousfield & Locher 2008, Culpeper 2011)
FINALLY it’s just not what people call ‘politeness’
Politeness research: the ‘first wave’
• Lakoff 1973 maxims
• Brown & Levinson 1978/1987 face-maintenance
• Leech 1983 maxims
All speaker-centred
(Im)politeness for real people
• what is (not) polite?
• what is (not) a valid, universally applicable concept?
It depends: are we talking about things which:
1) mean something to everyday interactants (what they judge polite or otherwise)?
OR
2) are scholarly, technical concepts (e.g. ‘politeness’ in B&L’s model)?
Politeness research: the ‘second wave’
distinguishes between: • first-order politeness (common-sense notion; how people talk
about politeness and evaluate behaviour)
- politic behaviour (everyday, unmarked, conventional)
- politeness (anything over and above)
- impoliteness / rudeness (anything under and below)
• ‘second-order’ politeness (technical notion; scholarly conceptualisation within a theory of interaction)
• Watts et al (1992) >>> Eelen (2001) >>> Watts (2003) .......(others) ........... . Kádár & Haugh (2013)
The second wave and beyond the discursive approach
Foci:
•mainly on politeness1
•longer stretches of interaction
•effects (rather than intentions)
so more H-centred (rather than S-centred)
also: multi-modality
OK, so Where does all this leave ...........
• face?
• universality?
.
Some issues with the concept of face
Face across cultures?
A second order concept (‘face2’)
→→→ culture-neutral
Some issues with the concept of face
When (& how much) is face relevant?
• It exists in interaction. Only? What about dislocated a/o asynchronous communication (e.g. phone, email)?
• How much it matters depends on aspects of situation
• It also varies cross-culturally, with respect both to types of occasion and also to particular speech acts
Some issues with the concept of face
What are faces made from?
suggested ingredients:• Personal wants• Personal reputation• Interpersonal history• Ascribed characteristics• Culture• Situation
in different amounts in different cases
Some issues with the concept of face
What are faces made of?Are positive & negative for real a/o useful?
1) No, not really (e.g. Bargiela-Chiappini 2003, Watts 2003)
2) Yes, but they’re not enough (e.g. Lim & Bowers 1991, O’Driscoll 2007b; 2011)
3) Not exactly. They have to be recast as abstract, second-order concepts (Arundale 2006; 2009, Terkourafi 2007) with very different manifestations in different cultures
(2) & (3) involve reconceptualising B&L’s positive face
Some issues with the concept of face
What are faces made of?
= How do we describe a person’s face? How many elements does it have?
Just two basic ones:positive negative (Brown & Levinson 1987)
connection separation (Arundale 2006, 2009)
approach withdrawal (Terkourafi 2007 ...)
Ideal social identity ideal individual autonomy (Mao 1994)
But that’s not all:positive negative (e.g. O’Driscoll 2007, 2011)
To whom – or what – does face pertain?
Perhaps not to individual interactants?
>>> group face (e.g. Nwoye 1992, De Kadt 1998)
>>> face-constituting theory (Arundale 2006, 2009; Haugh 2009)
References & bibliography
• Arundale, Robert B. 2006. Face as relational and interactional: A communication framework for research on face, facework, and politeness. Journal of Politeness Research 2 (2): 193–216.
• Arundale, Robert B. (2009) Face as emergent in interpersonal communication: an alternative to Goffman. In Bargiela Chiappini & Haugh, pp. 33–54.
• Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca (2003). Face and politeness: New (insights) for old (concepts). Journal of Pragmatics 35 (1011):14531469.
• Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca& Michael Haugh (eds) (2009) Face, Communication and Social Interaction. London: Equinox.
• Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca & Daniel Kádár (eds.), (2011). Politeness Across Cultures. Palgrave MacMillan
• Bayraktaroglu, Arın 1991. Politeness and interactional imbalance. In Florian Coulmas (ed.), New Perspectives on Linguistic Etiquette. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 92: 5–34.
• Bousfield, Derek, 2007. Impoliteness, preference organisation and conducivity. Multilingua 26.1: 1–33.
• Bousfield, Derek, 2008. Impoliteness in Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamin• Bousfield, Derek & Miriam Locher (eds.) 2008. Impoliteness in Language: Studies on its
Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
References (cont.)
• Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson 1987 [1978]. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Main body of which first published in Esther Goody (ed.), Questions and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)
• Byon, Andrew Sangpil 2004. Sociopragmatic analysis of Korean requests: pedagogical settings. Journal of Pragmatics 36.9: 1673–1704
• Culpeper, Jonathan 1996. Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 25: 349–367.
• Culpeper, Jonathan 2011. Impoliteness: using language to cause offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Culpeper, Jonathan, Derek Bousfield & Anne Wichmann 2003. Impoliteness revisited: with special reference to dynamic and prosodic aspects. Journal of Pragmatics 35 (10–11): 1545–1579
• Culpeper, Jonathan & Kádár, Daniel 2010. Historical (Im)politeness. Bern: Peter Lang.• De Kadt, Elizabeth 1998. The concept of face and its applicability to the Zulu language.
Journal of Pragmatics 29: 173–191.• Economidou-Kogetsidis, Maria 2005. ‘‘Yes, tell me please, what time is the midday
flight from Athens arriving?’’: Telephone service encounter and politeness. Intercultural Pragmatics 2.3: 253–273
• Eelen, Gino 2001. A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester: St Jerome.
References (cont.)
• Goffman, Erving 1967 [1955]. On Face-Work. In Erving Goffman (collection), Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, 5–45. Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Originally in Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes 18 (3): 213–231).
• Goffman, Erving 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. London: Allen lane
• Grice, H. Paul 1975 [1967]. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. Ill: Speech Acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press. (This being chapter 3 of unpublished MS of the William James Lectures 1967).
• Gu, Yueguo 1990. Politeness phenomena in modern Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics 14 (2):237–258.
• Haugh, Michael (2009), Face and Interaction. In In Bargiela Chiappini & Haugh, pp. 1-30.
• Haugh, Michael & Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini (eds.) 2010. Face in Interaction.
Journal of Pragmatics 42 (special issue)• Ide, Sachiko 1989. Formal forms and discernment: two neglected aspects of universals
of linguistic politeness. Multilingua 2.3: 223–248.• Kádár, Daniel & Michael Haugh (2013). Understanding Politeness. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.• Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine 1997. A multilevel approach in the study of talk in
interaction. Pragmatics 7 (1): 1–20.
References (cont.)• Lakoff, R. 1973. “The logic of politeness; or, minding your p’s and q’s.” In Papers from
the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society: Chicago Linguistics Society: 292 – 305.
• Leech, Geoffrey N., 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman • Lim, Tae-Seop and John Waite Bowers 1991. Facework: solidarity, approbation, and
tact. Human Communication Research 17.3: 415–450.• Locher, Miriam A. & Richard J. Watts 2005. Politeness theory and relational work.
Journal of Politeness Research 1.1: 9–33 • Mao, L.R. 1994. Beyond politeness theory: ‘face’ revisited and renewed. Journal of
Pragmatics 21: 451-486• Matsumoto, Yushiko 1988. Reexamination of the universality of face: Politeness
phenomena in Japanese. Journal of Pragmatics 12: 403–426.• Nwoye, Onuigbo G. 1992. Linguistic politeness and sociocultural variation of the notion
of face. Journal of Pragmatics 18 (4): 309–328.• O’Driscoll, Jim 1996. About face: a defence and elaboration of universal dualism.
Journal of Pragmatics 25: 1-32• O’Driscoll, Jim 2007a. What’s in an FTA? Reflections on a chance meeting with
Claudine. Journal of Politeness Research 3.2: 243–268.• O’Driscoll, Jim. 2007b. Brown & Levinson’s face: how it can – and can’t – help us to
understand interaction across cultures. Intercultural Pragmatics 4.4: 463-492.• O’Driscoll,,Jim 2011. Some issues with the concept of face: when, what, how and how
much? In Bargiela-Chiappini & Kadar , pp 17-41
References (cont.)
• Ruiz de Zarobe Leyre & Yolanda Ruiz de Zarobe 2012. Speech Acts and Politeness across Languages and Cultures.
• Sifianou, Maria (2002). Don’t do the FTA to be extremely polite? Unpublished paper given at the Colloquium ‘First-order and second-order politeness: The dispute over modeling politeness’, Sociolinguistics Symposium14,University of Gent,April 2002.
• Sifianou, Maria (2011). On the Concept of Face and Politeness. In Bargiela-Chiappini & Kadar , pp 44-58.
• Terkourafi, Marina 2004. Testing Brown & Levinson’s theory in a corpus of conversational data from Cypriot Greek. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 168:119–134.
• Terkourafi, Marina. 2007 ‘Toward a universal notion of face for a universal notion of co-operation.’ In: Istvan Kecskes and Laurence Horn (eds.), Explorations in pragmatics: Linguistic, cognitive and intercultural aspects. 307–338. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter..
• Watts, Richard J. 1992. Linguistic politeness and politic verbal behaviour: Reconsidering claims for universality. In Watts et al 43–69.
• Watts, Richard J. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Watts, Richard J, Sachiko Ide & Konrad Ehlich 1992. Introduction to Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory and Practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.