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.

Taking a position on race

Race is a very difficult topic to handle. It is very emotional and such a ‘taboo’ topic. You might get scolded by society for talking about certain racial aspects.

I feel that race should not be so frowned upon to talk about. I think it should be handled very carefully. But the fact is, even as far as a decade or two ago, people could throw around the “N” word on TV sitcoms and nothing was thought of it. But if it were used now, there would be lawsuits and all sorts of media coverage.

What is happening?

Why are we so touchy about something that should be getting better over time, in which may have gotten worse?

I grew up in a very anti-racial setting. My parents always said that African Americans were no different than Caucasians. Living in Flint, Michigan, the only racial issue I saw was that it seemed like more African Americans lived in the poorer city of my town than caucasians. I always felt like African Americans were poorer than whites growing up. But does this make me racist? Is this a racist thought? This is why I find it very difficult to take a position with race.

I feel that many people claim that they are anti-racial, or even racist. But I feel that everyone is blind to the truth. Someone who claims that they are anti-racial may live with racial lifestyles without even realizing it. For example, my own mother claims that she is not racist. She works at a burger joint where the employees are dominantly African American. At times, she will come home from work and tell me about the “niggers” at work. She’s told me that there’s a difference between being an African American and a nigger, and that that niggers are the trashier ones. But she also will call out on white people and say there’s a difference between being white and being white trash. But she claims she is not racist.

I’ve spent many years believing the same beliefs that my mom does. I’ve also realized that many people also feel the same way.

After going through the education system at my high school, it taught me to be less closed minded and put myself in other people’s shoes. Some of these “white trash” people grew up in poor environments. It’s not fair to put them down for something they had no control over. No one chose their life, or the pigment of their skin. So why should they be punished, and bad mouthed?

What is Race

What is race? People nowadays seem to pay more attention to how different races are, instead of what the race really is. So let me share some of my thoughts about race.

Before we get to know the race, let’s find out why are there different races.

Human was born in Africa 200,000 years again. And they migrated to other continents in the following times. As the human migrated to different surrounding, some changes little by little happened that make human easier to adopt the surrounding and survived. And as the times pass, the characteristics of different race fixed and stay unchanged till today. By the developing of technology, there are more and more contact and connection between races. Well, just like old friends haven't seen each other for a long time, people asked, “why is this human so different from us, is he even the same spice with us?" And part this idea of thinking continue today.

I believe most of you find out how different races coming from by reading the above. Physically, the differences between races come from different way to adopt the surrounding. For example, African American has black skin because the strong UV light under African sky, relatively short nasal cavity due to the warm weather in Africa.

Let's get back to the problem, “what is race?"  Imagine a family member of yours who was separated from you at young age, living in different country. And after all the years, you two meet each other again, although he might be dressing differently, speak different language,  listening to different music; but he is still your family, whether you like it or not. And what is race? There was no race; there is race only because of speaking of races.

A lot of people cannot believe the human origin in Africa at first place, because Africa nowadays is not a really developed place. It is understandable. It is face problem. I believe most people prefer rich relatives rather than a poor one, a higher social-stand relatives rather than a low one. Chasing the good is humanity, without it we human cannot have so many brilliant achievements.

The idea of race was origin in the time that humans with different characteristics meet each other. They admit each other as the same spices, but create "race" to classify each other. By the process of some people (country, race) being more developed than others, the concept of race transform into a political idea, to justify the activity that maybe harmful to other races and benefit themselves. For example, in the triangular trade, Europeans captured and slave Africans, and transfer them to America with an extreme odious condition. The way they treated African was unacceptable. But when they define African as a different race, and when it comes to a different race, everything they have done to them was okay.

So when it comes to what race really is and come from, I will say it is fear, the fears come from unknown. Human classify themselves, to avoid the unknown and the fear. People lie to themselves, believe in the stereotype, and think "when I know your race, I know part of you", however hardly realize that race does not help us understanding people, but in another side, help us misunderstanding people.

Maybe every single one of us has a different idea of race, but just do not repeat word for word what other say.