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.
