Date: 17-Apr-2006
From: Susan Burt <smburtilstu.edu>
Subject: Broadening the Horizon of Linguistic Politeness
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-3253.html
EDITORS: Lakoff, Robin Tolmach; Ide, Sachiko TITLE: Broadening the Horizon of Linguistic Politeness SERIES: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 139 PUBLISHER: John Benjamins YEAR: 2005
Susan Meredith Burt, Department of English, Illinois State University
GENERAL DESCRIPTION
This volume has several goals, the most obvious being to make available some of the papers presented at an International Symposium on Linguistic Politeness held at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok in 1999. The purpose of the symposium itself was to expand the scope of politeness studies, which the editors feel had focused far too much on Western languages, particularly English; a second goal is to assess 30 years of work in the field of politeness. The book includes an introductory chapter by Lakoff and Ide, three plenary papers by Lakoff, Ide and Bruce Fraser, and fifteen further papers, grouped into four sections, ''the theoretical perspective,'' ''the descriptive perspective,'' ''the comparative perspective,'' and ''the historical perspective.''
SUMMARY
The introductory chapter, by the editors, cites forebears in the field of linguistic politeness, including Jane Austen, Freud, and Margaret Mead. The central notion of face is attributed to Erving Goffman; appropriately, politeness is seen as ''necessarily interdisciplinary'' (p.2), and the phrase ''linguistic politeness'' is neither tautologous nor contradictory. Still, the notion is complex, in that issues of both ''rules'' and ''standards'' are involved. One function of politeness is offered: if two agents adhere to politeness rules, they succeed in both signifying their shared group membership and in signaling that they are both good members of the group; doing this successfully is labeled 'wakimae'. The discussion of terms of the art continues with distinctions made between civility, politeness and courtesy, calling to mind Watts's (1992) distinction between politic verbal behavior and politeness, although the authors do not discuss the Watts terminology. The writers then broach the universality-contrastivist dispute, suggesting a sensible compromise that ''languages share many universal components, but also differ in surprising and unpredictable ways'' (p. 6). The same is true, they suggest, with politeness phenomena. Lakoff and Ide argue for an integral position of politeness in grammar, given that polite behavior is usually ''unmarked.'' Furthermore, ''the fact that speakers can tell intuitively whether an utterance is polite, rude or something in between suggests that the system is rule-governed'' (p.9), an interesting and strong claim, which Mills (2003) has since disputed. Still, the position of politeness as an integral part of pragmatics cannot be doubted. However, the viability of a universal system is again questioned, and the authors concede that they have not been able to find an approach that bridges the East-West divide for the two of them.
The goals of the three plenary papers reflect the individual authors' theoretical backgrounds and positions. Lakoff focuses her keenly intuitive observations on American English political-politeness practices; Ide stresses East-West differences and Fraser assesses the state of the art with a set of meta-theoretical questions.
Lakoff frames her plenary paper, ''Civility and its discontents: Or, getting in your face,'' with three research questions: 1) Why is politeness more salient at some times than others? 2) How do normal people understand politeness? And 3) What happens when politeness systems change or shift? American society, she argues, is undergoing a shift in its politeness system now, which makes this a good time to focus on these questions. Lakoff offers definitions of politeness as ''an offering of good intentions'' and civility as ''a withholding of bad ones'' (p.25) and suggests that complaints that society is becoming less civil arise from a worry that it is actually fragmenting. She cites a shift during the Renaissance from a camaraderie-based to deference-based politeness system, and suggests that that earlier shift is now in the process of being reversed. As evidence for this, she discusses nine ''cases'' or symptoms of politeness worries: ''sexual coarseness in public contexts,'' ''violence in the media,'' ''agonism, the unwillingness to acknowledge middle ground in debate'' (p. 28), ''uncontrolled displays of hostility'' (p. 29), ''negative political advertising,'' ''cursing and other bad language'' (p. 30), ''flaming on the internet,'' ''the loss of polite conventions'' (p. 32), and ''invasions of privacy and the rise of conventional anti-formality'' (p. 34). These symptoms are consistent with a shift from deference to camaraderie politeness, with camaraderie still in a stage of inadequate conventionalization, which prevents its being recognized as a type of politeness. Lakoff ties these changes in with an erosion of the distinction between public and private realms (which she discusses at greater length in Lakoff 2005), the increasing diversity of the population or an increase in empowerment of previously subordinated groups, the rise of the internet, and media pressures.
Sachiko Ide's chapter is entitled ''How and why honorifics can signify dignity and elegance: The indexicality and reflexivity of linguistic rituals.'' Beginning with the observation that Thai as well as Japanese seems to have honorifics, Ide asserts that it ''make[s] sense to talk of East Asian languages'' (p. 45), seemingly on a level of some generality. Claiming that honorifics are indispensable to East Asians, Ide attributes the lack of understanding on the part of some Westerners to ''the Western way of looking at language...as something linear, which can be processed one piece after another in an alphabetic item-and-process approach'' (p.46). Furthermore, Westerners' reliance on an alphabet seems to predispose them to ''simple conceptualization'' (p. 47). Further claims follow about Eastern and Western differences in thinking (I must say that I found the number of stereotypes about both East and West somewhat surprising). Ide does mention linguistic differences, such as the Japanese pronoun system, which contains pronouns differentiated by styles (formal, normal and deprecatory--this last style apparently unavailable to female speakers) as well as by person. This kind of system, she claims, is, like honorifics, a challenge ''to the Western perspective.'' (Her paper pre-dates interesting work on pronoun variation internal to Japanese, discussed in Lunsing and Maree 2004 and Miyazaki 2004).
Pragmatic particles also play a role in expressing speaker identity in Japanese; Ide cites the nominalizing particle no, which also ''indexes the speaker's identity as a sweet female'' (p. 52). Ide claims further that in Japanese, agreement is pragmatic in that it shows ''one's sense of self and relation to others'' ('wakimae', p. 53), while agreement in English is grammatical. Neither claim seems to allow for individual or group dissent from a ''standard,'' whether in pronoun choice by a Japanese lesbian (Lunsing and Maree 2004), or in agreement leveling in some non-standard varieties of English. Ide further discusses items such as the sequencing of turns at talk, back-channeling and levels of formality as playing a role in Japanese, in claimed contrast to a Western focus on propositional content. Again, Ide seems to overlook Western linguistic scholarship that has discussed precisely such things, such as Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974), Gumperz (1982), Tannen (1984) and Myers-Scotton (1993), to name just a few.
Ide criticizes face-maintenance approaches to honorifics as inadequate to deal with ironic uses of honorifics, although she later finds the notion of ''negative wants and positive wants'' (p. 59) useful in explaining other uses. The elegance and dignity she attributes to honorific use comes from the high level of honorific use she says characterizes the speech of high-ranking women in Japanese corporations (although no actual examples are given). She ends with a reiteration of the claim that choice of forms appropriate to situation is universal, but its exploration has been neglected in Western languages.
Bruce Fraser focuses his plenary paper on a set of explicit theoretical questions, with the overall goal of summarizing the types of critiques that have been made of Brown and Levinson (1987). Fraser cites challenges to the claims of universality, points to the question whether politeness is communicated, implicated or simply anticipated, and to the role of impoliteness in this issue, and the status of politeness in pragmatics: summarizing the argument of Fukada (1998), Fraser concludes that ''a strong case can be made for maxim status'' (p. 68). Other issues include the distinguishing between deference and politeness, and the need to explain rudeness, a task which Brown and Levinson (1987) do not tackle. Questions about the status of Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies also are discussed--does ''bald- on-record'' properly count as a strategy? Can we distinguish between an FTA and the strategy employed to perform it? Turner (1996) has shown that one speech act can simultaneously impact both positive and negative face, making that distinction somewhat questionable. Furthermore, the ''strategies'' of Brown and Levinson have other social uses besides face-threat mitigation.
The very notion of face, of course, has come in for a great deal of critique, which Fraser briefly summarizes; the same is true of the Wx formula which is at the heart of Brown and Levinson's theory. Despite these criticisms, Fraser believes that a politeness theory is possible and worth working for. This article, in summarizing critiques of the Brown and Levinson theory up through the 1990s, is useful.
The second section of the book, on ''The theoretical perspective,'' begins with Makiko Takekuro's article, ''Yoroshiku onegaishimasu: Routine practice of the routine formula in Japanese.'' Takekuro cites two views of politeness, 1) as strategic action, or 2) as conformity to norms. Neither is adequate, she claims, to the analysis of the routine formula in Japanese, Yoroshiku onegaishimasu, which is used in a great variety of social situations, including on New Year's greeting cards. The formula conveys both ''deference and an imposition on the addressee's freedom of action'' (p. 88) two items that are mutually exclusive in the Brown and Levinson framework. In Japanese, however, the formula, which is practiced reciprocally, serves to ''affirm social bonds'' (p. 90). Ultimately, it is seen as ''routinized practice,'' rather than either a strategy or social norm.
Marina Terkourafi's article provides ''An argument for the frame-based approach to politeness: Evidence from the use of the imperative in Cypriot Greek.'' Here, the basic claim is that the social variables that are relevant to the choice of imperative form in Greek (use of the tu or vous equivalent) should not be subsumed under Brown and Levinson's mega-variables P (power) and D (distance). Terkourafi argues that politeness is expected in most interactions, and thus, should be seen as unmarked. Thus, rather than a strategic approach to politeness, she proposes that ''interlocutors' stable attributes enter politeness assessments in a more direct way'' (p. 106). Politeness emerges as a reflex of shared and social rationality, and is seen as a suitable response to a frame, which is defined as ''a data-structure for representing a stereotyped situation'' (p. 110). Politeness is unmarked because speakers share frames and derive similar inferences from them.
The last article in the Theoretical section is Margaret Ukosakul's description of ''The significance of 'face' and politeness in social interaction as revealed through Thai 'face' idioms.'' Ukosakul collected 180 'face' idioms in Thai and analyzed the metaphors therein. Thai idioms that include the word for 'face' are numerous, and reflect the Thai estimation of the head as the ''sacred'' part of the body (while the feet are ''debased,'' p. 118). The word for face seems to include notions such as personality, emotions and honor, as well as ''dignity, self-esteem, prestige, reputation and pride'' (p. 119). Thai values include appropriateness and harmony, which lead to a concern to preserve other people's face as well as one's own. Linguistic strategies that develop from this include a strong preference for indirectness, including hinting, beating around the bush, and teasing; there is an avoidance of confrontation, although anger which cannot be suppressed can result in 'face'-related insults (''dog face,'' ''sole of feet face,'' '' furry face,'' p. 122). But this and other norm transgressions can lead to ''broken face,'' ''red face,'' or ''numb face,'' (p. 124), in other words, shame, after which one must ''buy the face back'' (p. 124) and regain one's honor.
The first of four articles in the section on ''The descriptive perspective'' is Christopher Conlan's article, ''Face threatening acts, primary face threatening acts, and the management of discourse: Australian English and speakers of Asian Englishes.'' Conlan's thesis is that the contextual placement of a face-threatening act is itself a matter of communicative competence. In a request scenario between two native speakers of Australian English whose relationship (in terms of power and distance) is well-established, there must be an optimal number of speech acts leading up to the request for the exchange to remain functional; either too few or too many of these preliminary acts will annoy the requestee. Conlan then shows two sequences in which a native speaker converses with a non-native speaker in which the paucity of preliminary acts seems to render the sequence impolite to native speakers of Australian English.
Krisadawan Hongladarom and Soraj Hongaldarom describe ''Politeness in Thai computer-mediated communication. They show that in a Thai virtual community, both the explicit ''netiquette'' rules and the actual practices of participants reflect Thai cultural values: posts critical of the King are prohibited, but even if posters venture onto questionable territory, other posters will be more likely to respond with sympathy, joking, and general camaraderie rather than with flaming. Politeness, it is concluded, has both universal and local manifestations.
Martha Mendoza's chapter, ''Polite diminutives in Spanish: A matter of size?'' argues that diminutive use is indeed not just a matter of size. Spanish diminutive suffixes have undergone grammaticalization, defined as the loss of some semantic content coupled with the gain of new contexts of use. Diminutives function as means of intensification, approximation and pejoration in appropriate contexts, but Mendoza shows that more ''social'' functions have also been added, such as hedging and a softening of the illocutionary force. This seems in accord with Lakoff's politeness maxim, ''Don't impose.'' Thus Spanish diminutives seem to function as polite minimizers, as they do in some other languages. In accord with theories of grammaticalization, morphemes can acquire these functions while still retaining earlier meanings.
Deeyu Srinarawat describes the functions of indirectness in the chapter, ''Indirectness as a polite strategy of Thai speakers.'' Two kinds of data were used in this study: 1) dialogue passages taken from five contemporary Thai novels, and 2) responses to a multiple choice discourse completion questionnaire administered to 475 respondents. The passages from the novels classified as indirect seem to be used first and foremost for purposes of irony. In the questionnaire responses, a preference for indirectness was shown by women more than by men, and increased with increasing education. But when the prompt emphasized politeness, the choice for indirectness increased to 76% of responses. The author concludes that passages from novels are less revealing of speaker preferences than other sources, such as drama scripts, might be.
The ''comparative perspective'' section opens with Megumi Yoshida and Chikako Sakurai's chapter ''Japanese honorifics as a marker of sociocultural identity: A view from non-Western perspective.'' This article discusses switches from the ''plain form'' to the ''polite form'' in Japanese, also known as addressee honorifics. By gathering tape recordings of 10 families, 32 such switches were collected. Earlier interpretations of these forms, as showing deference, formality or out- group membership of the addressee, do not seem to apply to these cases. The authors instead claim that the switch to polite form marks a role identity for the speakers, although to this reader, interpeting these switches as ironic seems more plausible.
Alexandra Kallia, in ''Directness as a source of misunderstanding: The case of requests and suggestions,'' attempts to determine whether the forms used to realize requests and suggestions overlap, and therefore lead to misunderstanding, in English, German and Greek. Data were collected from native speakers of all three languages, who were all students of one of the other two languages. One questionnaire involved a discourse completion task, and the other asked respondents to evaluate possible utterances in a situation from the point of view of one of the participants. The results are complex, but some of the more salient results are the following: English native speakers avoid direct forms in German and come across as overly polite, while German native speakers use conventional indirectness in English. Misunderstandings can arise with some direct forms and their differential interpretations: ''Negative questions ...were almost always perceived as impolite by German and English speakers but not by Greek speakers'' (p. 228). Imperatives also are evaluated differently: English speakers find them impolite, German speakers give them mixed reviews, and they seem neutral to Greek speakers.
Anders Ahlqvist focuses on ''Forms of address in Irish and Swedish.'' These two languages are of interest because both are exceptions to the pattern in many European languages in which a second person plural pronoun serves as the ''polite'' form of address to a singular addressee, such as 'vous' in French. In Ireland, this pattern was never adopted, whereas in Sweden, it was. Still, in Sweden, the vous- equivalent was marginalized by the widespread use of titles for addressee-reference used with third person predicates; this pattern was then done away with in the language reform of the 1960's, and the universal use of Du to a singular addressee prevailed in most of Sweden.
Ekaterini Kouletaki analyzes the results of a discourse completion questionnaire in ''Women, Men and polite requests: English and Greek.'' Following Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989), Kouletaki shows that the strategies used by men and women, Greek and English, are as much influenced by the situation as other factors, which mitigates the characterization of whole cultures as inclining towards one type of politeness or other.
Mark Le's discussion of ''Privacy: an intercultural perspective'' claims that ''privacy is culturally determined'' (p. 277); Le presents a cline of discourse types, from very private ''pillow talk,'' to very public ''conference presentation, as well as instances of (presumably recalled) discourse between Australians and Vietnamese which demonstrate that participants were operating with two very different notions of what kinds of topics were off-limits.
The final chapter in the comparative section is ''Selection of linguistic forms for requests and offers: Comparison between English and Chinese'' by Masako Tsuzuki, Kazuhiro Takahashi, Cynthia Patschke and Qin Zhang. The researchers constructed a Discourse Completion Task which contrasted two kinds of requests, those that burden the addressee, and those that benefit the addressee. These were constructed with socially close versus distant, and status equal versus higher status addressees (request type x social distance x status). In all cases, the question was whether the imperative or interrogative form was judged more acceptable; respondents rated each form on a Likert scale. Respondents were American teachers of English and Chinese teachers in Japan. The results are clearly and carefully presented: for the burden-requests, the interrogative is judged more appropriate than the imperative for both languages, although Chinese speakers rated all cases of the imperative as less impolite than the English speakers did. For the benefit-request, the imperative is more appropriate only if the addressee is both socially close and a status- equal. Otherwise, the interrogative remains more appropriate. However, in Chinese, the imperative is more appropriate than it is in English in a ''close and equal relationship'' (p. 295), and is conventionalized as such; for this reason, the authors conclude that Chinese society can be said to be more positive politeness oriented than American society.
Two chapters comprise the final section, ''The Historical Perspective.'' The first of these, Andrew Barke and Satoshi Uehara's ''Japanese pronouns of address: Their behavior and maintenance over time,'' provides a fascinating coverage of the historical changes in Japanese second-person pronouns since the Nara period (710-794 C.E.). The resulting picture contrasts with that provided by Brown and Gilman (1968) for second-person pronouns in Western European languages. Current-day Japanese has more second-person pronouns than German, Italian, etc., and an extensive search of a Japanese historical dictionary revealed 140 second-person forms since 710; collapsing of phonological variants reduced this number to 72. The question that arises is what accounts for this large number of forms and for the frequency of innovation and replacement? The authors argue that Japanese, first of all, has more ''levels of politeness'' than European languages, as well as second person pronouns that are distinctly derogatory. Furthermore, ''personal pronouns in Japanese are susceptible to shifts in their politeness levels, and when such a shift occurs, it is always downwards'' (p. 306). Thus, the life cycle of second person pronouns in Japanese consists of a euphemistic innovation (as reference to the addressee is more or less taboo), followed by semantic pejoration, and an eventual retiring of the form. Thus, new address terms are needed frequently. Interestingly, while both men and women have created innovative second-person forms over the history of Japanese, those created by women come to be used by men, although the reverse is not the case.
The final chapter of the volume is ''An aspect of the origins and development of linguistic politeness in Thai'' by Wilaiwan Khanittanan. Khanittanan consults compendia of inscriptions from the Sukhothai period (1238-1420) and identifies this period as the source of the use of kinship terms as polite address terms, as well as of the stratification of various personal pronouns, and special (honorific) lexical items for use by or with reference to kings or monks. During the succeeding Ayutthaya period (1351-1767), kings were further elevated by the use of the ''raja-sap'' or royal vocabulary. During this period the elite were literate in both Thai and Khmer, and in consequence a ''diglossic register differentiation'' (p. 324) developed, as did honorification prefixes and usages that elevated the king and effaced the speaker. While politeness was due from those lower on the hierarchy, it was not reciprocated by those above. In the modern era, raja-sap is taught in the schools, and the categories of people to whom it should be used has expanded. Sentence-final particles have developed that mark politeness in ordinary speech, and words of Indic and Khmer origin are still considered more refined than words developed of native Thai elements.
EVALUATION
As a collection of papers, this volume achieves its stated goal of broadening the focus of politeness studies; not only are some European languages included which have not been frequently studied in terms of politeness (such as Irish), but also, the volume boasts several articles on politeness phenomena in Thai, a language which has not been as central to the politeness conversation as have Japanese and Chinese, for example. Further broadening still remains to be done, both within and beyond East Asia, obviously, but this attempt is a good start. The secondary goal of assessing three decades of work in politeness studies is a more difficult one, and only a few of the papers can be seen as contributing towards this goal; however, there is a certain amount of theoretical diversity here (which can be an advantage or a disadvantage in a volume like this); while notions from Brown and Levinson (1987) are both used and critiqued, this use and critique does not unduly constrain either the topics or the approaches of the papers. The papers in the historical section, for example, serve as refreshing reminders that a number of approaches to linguistic politeness phenomena can be fruitful. The quality of papers in the volume is not quite uniform, in that a few papers are somewhat data-thin. Others, however, are well-constructed, original in approach, well-argued and well-supported, making the overall value of this volume high.
REFERENCES
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper (eds.) (1989). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: CUP.
Brown, Roger and Albert Gilman (1968). The pronouns of power and solidarity. In Joshua Fishman (ed.), Readings in the Sociology of Language. The Hague: Mouton.
Fukada, Atsushi. (1998). A Gricean theory of politeness. Presented at the Twelfth International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning, Urbana, IL.
Gumperz, John. (1982). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: CUP. Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. (2005). The politics of Nice. Journal of Politeness Research 1,2: 173-191.
Lunsing, Wim and Claire Maree. (2004). Shifting Speakers: Negotiating Reference in Relation to Sexuality and Gender. In Shigeko Okamoto and Janet S. Shibamoto Smith (eds.), Japanese Language, Gender and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People. Pp. 92-109. Oxford: OUP.
Mills, Sara. (2003). Gender and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miyazaki, Ayumi. (2004). Japanese Junior High School Girls' and Boys' First-Person Pronoun Use and Their Social World. In Shigeko Okamoto and Janet S. Shibamoto Smith (eds.), Japanese Language, Gender and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People. Pp. 256-274. Oxford: OUP.
Myers-Scotton, Carol. (1993). Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Sacks, Harvey, E. Schegloff and G. Jefferson. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50: 696-735.
Tannen, Deborah. (1984). Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Turner, K. (1996). The principle principals of pragmatic inference: Politeness. Language Teaching, 29:1-13.
Watts, Richard J. (1992). Linguistic politeness and politic verbal behavior: Reconsidering claims for universality. In Watts, Richard J., Sachiko Ide and Konrad Ehlich (Eds.): Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory and Practice. Pp. 43-69. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Susan Meredith Burt is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois. She has published on politeness in the choice of deictic verbs in Japanese, and in code choice in German-English intercultural conversations. She is currently researching changes in politeness practices in the language of the immigrant Hmong community in Wisconsin. Her most recent publication is "How to Get Rid of Unwanted Suitors" in volume 1, number 2 of the Journal of Politeness Research.
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