CHAPTER 5

Being polite as a variable

in speech

Key terms in this chapter:

■ politeness ■ inherently face-threatening acts
■ negative politeness strategies ■ speech acts
■ positive politeness strategies ■ envelope of variation
■ face wants ■ sociolinguistic competence
■ negative face ■ grammatical competence
■ positive face ■ pragmatic competence
■ social distance ■ contrastive analysis
■ power ■ individualistic
■ cost of imposition ■ collectivist
■ bald, on record ■ wakimae

INTRODUCTION

‘I’ll have an iced mocha’, my New York friend, Ellen, said. ‘An iced mocha’, repeated the server.
‘Do you want whipped cream on that?’ ‘You have to ask?’ said Ellen.
Politeness is a strange thing. Clearly the server at the Michigan restaurant where this
exchange took place found Ellen’s reply, ‘You have to ask?’ and her ironic tone of voice,
somewhat hard to interpret. There was a long pause while she looked at Ellen waiting for her
to say something more. When she said nothing and went back to studying the menu, the
server finally looked at me. I raised my eyebrows and smiled slightly, and the server wrote
the drink order on her notepad. Outside of New York, Ellen’s answer didn’t have the meaning
of an enthusiastic ‘yes’ that it was intended to have. In Michigan, it seems waiting staff don’t
expect the kind of ironic jokes from strangers that you might find in talk between close
friends.
Was it polite for her to say ‘You have to ask?’ like that? Your answer probably depends
on where you grew up and what norms of politeness you acquired there. In many places, a
reply like this would be considered terribly rude, and something like ‘Yes, please’ or ‘Yes, thank
you’ would be expected. But by the standards of where Ellen grew up, she was being polite.
By making a joke – moreover, a joke that suggests that the answer to her question is already
shared knowledge between the speaker and the hearer – she was working to construct the
business exchange in more friendly and intimate terms.
 82 BEING POLITE AS A VARIABLE OF SPEECH
exercise

Intuitive notions of politeness

List five things that you consider polite and five things you consider impolite. (Decide
beforehand if you will restrict yourself and focus only on talk or include other behaviours.)
Compare your lists with someone else’s. Do you both agree entirely on what is
polite/impolite?
What seems to be the main thing you were paying attention to when you drew up
your lists?

As we will see in the discussion of speech levels in the next chapter, some languages
even have different words for the same thing that have to be chosen depending on what the
politeness and respect relationship is between the speakers. In Japanese, the form of some
verbs, including the verb ‘to eat’ changes entirely, as you can see in the following example
(the root form for ‘eat’ is shown in bold in each sentence):

(1)
Tanaka: Sensei, keeki meshiagari-mas-u-ka?
Teacher cake eat(honorific)-polite-non.past-Q
‘Teacher, would you like some cake?’
Professor: Ee, tabe-mas-u. Tanaka-san wa?
Yes, eat-polite-non.past. Tanaka-san TOPIC
‘Yes, I’ll have some. Will you, Tanaka?’
Tanaka: Hai, itadaki-mas-u. Doomo.
Yes eat(humble)-polite-non.past. Thanks.
‘Yes, I’ll have some. Thank you.’
(Adapted from Tsujimura 1996)

Here the student, Tanaka, uses the honorific form for ‘eat’ in his question. It is called an
honorific form because it is used to show respect for the person who is (or will be) eating.
The professor replies with the unmarked form (i.e., it makes no claims one way or another
about the status of the person eating), and then Tanaka answers him using the form for ‘eat’
that indicates that Tanaka humbles himself with respect to his professor.
As you can see, regardless of which form of ‘eat’ they use, both Tanaka and his professor
add a polite suffix, -mas-, on the verb, and the professor uses the respectful suffix -san when
addressing Tanaka. Japanese requires speakers to make such decisions about what verb
form to use, and what kind of suffixes to attach to verbs and nouns in everyday speech.
Showing this kind of attention to each other and evaluating your relationship with your
Politeness interlocutors in a particular place or at a particular time is, in a very general sense, what it
The actions taken by means to be polite.
competent speakers In this chapter we will look at the phenomenon of politeness, focusing on one
in a community in framework for analysing different forms and levels of politeness. We will explore the
order to attend to
usefulness of distinguishing between the politeness that we use among friends and with
possible social
or interpersonal people we are less familiar with. This distinction will be useful because the kind of attention
disturbance. (See close friends pay to each other and the nature of our long-term relationships with each other
also Wakimae.) are very different from the kind of attention we have been taught to pay to people with whom
 BEING POLITE AS A VARIABLE OF SPEECH 83

exercise
Speech levels or respect in English vocabulary

English doesn’t have speech levels or special respectful vocabulary to the same extent
that Japanese and Sasak do (see discussion in Chapter 6). But we do have some areas
of the vocabulary where we use euphemisms or avoidance strategies according to
where we are or who we are talking to.
Make up a list of terms you know to say:

(i) someone has died;

(ii) someone has vomited;
(iii) someone is wealthy;
(iv) someone is attractive to you.

Now annotate each term according to where, when and who you would use it with.

we have more restricted relationships and with whom we are less well acquainted. This
chapter will show how different forms of politeness attend to different social needs, and we
will illustrate this by looking at examples of the different forms that requests and apologies
can take. We will then consider the way in which frameworks of politeness have been applied
to other fields, such as workplace interaction and intercultural communication. The chapter
also considers some critiques of the most commonly used theory of politeness, and highlights
some of the directions in which these critiques might help to advance work on politeness in
the future.

THEORIES OF POLITENESS

There are a number of different ways in which linguists can analyse politeness. The various
approaches differ primarily in the emphasis placed on the speaker, the addressee (or both),
and the emphasis given to accounting for behaviour that would be considered polite or
behaviour that would be considered impolite. Most of the frameworks proposed to account
for politeness that are accessible to readers of English or other European languages have
made the speaker central to the analysis rather than the addressee, and though they have
tried to take into account the relationship between speaker and hearer, this has been limited
by the focus on the speaker as a linguistic agent planning and evaluating their next move in
a conversation. More recently, work by Japanese, Chinese, African and Middle Eastern
scholars has begun to make more of an impact on the field of politeness studies. As a general
rule, most of these researchers have emphasised the empirical and theoretical importance
of seeing politeness and impoliteness as acts which involve consideration of the addressee’s
wants and desires as well as the speaker’s own, and acts that involve consideration of the
demands of the larger social group in which both the speaker and addressee have grown up
and been socialised.
It is impossible in an introductory text to do justice to the range of perspectives that
linguists and anthropologists have on politeness. Instead, I will introduce one major framework:
Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson’s Politeness Theory, and discuss this in more detail.
 84 BEING POLITE AS A VARIABLE OF SPEECH

Their framework is, without doubt, the most widely known and extensively used approach to
the study of politeness. Its position in the field is so dominant that researchers who want
to propose alternative treatments of politeness are obliged to state how and why they consider
their framework to be preferable to Brown and Levinson’s. So it is impossible to talk about
politeness or to read most of the research that has been undertaken on politeness since the
Negative 1970s without understanding the basic tenets of Brown and Levinson’s theory.
politeness
strategies
An action, phrase Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory
or utterance that
indicates attention
is being paid to the Under Brown and Levinson’s framework for analysing politeness, it is important to realise that
negative face both a deferential response and a joking response (as with Ellen’s reply asking for whipped
wants of an cream on her coffee) can be analysed as forms of politeness. Most people associate
interlocutor. Often ‘politeness’ just with ways of speaking that avoid causing offence by showing deference to
achieved through
another person. But Brown and Levinson point out that in any speech community, in some
shows of deference.
One type of action contexts, deference would be inappropriate. Instead, comments that orient to ingroup
available to mitigate membership may be what oil the wheels of an interaction and avoid causing offence. If Ellen
an inherently had replied ‘Well, if it’s not too much trouble, I would be terribly grateful’, such extreme
face-threatening act. deference would have also been peculiar, and perhaps even been interpreted as snobbish
(See also Positive
and uppity. In other words, under these circumstances, showing lots of deference would have
politeness
strategies.) seemed impolite and rude.
Brown and Levinson’s goal was to provide a framework for analysing politeness that
Positive could accommodate considerations like this, and that might also provide a basis for discussing
politeness similarities and differences between cultures in how politeness works.
strategies
An action, phrase
or utterance that
Positive and negative politeness; positive and negative face
indicates attention
is being paid to the
positive face wants of Brown and Levinson suggested that it was useful to distinguish two types of politeness.
an interlocutor. Often They called the strategies that avoid offence by showing deference negative politeness
achieved through strategies and the strategies that avoid offence by highlighting friendliness positive
shows of friendliness.
politeness strategies. They also suggest that whether we consider a strategy polite or
One type of action
available to mitigate
impolite depends on how much attention or what kind of attention a speaker pays to their
an inherently own and their addressee’s face wants.
face-threatening act. This technical use of the term ‘face’ is very similar to the way the word is used
(See also Negative metaphorically in many varieties of English. If, for example, someone comes to a meeting
politeness strategy.) unprepared and attention is drawn to their lack of preparation, you could say that person had
Face and face
‘lost face’. Similarly, if I do something embarassing in public, and you distract attention or say
wants something to minimise the seriousness of what I did, you could say that you had ‘saved my
face’. (I’m told this use of the term may be less common in North American English than it
Erving Goffman’s
notion of face, our is in other varieties.)
social persona, The notion of ‘face’ can be traced back to work by the sociologist Erving Goffman, who
adopted into used the term to discuss some of the constraints on social interaction. In Goffman’s work,
politeness theory. ‘face’ was a personal attribute or quality that each of us works to protect or enhance. However,
Face wants are the
crucially, face is something that we only possess if it is recognised or granted to us by others
desire to protect our
positive face and in our community. Brown and Levinson narrowed this down somewhat, and their definition
negative face from of ‘face’ emphasises less the interpersonal and communal nature of face wants. They propose
threat or damage. that we want to guard our face against possible damage when we interact with others. The
 BEING POLITE AS A VARIABLE OF SPEECH 85

reason that there are two types of politeness – positive and negative politeness – is because
we are concerned with maintaining two distinct kinds of face:

(2)
■ Negative face is the want of every competent adult member of a community that Negative face
their actions be unimpeded by others. The want of every
■ Positive face is the want of every member that their wants be desirable to at competent adult
least some others. member of a
(Brown and Levinson 1987: 62) community that their
actions be unimpeded
by others. ‘Don’t tread
Notice the qualification that face wants are something ‘competent adults’ in a community have. on me.’
In other words, we have to learn or acquire what we come to think of as our negative and
positive face wants.

No, really?

facts
What is and is not considered polite varies, of course, from place to place.
Politeness conventions emerge gradually and consensually. A competent mem-
ber of Arab society, for example, knows it is terribly rude to show the soles of your
feet to someone. But in some cases, a ruling is required on whether a word or
activity is impolite or not. Such a case occurred when one MP in the New Zealand
Parliament referred to another MP as a wanker. The epithet was licensed in the
end, on the grounds that the dictionary defined wanker as ‘a pretentious person’
(Burchfield 1986).

In societies where interactions between strangers are conventionally oriented more Positive face
to deferential (that is, paying more attention to negative face wants), it seems very rude to The want of every
ignore the distance there might be between you and your addressee and to talk as if you competent adult
know her or him better than you do (we will define this notion of social distance more fully member of a
community that their
in the section ‘Choosing politeness strategies’ on p. 87). A strong European stereotype of
wants be desirable to
Asian politeness is that social conventions require Asian speakers to pay more attention to at least some others.
the hearer’s negative face wants than, say, French society requires French speakers to. And ‘Love me, love my dog.’
in example (1) we saw some instances of the overt strategies required in Japanese to show
that the speaker is deferential to (or respectful of) their addressee. These include the use of Social distance
honorific address forms, humbling forms of the verb, and suffixes indicating politeness. These See Distance.
are all particularly noticeable to Western learners of the language and quite hard to master
well. However, even within Europe, some speech communities are stereotyped as being
more deference-oriented than others, e.g., the idea that Germans are more ‘stand-offish’ and
Italians are more ‘friendly’.
In Japan, students would usually address a university professor by his or her last name
and then they will add the honorific suffix -sensei (meaning ‘teacher’). By emphasising the
social distance between the student and the professor, it attends to both parties’ negative
face wants. The situation in Germany is analogous. There, students and more junior faculty
members almost invariably address university professors by their full professional titles. This
86 BEING POLITE AS A VARIABLE OF SPEECH

means that if you are addressing a full professor who has a Ph.D., and who has also been
awarded an honorary degree from another university, you are expected to use all those titles
when you greet them: Guten Tag, Frau Professor Doktor Doktor Nussbaum (‘Good afternoon
Ms Professor, Doctor, Doctor Nussbaum’).
Contrasting with this are societies where interactions between strangers are expected
to be more personable and friendly (that is, where they often attend more directly to positive
face wants), and it would be considered rude to talk in ways that emphasise or draw attention
to the social distance between the interlocutors. The stereotype about Australians is that they
are much more chummy and informal than other English speakers, i.e., more attentive to
addressing positive face wants.
This greater orientation to positive face wants means that use of first names is the norm,
even in professional contexts in much of the English-speaking world (though this seems to
still be true more in North American and Australasian universities than in UK universities).
This tendency interacts with other social factors, such as the addressee’s age and sex. For
example, younger university professors are more likely to be addressed by their first name
than their older colleagues are. Moreover, many women report an asymmetry between the
way that they are addressed (e.g., ‘First Name’ or ‘Mrs + Surname’) and their male peers (e.g.,
‘Title + Surname’). The fact that the politeness strategies speakers choose depends on their
evaluation of a number of social factors is an important point that we will return to shortly,
and later in the chapter we will also return to the broad social stereotypes that have provided
us with our examples here and find that they too are not so straightforward.
The specific linguistic and non-linguistic strategies that display attention to either the
speaker’s or the addressee’s face wants can therefore be referred to as ‘positive’ and ‘negative
politeness strategies’. Even a very brief exchange such as a greeting can illustrate some of
the different linguistic strategies used to express the two kinds of politeness. For example,
suppose you were passing by the outdoor tables of a coffee shop and you recognise an old
friend who you haven’t seen for some time. You might call out to them using a nickname:

(3) ‘Mouse! I haven’t seen you in years. You look terrific! What are you up to?’

Brown and Levinson provide an extensive list of linguistic strategies that express positive
politeness, several of which are illustrated in this example. The use of ingroup code (here, a
nickname Mouse), showing attention to the addressee’s interests (what are you up to? ) and
exaggerating the speaker’s interest or approval (you look terrific!) are all strategies that
attend to the addressee’s positive face wants.
Other greetings attend more to the hearer’s negative face wants, for example:

(4) ‘Excuse me, Dr Michaels, I’m sorry but could I just interrupt you for one moment?’

The politeness strategies in (4) include a deferential form of address ( Dr Michaels), an

apology (Excuse me; I’m sorry) and an attempt to minimise the request (just; one moment).
These are negative politeness strategies because they attend to the addressee’s negative
face wants, that is, to their desire to be left alone to pursue their own actions or interests
unimpeded.
 BEING POLITE AS A VARIABLE OF SPEECH 87

exercise
Orienting to different kinds of politeness

Would you say that the community you grew up in was oriented more to negative or
positive politeness? What are some examples of behaviour supporting this?
How does it compare with other places where you have lived or that you are familiar
with? Have you ever found yourself living somewhere where the general orientation to
positive or negative politeness was different to the norms you grew up with?
Did this cause you problems? How did you resolve them (if at all)?

Power
Choosing politeness strategies: power, distance
A vertical relationship
and cost of the imposition between speaker and
hearer in Brown and
Our decisions about exactly what kinds of strategies would be polite or impolite in a given Levinson’s theory of
situation involve an evaluation of a number of different factors. Brown and Levinson identify politeness. Along with
three specific factors. We consider how great a power difference there is between the distance and cost of
imposition, power
speaker and the addressee; we consider how great the social distance is between the
determines how much
speaker and the addressee; and we evaluate the cost of the imposition (I have modified and what kind of
their terminology very slightly here). redressive action
We generally put more effort into being polite to people who are in positions of greater the speaker
social power than we are. For instance, I am more polite to the government official processing might take with a
face-threatening act.
my passport application than I am to the telemarketer who rings me during dinner. That
is because I want the official in the passport office to do me a favour and speed up my Cost of
application, but when the telemarketer rings me I am the one with the power and they need imposition
something from me. That is the effect of power on politeness. Modified term from
Similarly, the social distance between speakers has a tremendous impact on how they Brown and Levinson’s
speak to each other. We are generally more polite to people who we don’t know very well, politeness theory.
and we generally feel we can be more abrupt with people who are close friends. If you are A scalar measure
of how serious a face-
cooking a meal with a close friend or family member, you might simply say ‘You’ve got the
threatening act is in a
butter’ instead of ‘I think the butter is closer to you than it is to me, so could you pass it to particular society, and
me’. However, if you are working on a task with someone you are not so close to, you might given the power
ask in a less direct way, showing more attention to their negative face wants – ‘Excuse me, and distance
are those the telephone accounts? Could I have them for a second?’ difference between
speaker and hearer.

No, really?
facts

Being family members doesn’t necessarily mean you can assume closeness.
In a lot of places, some kinship relationships are conventionally considered
respectful ones, and you must use respect forms when addressing that member
of your family.
In Tamambo (spoken in Vanuatu), a mother’s brother is addressed with
kamim and the subject agreement marker no- (‘you, plural’) as a show of respect
(like vous in French) (Jauncey 1997: 107.)
 88 BEING POLITE AS A VARIABLE OF SPEECH

The third factor that Brown and Levinson believed was important in order to understand
the different politeness strategies people use was how big the social infraction is. This was
what they meant by the cost of the imposition. So, to continue the example of requests that
we have been looking at, different requests have different social weight. Asking someone
for the time is generally considered a minor imposition. As a consequence, you can ask
complete strangers for the time and the politeness strategies we use pay relatively little
attention to face wants, e.g., ‘Sorry, do you have the time?’ or even just ‘What’s the time?’
However, asking for money is generally considered a greater imposition, and usually you
would only do this with someone you are fairly close to. And the more money you want to
request, the better you will probably want to know them. For example, in the last few months
I have found myself needing 5 pence so I can get the bus home and I borrowed this from an
acquaintance, but the day when I left my credit cards at home I had to ask a very close friend
to lend me enough money to buy my groceries.

No, really?
facts

In many languages in Vanuatu, polite registers or respectful ways of speaking

are spoken of in terms of ‘heaviness’. So, in Mwotlap, spoken in the north, the
phrase is hohole map (‘talk respectfully, lit. heavy’), which shows that the speaker
‘thinks heavy’ (dēm map), or respects the addressee or the person being talked
about. The metaphor of heaviness carries over into the English-lexified creole,
Bislama, where ting hevi alternates with the more English rispektem.
exercise

Costs of an imposition

How would you rank the cost of the imposition involved in asking someone to:

(i) check on your flat or house while you are on holiday,

(ii) feed your pets and water the plants, and
(iii) answer and deal with any mail?

What are the ways in which you can try to address the differences in cost to them?

So under this framework there are three social variables that shape how people choose
which politeness strategies they will use. Their attention to others’ positive and negative face
wants will be determined by the relative power and social distance of the interactants,
and by the social cost of the imposition. As a number of people working within this frame-
work have noted, the three factors are by no means independent. You are often not very close
to someone who is in a position of power or authority over you, so power and distance are
overlapping measures. And how we evaluate cost is also partly a function of interlocutors’
social distance or the power one interlocutor has over the other. This was shown clearly in
 BEING POLITE AS A VARIABLE OF SPEECH 89

the examples I gave in the last paragraph, where the scenarios I drew on to illustrate the notion
of cost made direct reference to how well I knew the person I was borrowing money from.
Similarly, we do not feel that asking someone to tell you the time carries much cost for a
number of reasons. One is that the time is not considered to be privileged property of anyone
(if you give me the time, I haven’t taken it away from you), nor is the activity particularly
onerous (it takes moments to either tell me the time or say that you don’t know). But it is also
relatively low in cost because it doesn’t change anything about the social order in doing so. Inherently
The social distance and relative power of everyone involved remain unchanged. face-threatening
Despite this lack in independence, I believe they are still useful factors for us to bear in acts
mind when we consider the variable ways in which people are polite or impolite to each other. Speech acts which
necessarily threaten
the speaker’s and/or
hearer’s positive face
Inherently face-threatening acts and/or negative
face. In Brown and
Brown and Levinson suggest that some conversational events are inherently face- Levinson’s framework,
threatening acts. That is, once you undertake one of these acts, it is impossible not to they require the
speaker to decide
have somebody’s positive or negative face wants threatened (sometimes it will be the
whether or not to
speaker’s, sometimes it will be the hearer’s). This means that whenever one of these acts mitigate the threat
happens in a conversational exchange, the participants have to make a decision about how and which politeness
polite they will be. strategies to use.

Connections with theory

The term ‘face-threatening act ’ builds on the notion of speech acts from the field of
semantics and pragmatics. Naming something, wagering something, requesting
something, are considered speech acts because when said they perform some activity.
Saying ‘I bet you . . .’ lays a wager; saying ‘We’ll call the bear Erasmus’ names the bear,
and so forth. Some of the face-threatening acts discussed in the politeness literature are
classic examples of speech acts. But some vary a lot in their syntactic form, e.g., an
apology can take a number of forms – some direct and some indirect – and still be
considered an apology.

Table 5.1 shows that we can divide speech acts up according to whether they constitute Speech acts
a threat to the addressee’s or the speaker’s face wants. Giving an order or making a request Utterances which, in
are threats to the addressee’s face wants, and so are expressions of disagreement. But saying, do something.
giving an order threatens the addressee’s negative face wants because it is at odds with their
desire to have their actions unimpeded, while expressing disagreement threatens their
positive face wants because it is at odds with their desire to have their wants seen as desirable
by others (if I don’t agree with you then at least some of what you want is not desirable
to me).
The table also reminds us that some politeness strategies are speaker-centred and
attend to the speaker’s face wants. This is shown in the bottom row of the table, where
expressing thanks and making an apology are identified as examples of threats to the
speaker’s face wants. Saying ‘thank you’ establishes indebtedness to the other person,