Book Notice: Linguistic Politeness

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Forwarded from LINGUIST List 17.1235, Mon Apr 24 2006

 Broadening the Horizon of Linguistic Politeness
Date: 17-Apr-2006
From: Susan Burt <smburtilstu.edu>

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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