Linguistic Politeness (02-Feb-2004)

Many (all?) languages include strategies related to politeness in conversations. Different cultures may have different ways of tagging politeness, and this can lead to confusion, e.g. if certain expressions are taken literally ("have a nice day" may be seen as insincere by English people). The relationship between two people will make a difference to the amount of effort expended on being polite: factors influencing this include things like how well they know each other, the social context, and the perceived relative "rank" of the participants to one another.

Politeness strategies may be used either to create a sense of closeness with the other person, or to maintain distance from them. For example, "pass the butter, mate" vs. "would you mind passing the butter please?"

The concept of "face" (Brown & Levinson) has been used to explain how politeness works in spoken communication, where:

Each of these can be threatened or confirmed by the way that others talk to us, and people will often employ either positive or negative politeness to address these types of face, e.g.

Requests can be seen as "Face Threatening Acts" (FTAs), and so are often modified in some way to address possible damage to face. For example, in the request "could you tell me the way to town?", the head act, i.e. the request for directions, is moderated with the phrase "could you" rather than "what's the time?".

Conventional modification typically uses a modal auxiliar verb ("expressing a distinction of mood, such as that between possibility and actuality...including can, could, may, must, need, ought, shall, should, will, wood"), for example "could you tell me the time?"

Non-conventional modification may result in extra material being added to the request, as in "that's a nice coat, where did you get it?".

Key Points (from handout)


Language in the Individual and in Society notes index