Politeness in Discourse Analysis - Essay Example

Politeness in Dis Analysis Politeness theory has presented a key paradigm for studying the interpersonal foundations of language use. At present, in this practice the concept of politeness does not refer to a simple idea of politeness or ‘a set of protocols regarding how one is to behave in different social settings’ (Holtgraves 2002: 38). Rather, politeness is a technical idea, a conceptual unit raised as a means of clarifying the connection between the social context and language use (Fraser 1990). Politeness is an exceptionally wide-ranging fact present at the boundary of cognitive, social and linguistic processes: “It refers (roughly) to the way one puts things and the way one puts things is a result of a speaker’s cognitive assessment of the social context” (Holtgraves 2002: 38). Due to its expansive scope, politeness has been a subject of interest to academics in various disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive psychology, social psychology, philosophy, communication, and others (Chimombo & Roseberry 1998). The objective of this paper is to discuss politeness in discourse, including its various aspects and potential problems. Moreover, the subject matter will be approached from several different perspectives and analysed through the use of different discourse contexts or examples. Politeness in Discourse A potent instrument for attaining control over an interpreter is politeness. The concept of politeness obviously fulfils a major function in the level of cooperation among participants in dialogue. Politeness is cultural in nature (Martin 1993). As argued by Goffman (1956), what makes politeness crucial is the reality that discourses commonly give the interpreter a ‘face threatening act’. Negative responses, such as refusals, are one instance of such an act. If people ask courteously for something and are brusquely turned down, then they may feel humiliated or offended. People of several cultures view such straightforward conduct as a threat to one’s face, implying the personal image that the individual shows in a dialogue. If one individual insults another by performing a face threatening act, the reply, in contemporary colloquial or informal English, could be “Get outta my face!” (Holtgraves 2002: 39). The extent of frankness that an individual could tolerate without sensing that a face threatening act has been performed seems to rely greatly on culture. Efforts that have been made to furnish an explanation of politeness that is wide-ranging enough to be relevant across cultural frontiers have been fairly broadly criticised (Fraser 1990). However, the face-saving, conversational-contract, and conversational-maxim perspectives of politeness appear to be the most thoroughly expressed. The ‘Politeness Principle’ by Lakoff (1973), the conversational-maxim perspective, was explained by Brown and Levinson (1987) in their theory of face saving, while the conversational-contract perspective by Fraser and Nolan (1981) diverge from the view of Brown and Levinson. The ‘Politeness Principle’ is composed of three maxims intended to describe the politeness techniques that individuals apply in discourse. These three maxims maintains that a producer who desires to be seen as being courteous ‘(a) will not impose on the interpreter, (b) will give the interpreter options to allow escape from undesired situations, and (c) will attempt to make the interpreter feel good’ (Chimombo & Roseberry 1998: 49). This is an example of a dialogue that illustrates these maxims (Levinson 1983: 333-334): a. Uh if you’d care to come and visit a little while this morning I’ll give you a cup of coffee b. Hehh Well that’s awfully sweet of you, I don’t think I can make it this morning. hh uhm I’m running an ad in the paper and-and uh I have to stay near the phone Observe that A tries not to impose on B, but instead proposes something in return. Moreover, by using the conditional ‘if’ to express an indirect request, A allows B a simpler way out than would a question or a demand. Ultimately, by making B think that his/her company is pleasing, A tries to make B feel good. The response of B is also courteous. B exhibits gratitude aimed to make A feel good and applies evasions and reasons to show that the invitation of A is appreciated even though it cannot be accepted. The following example also demonstrates the three maxims: Joanne: Sir Mr. A: yes Joanne: are we talking about racism in tutorial? Mr. A: well I dunno I got-I had these other plans whi-that Miss Ford wants us to er deal with I’m not quite sure Note that Joanne attempts not to impose the subject of racism on Mr. A. Furthermore, by stating her statement in question form Joanne allows Mr. A an easier escape route. Mr. A’s response is polite because he tries to answer the question of Joanne as much as he can even though he is uncertain; Mr. A tries to make Joanne feel good by showing to her that he exerts effort to answer her question. Brown and Levinson (1987) built on the Politeness Theory, arguing that ranked extremity (R), distance (D), and power (P), while staying culturally explicit, are the general factors of levels of politeness. They named five techniques, later trimmed down to four, with 10 sub-types of negative politeness and 15 of positive politeness. The four techniques are (Chimombo & Roseberry 1998: 50): 1) Do the face threatening act (FTA) on record without redressive action, baldly. 2) Do the FTA on record with redressive action of the kind called positive politeness and/or of the kind called negative politeness. 3) Do the FTA off record. 4) Don’t do the FTA. Fraser (1990) offered a critical summary of earlier and later enhancements of politeness theories, rejecting the traditional social norm perspective, and assuming that the face threatening perspective is presently the most feasible. However, a more remarkable development is the connection between negative and positive face and affect (Holtgraves 2002). For instance, Brown and Gilman (1989) discovered in their investigation of R, D, and P in the tragedies of Shakespeare that “distance and affect had to be treated separately and, for the problems presented; affect was the more important variable by far” (p. 168). Moreover, “politeness decreases with the withdrawal of affection and increases with an increase of affection” (p. 199). This connection between politeness and affect is a critical concern in any power relation. In order to get a more understandable knowledge of power relations and the part that politeness fulfils in them, consider the case of a male physician who is counselling a young unmarried woman about contraceptive preferences. The patient perhaps has a high regard for her physician, which explains why she seeks his opinion and guidance in the first place. This routinely gives the physician substantial authority over his patient. Culture and context, involving age, gender, and several other variables, could determine the physician’s and the patient’s thoughts and points of view on the issue of contraception. Nonetheless, precisely how the issue is articulated, what forms of power markers are employed, what kind of important information is excluded, and so forth, is not a common issue of discourse anymore, but is rather an issue of a particular text that has surfaced between two individuals (Holtgrave 2002). In order to possess a degree of power over a text at the interpersonal stage, interpreters need not only an understanding of the actual strategies and intentions of the producer, but also a level of forcefulness to ascertain their own point of view. Primarily, interpreters should be capable of distinguishing how the topic structure is building up and to what degree conscious projecting is being employed in the progress of the dialogue. If any such strategies are obvious, interpreters instantly have to find out possible explanations for the staging (Martin 1993). For instance, they may have to remember important information or message that has been intentionally excluded from a text to advance the intention of the producer. Next, having ascertained that the producer is trying to project the text, interpreters have to be capable of checking efficiently so as to compel a certain degree of conformity on the producer. These two techniques are complicated and are attainable much more easily in principle than in actual. The first technique is attainable through a familiarity of the strategies of discourse analysis (Chimombo & Roseberry 1998). As individuals mature, learn, and encounter more of life and the world, their awareness of other individuals and their purposes develops, and they become more and more capable of distinguishing staging, prejudices, and other efforts at wielding control through texts. The second technique is the more challenging one for numerous individuals, who plainly feel incapable of defying authority models. Authority models are most prone to project texts, and they carry this out in order to direct or deceive those over whom they have genuine or assumed power. For instance, examine the following two brief passages from a consultation involving a male physician and a young female patient (Borges 1986: 47-48): Doctor: Would you like something called meprobramate?... Patient: I don’t know what it is. Doctor: Fine, I’ll call the pharmacy and [inaudible]. And you can mix that with aspirin. That’s perfectly fine. Patient: And my mother, and my mother tends to be anemic. Doctor: Don’t choose a diagnosis out of the blue. Buy a medical book and get a real nice diagnosis. In the above illustration, staging is carried out through the exclusion of important information, that is, the answer to the question of the patient, ‘what is it?’ The physician is simply having a discourse with himself, the outcome of which, almost certainly, will be to compel the patient to take a medication that she does not understand or know. Furthermore, in the illustration, staging goes beyond its limits and defies cultural and contextual rules of politeness. The patient can sense and recognise from the sarcasm of the doctor that, as a somewhat uneducated individual without any knowledge in medicine, she has no right to trespass on the physician’s field and make use of medical jargons such as ‘anemia’. If the patient had been a man, it must be remembered that, it is quite unlikely that the physician would have reacted in this manner (Chimombo & Roseberry 1998). Obviously, individuals do not want to say anything that will force them to be ‘rejected’ or insulted, as in the doctor-patient discourse. Perhaps, there are only two actual alternatives: ‘avoidance and mastery’ (Holtgraves 1998: 8). Definitely, avoidance is not to be omitted in general. In this illustration, the patient would possibly do quite well to change physicians. Any person who has such disrespect for patients and for women, and whose perspective of medicine encourages him to humiliate an individual with inadequate medical knowledge, apparently is unfit to serve in a helping profession. Yet, avoidance is not an inclusive way out. There will consistently be challenging texts to deal with, even between individuals who have no contempt toward each other. A more constructive technique, and one that can help the injured party in circumstances such as the doctor-patient consultation, is self-confidence exercise. In this technique, an individual learns to respect and appreciate the self (Fraser 1990). For instance, a somewhat uneducated individual learns that questioning a physician for the intention of enhancing personal knowledge in a constructive, not an unhelpful, act. A female who grew up in a culture where females submit to males learns that her own insights and points of view count as influentially as anyone else’s, particularly when they involve decisions that she should make about her own self. She would in that case be capable of saying to the physician in the earlier setting, “Excuse me, doctor, but I am not going to take a drug without knowing precisely what it is and what it does. As for my mother, she does have anemia—at least if one can trust the diagnosis of her doctor. And as one final point, let me say that I do not like the nonprofessional tone of some of this interview today. I detected considerable and uncalled-for rudeness and contempt. If we are continue to work together as doctor and patient, I would hope to see no further examples of this in our future meetings. Have a nice day” (Chimombo & Roseberry 1998: 52). As mentioned previously, achieving the skill to handle discourse in this manner is a difficult task. Nonetheless, once this skill is realised, it carries with it personal benefits that even transcend discourse management. Persons become more self-confident in the understanding of who they are; they enhance the respect of others for them, and they gain the knowledge on how to arbitrate dynamically to enhance their relationships with others. Politeness and Language Comprehension As the above discussion indicates, politeness is an all-encompassing and general component of human language use, and empirical evidence has shown how it encourages the way in which individuals stage their expressions in different contexts. But if politeness influences the production of language, should it not also serve a similar function in language comprehension? This probability has been given inadequate attention; research on politeness has put emphasis almost entirely on the production of language. Still, there are a number of probabilities worth discussing. A basic approach for communicating a polite manner is to articulate in a less than favourable efficient way, specifically, to defy the conversational maxims of Grice and speak indirectly. Obviously, this raises the question “How do hearers recognise the intended meaning of a speaker’s utterance? (Holtgraves 2002: 51)” Brown and Levinson developed extensively the Gricean model for politeness production and comprehension. Hence, conversationalists are rational agents with shared understanding of the influence of conversational maxims on the expression of meaning. Presenters can convey indirect meanings, alongside a polite manner, by depending on the capability of hearers in identifying defiance and deduce the projected meaning (Chimombo & Roseberry 1998). Presuming the initial phase of an inference practice does include the identification of a hearer of a maxim breach, what directs the hearer toward the identification of other, and seemingly planned, indirect meaning? Apparently, Grice (1975) was basically silent concerning this topic, indicating plainly that hearers will create an inference that is in line with the conversational exchange. Theoretically there are a limitless number of deductions that a listener could construct (Holtgraves 1998). There have been a number of more particular suggestions in this respect. For instance, Sperber and Wilson (1986) have claimed that understanding is directed by a relevance principle. Listeners are presumed to make the most relevant construal of a statement, in which the most relevant construal is one needing the least extent of effort and furnishing the highest number of relative implications. Likewise, Hobbs, Stickel, Appelt, and Martin (1993) have suggested a computational approach founded on a common premise that listeners develop an interpretation of textual uncertainty, or indirectness, in the most effective possible way. Essentially, neither of these suggestions involves interpersonal concerns, although interpersonal concerns are a primary basis for indirectness. It is at this point that politeness theory could be valuable. Primarily, when experiencing a maxim violation, it is probable that a listener will try to clarify why the violation took place. This is in line with a number of studies. For instance, individuals commonly attempt to clarify why unforeseen or unscripted actions have transpired (Hobbs et al. 1993). Furthermore, text comprehension usually entails a search for meaning, and this is oriented by an effort to comprehend why something is stated in a text. Interpreters also create causal inference as a way of attaining consistency in their illustration of a text (Brown & Gilman 1989). Furthermore, given that textual uncertainly is encouraged largely by politeness, it appears likely that listeners, on experiencing a maxim violation, will take into account the likelihood that the speaker is endeavouring in face management. This identification can afterward function as the foundation for constructing an understanding of what a speaker means with a verbalised statement (Chimombo & Roseberry 1998). Note the following dialogue from Holtgraves (1998: 16): Bob: What do you think of my presentation? Al: It’s hard to give a good presentation. The response of Al is a defiance of the relation maxim since it fails to give the requested information. Hence Bob will have to construct an inference so as to understand the meaning of the response. At this instant, Bob could understand the reply of Al as implying that he actually appreciated the presentation, in spite of its difficulty, or that he is being supportive with the challenge of carrying out this activity, and so forth. But Bob, in most cases, will not construct those interpretations. Rather, he will perhaps identify that Al is using face management. And since Al’s evaluation of Bob’s presentation is negative that would be face threatening in this case, the most probable construal is that Al does not have an encouraging judgment of the presentation. If the evaluation was affirmative violation of the relation maxim would be unnecessary; encouraging judgment would not be face-threatening (Holtgrave 1998). A similar example is this one: Mr A: I mean what do you think? Do you think it’s worthwhile talking about racism? Joanne: I don’t know. Ninnette: What? Mr. A: What do you think Ninnette? Ninnette: Talking about what? Mr A: Well, John wanted to carry on talking about racism and stuff like that. The responses of Joanne and Ninnette are violation of the relation maxim since they fail to properly acknowledge the question of Mr. A. Thus, Mr. A has to construct an interpretation in order to understand the replies of his two students. Mr. A will most likely understand the responses negatively, or he will think that his students are really not paying attention to what he is saying; hence, the two students’ responses are face-threatening. Nevertheless, it has to be underlined that violation of the relation maxim will not consistently be understood as communicating negative information. Instead, the assertion is that they will be understood as expressing negative information if it is face-threatening negative information. On the other hand, there are times when encouraging information may be threatening (Sperber & Wilson 1986). For instance, picture an exchange between two close friends, David and James, in which David always do better than James in school, much to James’s disappointment. David knows how James feels and usually attempts to manage his face. At this instant, when James asks David how he did on his math exam and David falls short in answering James’s question directly, James will perhaps interpret the response as expressing positive rather than negative information. In this case it is affirmative information that could be face-threatening, and hence the response will tend to be understood as expressing positive information. Conclusion Politeness production and comprehension should be interdependent. If politeness is expressed by departure from optimally efficient and effective communication, then discourse participants should have some means for recapturing a speaker’s purpose. If these departures are encouraged by politeness, then it appears sensible that identification of this motivation will fulfil a function in the interpretation of a verbalised statement. References Borges, S., (1986) A feminist critique of scientific ideology: An analysis of two doctor-patient encounters, In S. Fisher & A. Todds, Discourse and institutional authority: Medicine, education and law (pp. 26-48), Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Brown, P. & Levinson, S., (1987) Politeness: Some universals in language usage, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Brown, R. & Gilman, A., (1989) Politeness theory and Shakespeares four major tragedies, Language in Society , 159-212. Chimombo, M. & Roseberry, R.L., (1998) The Power of Discourse: An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Fraser, B., (1990) Perspectives on politeness, Journal of Pragmatics , 219-236. Fraser, B. & Nolan, W., (1981) The association of deference with linguistic form, International Journal of the Sociology of Language , 93-109. Goffman, E., (1956) The presentation of self in everyday life, Edinburgh, Scotland: University of Edinburgh Press. Grice, H., (1975) Logic and conversation, In P. Cole & J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts (pp. 41-58), New York : Academic Press. Hobbs, J., Stickel, M.E., Appelt, D.E., & Martin, P., (1993) Interpretation as abduction, Artificial Intelligence , 69-142. Holtgraves, T., (1998) Interpreting indirect replies, Cognitive Psychology , 1-27. Holtgraves, T., (2002) Language as Social Action: Social Psychology and Language Use, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Lakoff, R., (1973) The logic of politeness: Or, minding your ps and qs, Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society , 292-305. Levinson, S., (1983) Pragmatics, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Martin, J., (1993) Literacy in science: Learning to handle text as technology, In M. Halliday & J.R. Martin, Writing science: Literacy and discursive power (pp. 166-202), London: Falmer Press. Sperber, D. & Wilson, D., (1986) Relevance, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Read More