Reflection: Beyond FTAs

It is important to note that Brown and Levinson’s work is oriented to acts that threaten face, and facework that attempts to redress those threatening acts. What about acts that simply enhance face? An important merit of Leech’s Politeness Principle is that it is not confined to the management of potentially “impolite” acts (i.e. FTAs), such as asking somebody to do something for you, but also involves potentially “polite” acts (Leech 1983: 83) (i.e. face-enhancing acts), such as a compliment out of the blue. Leech’s Politeness Principle allows for the minimization of impolite beliefs and the maximization of polite beliefs. This helps account for why, for example, the direct command Have a drink at a social occasion, which would appear to be impolite in brusquely restricting the hearer’s freedom of action, in fact maximizes the polite belief that the hearer would like and would benefit from a drink but might be too polite to just take one. And what about acts that simply attack face – threats, insults, put-downs, sarcasm, mimicry and so on? Goffman (1967: 24–26) mentions “aggressive facework”. Clearly, politeness is not the issue here but rather “impoliteness”, an area we will attend to. Recent “relational” approaches (e.g. Locher and Watts 2005; Spencer-Oatey 2008) within politeness studies are based on the full range of facework, and locate potentially polite behaviors within that framework.

We should also note here that FTAs are acts, reflecting the fact that speech act theory underpins Brown and Levinson (1987). We already discussed the limitations of speech act theory. Speech act theory is discussed in relation to single short utterances with single functions, single speakers and single addressees. This ignores the multi-functionality and complexity of discourse situations, and the fact that speech acts are often constructed over a number of turns. Brown and Levinson (1987: 10) recognize that the adoption of speech act theory as a basis for their model has not been ideal: “speech act theory forces a sentence-based, speaker-oriented mode of analysis, requiring attribution of speech act categories where our own thesis requires that utterances are often equivocal in force”. The sort of decontextualized speech acts they use do not reflect the indeterminacies of utterances and the face-threatening ramifications they may have for any of the participants in a particular speech event. Their work includes no extended examples.