Politeness theory

We have seen how a very robust assumption of co-operation in conversation accounts for some important aspects of meaning in context. The underlying principle is that human beings, as co-operative creatures, have more to gain from working together than being in conflict with one another, and that talk is generally a manifestation of co-operation which is mutually beneficial (hence Churchill’s famous dictum that: ‘To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war’). One might consider co-operation in conversation as one manifestation of politeness, a topic explored by Brown and Levinson (1987) in an important work of the same name. The need to be polite, they argue, is an important driver of the way we express ourselves in most circumstances, from the use of indirect speech acts we alluded to above, to the insertion of conversational fillers such as ‘I’m sorry…’ or ‘Not being funny, but…’

Central to Brown and Levinson’s notion of politeness is the concept of face, of which they distinguish a negative and a positive kind. Negative face refers simply to an individual’s desire to be free from imposition, while positive face refers to one’s need to be viewed positively by one’s peers and to be accepted as part of a group. In certain circumstances, speech acts can be seen as Face-threatening acts (FTAs), the force of which speakers attempt in normal circumstances to minimize. One of the felicity conditions for using an imperative or an overt performative verb such as command or order, for example, is that the speaker be in a position of power or authority over the addressee, and thereby have the authority to require compliance from his/her. But the act of saying ‘Get me a cup of coffee!’ or ‘I order you to get me a cup of coffee’, threatens the addressee’s face by underlining the difference in status and imposition upon him/her. The speaker may therefore wish to attenuate this status difference and thereby protect the latter’s face, often at the expense of his/her own, by using an indirect speech act, e.g. ‘Would you mind getting me a cup of coffee?’ or ‘May I ask you to get me a cup of coffee?’ Although lacking the force of an order, a request similarly threatens the addressee’s negative face: the addressee in turn will strive to avoid the dispreferred option of refusal, which would constitute a threat to the speaker’s positive face (now you know why so many people complain ‘I just couldn’t say “no”!’).

In some languages, the FTA implicit in a request is attenuated by the use of a conditional verb form:

Could you lend me a fiver?

Would you do me a favor?

Would you do me the honor of being my wife?

Formally what is happening here is that the speaker is saying ‘I’m not actually asking you to lend me a fiver/do me a favor/ marry me, because that would impose on you (i.e. threaten your negative face), but if I were to ask you, would you regard this imposition as excessive?’, but such constructions have become so conventionalized as to be immediately recognized for what they are: polite request formulae. Where a request or invitation has to be refused, addressees generally use set openings to mitigate the FTA, suggesting (whether truthfully or not) that they would have liked to accept, but that circumstances prevent them from doing so, e.g. ‘I’m sorry, but…’; ‘I’m afraid….’; ‘Regrettably…’. Conditional requests like these are, in effect, fossilized versions of the pre-requests speakers use when the request is of a sensitive nature and the potential threat to both parties’ face is significant.