Politeness

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True Politeness. "Your eel, I think, Sir?" Cartoon in Punch magazine: 28 July 1920 Politeness - Punch cartoon - Project Gutenberg eText 16619.png
True Politeness.
"Your eel, I think, Sir?"
Cartoon in Punch magazine: 28 July 1920

Politeness is the practical application of good manners or etiquette so as not to offend others and to put them at ease. It is a culturally defined phenomenon, and therefore what is considered polite in one culture can sometimes be quite rude or simply eccentric in another cultural context.

Contents

While the goal of politeness is to refrain from behaving in an offensive way so as not to offend others, and to make all people feel relaxed and comfortable with one another, these culturally defined standards at times may be broken within the context of personal boundaries – this is known as positive politeness.

Types

Anthropologists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson identified four kinds of politeness, deriving from Erving Goffman's concept of face:

  1. Negative politeness is the act of making a request less infringing, such as "If you don't mind..." or "If it isn't too much trouble..."; respects a person's right to act freely. This is a variety of deference. There is a greater use of indirect speech acts. It is also considered a part of being assertive.
  2. Non-assertive politeness is when a person refrains from making a comment or asserting their beliefs during a discussion so as to remain polite to others present. It is also when a person goes along with a decision made by someone else so as not to appear impolite, essentially following general social norms.
  3. Assertive politeness can be when a person offers their opinion in a positive and constructive way to be assistive and helpful during an interaction, or refrains from purporting to agree with something they do not actually agree with in a way that does not offend others.
  4. Positive politeness seeks to establish a positive relationship between parties, and it respects a person's need to be liked and understood. This standard of politeness is determined by personal boundaries, and often violates etiquette norms in letter. Direct speech acts, swearing and flouting Grice's maxims can be considered aspects of positive politeness because:
    • They show an awareness that the relationship is strong enough to cope with what would normally be considered impolite (in the popular understanding of the term);
    • They articulate an awareness of the other person's values, which fulfills the person's desire to be accepted.
    • They convey a natural, relaxed, casual setting.

Some cultures, groups, and individuals prefer some ideals of politeness over the other. In this way, politeness is culturally bound, and even within broader cultures, people may disagree.

History

The Spectator fostered a culture of politeness among the middle-classes of early 18th century England. Spectator.jpg
The Spectator fostered a culture of politeness among the middle-classes of early 18th century England.

During the Enlightenment era, a self-conscious process of the imposition of polite norms and behaviors became a symbol of being a genteel member of the upper class. Upwardly mobile middle class bourgeoisie increasingly tried to identify themselves with the elite through their adopted artistic preferences and their standards of behavior. They became preoccupied with precise rules of etiquette, such as when to show emotion, the art of elegant dress and graceful conversation and how to act courteously, especially with women. Influential in this new discourse was a series of essays on the nature of politeness in a commercial society, penned by the philosopher Lord Shaftesbury in the early 18th century. [1] Shaftesbury defined politeness as the art of being pleasing in company:

'Politeness' may be defined a dext'rous management of our words and actions, whereby we make other people have better opinion of us and themselves. [2]

Members of a Gentlemen's club had to conform to a socially acceptable standard of politeness. The painting, A Club of Gentlemen by Joseph Highmore c. 1730. Joseph Highmore - A Club of Gentlemen - Google Art Project.jpg
Members of a Gentlemen's club had to conform to a socially acceptable standard of politeness. The painting, A Club of Gentlemen by Joseph Highmore c. 1730.

Periodicals, such as The Spectator , founded as a daily publication by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in 1711, gave regular advice to its readers on how to be a polite gentleman. Its stated goal was "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality ... to bring philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses." It provided its readers with educated, topical talking points, and advice on how to carry on conversations and social interactions in a polite manner. [3]

The art of polite conversation and debate was particularly cultivated in the coffeehouses of the period. Conversation was supposed to conform to a particular manner, with the language of polite and civil conversation considered to be essential to the conduct of coffeehouse debate and conversation. [4] [5] The concept of "civility" referred to a desired social interaction which valued sober and reasoned debate on matters of interest. [6] Established rules and procedures for proper behavior, as well as conventions, were outlined by gentleman's clubs, such as Harrington's Rota Club. Periodicals, including The Tatler and The Spectator , infused politeness into English coffeehouse conversation, as their explicit purpose lay in the reformation of English manners and morals.[ needs copy edit ] [7]

Techniques

A polite notice on the side of a bus that reads "please pay as you enter" Southdown bus 199 (KUF 199F), 2009 Amberley Bus Day.jpg
A polite notice on the side of a bus that reads "please pay as you enter"

There is a variety of techniques one can use to seem polite. Some techniques include expressing uncertainty and ambiguity through hedging and indirectness, polite lying or use of euphemisms (which make use of ambiguity as well as connotation).

Additionally, one can use tag questions to direct statements, such as "You were at the store, weren't you?" There are three types of tags: modal tags, affective tags, and facilitative tags.

Modal tags request information of which the speaker is uncertain: "You haven't been to the store yet, have you?" Affective tags indicate concern for the listener: "You haven't been here long, have you? Facilitative tags invite the addressee to comment on the request being made: "You can do that, can't you?" Finally, softeners reduce the force of what would be a brusque demand: "Hand me that thing, could you?"

Some studies [8] have shown that women are more likely to use politeness formulas than men, though the exact differences are not clear. Most current research has shown that gender differences in politeness use are complex, [9] since there is a clear association between politeness norms and the stereotypical speech of middle class white women, at least in the UK and US. It is therefore unsurprising that women tend to be associated with politeness more and their linguistic behavior judged in relation to these politeness norms.

Linguistic devices

Besides and additionally to the above, many languages have specific means to show politeness, deference, respect, or a recognition of the social status of the speaker and the hearer. There are two main ways in which a given language shows politeness: in its lexicon (for example, employing certain words in formal occasions, and colloquial forms in informal contexts), and in its morphology (for example, using special verb forms for polite discourse). The T–V distinction is a common example in Western languages, while some Asian languages extend this to avoiding pronouns entirely. Some languages have complex politeness systems, such as Korean speech levels and honorific speech in Japanese.

Japanese is perhaps the most widely known example of a language that encodes politeness at its core. Japanese has two main levels of politeness, one for intimate acquaintances, family, and friends, and one for other groups, and verb morphology reflects these levels. Besides that, some verbs have special hyper-polite suppletive forms. This happens also with some nouns and interrogative pronouns. Japanese also employs different personal pronouns for each person according to gender, age, rank, degree of acquaintance, and other cultural factors.

Criticism of Brown & Levinson's typology

Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness has been criticised as not being universally valid, by linguists working with East-Asian languages, including Japanese. Matsumoto [10] and Ide [11] claim that Brown and Levinson assume the speaker's volitional use of language, which allows the speaker's creative use of face-maintaining strategies toward the addressee. In East Asian cultures like Japan, politeness is achieved not so much on the basis of volition as on discernment (wakimae, finding one's place), or prescribed social norms. Wakimae is oriented towards the need for acknowledgment of the positions or roles of all the participants as well as adherence to formality norms appropriate to the particular situation.

See also

Related Research Articles

In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deixis</span> Words requiring context to understand their meaning

In linguistics, deixis is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words tomorrow, there, and they. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denoted meaning varies depending on time and/or place. Words or phrases that require contextual information to be fully understood—for example, English pronouns—are deictic. Deixis is closely related to anaphora. Although this article deals primarily with deixis in spoken language, the concept is sometimes applied to written language, gestures, and communication media as well. In linguistic anthropology, deixis is treated as a particular subclass of the more general semiotic phenomenon of indexicality, a sign "pointing to" some aspect of its context of occurrence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Etiquette</span> Customary code of polite behaviour

Etiquette is the set of norms of personal behaviour in polite society, usually occurring in the form of an ethical code of the expected and accepted social behaviours that accord with the conventions and norms observed and practised by a society, a social class, or a social group. In modern English usage, the French word étiquette dates from the year 1750.

The T–V distinction is the contextual use of different pronouns that exists in some languages and serves to convey formality or familiarity. Its name comes from the Latin pronouns tu and vos. The distinction takes a number of forms and indicates varying levels of politeness, familiarity, courtesy, age or even insult toward the addressee. The field that studies and describes this phenomenon is sociolinguistics.

The imperative mood is a grammatical mood that forms a command or request.

The Japanese language has a system of honorific speech, referred to as keigo, parts of speech that show respect. Their use is mandatory in many social situations. Honorifics in Japanese may be used to emphasize social distance or disparity in rank, or to emphasize social intimacy or similarity in rank. Japanese honorific titles, often simply called honorifics, consist of suffixes and prefixes when referring to others in a conversation.

An honorific is a title that conveys esteem, courtesy, or respect for position or rank when used in addressing or referring to a person. Sometimes, the term "honorific" is used in a more specific sense to refer to an honorary academic title. It is also often conflated with systems of honorific speech in linguistics, which are grammatical or morphological ways of encoding the relative social status of speakers. Honorifics can be used as prefixes or suffixes depending on the appropriate occasion and presentation in accordance with style and customs.

In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a sign pointing to some element in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, in philosophy, an indexical.

A pro-drop language is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they can be pragmatically or grammatically inferable. The precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite intricate. The phenomenon of "pronoun-dropping" is part of the larger topic of zero or null anaphora. The connection between pro-drop languages and null anaphora relates to the fact that a dropped pronoun has referential properties, and so is crucially not a null dummy pronoun.

Politeness theory, proposed by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, centers on the notion of politeness, construed as efforts to redress the affronts to a person's self-esteems or face in social interactions. Notable concepts include positive and negative face, the face threatening act (FTA), strategies surrounding FTAs and factors influencing the choices of strategies.

The Korean language has a system of honorifics that recognizes and reflects the hierarchical social status of participants with respect to the subject and/or the object and/or the audience. Speakers use honorifics to indicate their social relationship with the addressee and/or subject of the conversation, concerning their age, social status, gender, degree of intimacy, and speech act situation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rudeness</span> Display of disrespect

Rudeness is a display of actual or perceived disrespect by not complying with the social norms or etiquette expected within a relationship, social group, or culture. Social norms are established as the essential guidelines of normally accepted behavior within a given context, and individuals often establish personal boundaries to meet their own needs and desires within smaller settings, such as friendships. To be unwilling to align one's behavior with these norms known to the general population of what is socially acceptable is to be rude. These norms may resemble a sort of "unspoken law", with social repercussions or rewards for violators or advocates, respectively.

According to Geoffrey Leech, there is a politeness principle with conversational maxims similar to those formulated by Paul Grice. He lists six maxims: tact, generosity, approbation, modesty, agreement, and sympathy. The first and second form a pair, as do the third and the fourth. These maxims vary from culture to culture: what may be considered polite in one culture may be strange or downright rude in another.

Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics, mediated stylistics, sociolinguistics, and feminist language reform and media studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Small talk</span> Type of discourse

Small talk is an informal type of discourse that does not cover any functional topics of conversation or any transactions that need to be addressed. In essence, it is polite and standard conversation about unimportant things.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries</span>

In 17th- and 18th-century England, coffeehouses served as public social places where men would meet for conversation and commerce. For the price of a penny, customers purchased a cup of coffee and admission. Travellers introduced coffee as a beverage to England during the mid-17th century; previously it had been consumed mainly for its supposed medicinal properties. Coffeehouses also served tea and hot chocolate as well as a light meal.

In linguistics, an honorific is a grammatical or morphosyntactic form that encodes the relative social status of the participants of the conversation. Distinct from honorific titles, linguistic honorifics convey formality FORM, social distance, politeness POL, humility HBL, deference, or respect through the choice of an alternate form such as an affix, clitic, grammatical case, change in person or number, or an entirely different lexical item. A key feature of an honorific system is that one can convey the same message in both honorific and familiar forms—i.e., it is possible to say something like "The soup is hot" in a way that confers honor or deference on one of the participants of the conversation.

LGBT linguistics is the study of language as used by members of LGBT communities. Related or synonymous terms include lavender linguistics, advanced by William Leap in the 1990s, which "encompass[es] a wide range of everyday language practices" in LGBT communities, and queer linguistics, which refers to the linguistic analysis concerning the effect of heteronormativity on expressing sexual identity through language. The former term derives from the longtime association of the color lavender with LGBT communities. "Language", in this context, may refer to any aspect of spoken or written linguistic practices, including speech patterns and pronunciation, use of certain vocabulary, and, in a few cases, an elaborate alternative lexicon such as Polari.

The Japanese language has some words and some grammatical constructions associated with men or boys, while others are associated with women or girls. Such differences are sometimes called "gendered language". In Japanese, speech patterns associated with women are referred to as onna kotoba or joseigo, and those associated with men are referred to as danseigo.

Pronoun avoidance is the use of kinship terms, titles and other complex nominal expressions instead of personal pronouns in speech.

References

  1. ↑ Klein, Lawrence E. (1994). Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England . Cambridge University Press. ISBN   9780521418065.
  2. ↑ Klein, Lawrence (1984). "The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness". Eighteenth-Century Studies. 18 (2): 186–214. doi:10.2307/2738536. JSTOR   2738536.
  3. ↑ "First Edition of The Spectator". Information Britain. 2010-03-01. Retrieved 2014-08-15.
  4. ↑ Klein, Lawrence E. (1996). "Coffeehouse Civility, 1660-1714: An Aspect of Post-Courtly Culture in England". Huntington Library Quarterly. 59 (1): 34. doi:10.2307/3817904.
  5. ↑ Klein, Lawrence E. (2002). "Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century". The Historical Journal . 45 (4): 869–898. doi:10.1017/S0018246X02002716. JSTOR   3133532. S2CID   145752613.
  6. ↑ Cowan, Brian William (2005). The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 101. ISBN   0-300-10666-1.
  7. ↑ Mackie, Erin Skye (1998). "Introduction: Cultural and Historical Background" . In Mackie, Erin Skye (ed.). The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. p. 1. ISBN   0-312-16371-1.
  8. ↑
    • Lakoff, R. (1975). Language and Woman's Place. New York: Harper & Row.
    • Beeching, K. (2002). Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
  9. ↑
    • Holmes, J. (1995). Women Men and Language. Longman.
    • Mills, S. (2003). Gender and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  10. ↑ Matsumoto, Y. (1988). "Reexamination of the universality of Face: Politeness phenomena in Japanese". Journal of Pragmatics. 12 (4): 403–426. doi:10.1016/0378-2166(88)90003-3.
  11. ↑ Ide, S. (1989). "Formal forms and discernment: two neglected aspects of universals of linguistic politeness". Multilingua. 8 (2–3): 223–248. doi:10.1515/mult.1989.8.2-3.223. S2CID   144575072.

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