CHAPTER 3:

DISCOURSE & PRAGMATICS

 IV. POLITENESS, FACE AND DISCOURSE
 Why people choose to say things in a particular way

1. Politeness and face

 Face: one’s public self-image, the sense of self

 Speakers should respect each other’s face and avoid face

threatening acts (FTAs)
 2 aspects of face: Involvement (positive face) and
Independence (negative face).
 Positive face (INVOLVEMENT): the need to be involved with
others, to be treated as a member of a group
 Strategies: showing interest, approval, agreement; avoiding
disagreement; using in-group identity markers; …
 Negative face (INDEPENDENCE): the right and need to be
independent, not to be dominated or imposed on by others
 Strategies: not presuming their wants/ needs; giving
options; minimizing imposition, apologizing…
 Face threatening acts
FTA: conversational turns that risk a ‘loss of face’

FTA’s strategies
Off-record – indirectly
On-record baldly, without redress
On-record baldly, with positive politeness strategy
On-record baldly, with negative politeness strategy
 Choosing a politeness strategy

Factors that influence the choice of politeness strategies:

 Social distance
 Power relation
 Significance of what S wants
 Degree of emphasis on involvement and independence in
particular contexts
 POLITENESS AND CONTEXT
(Cutting, 2008:51-52)
1. Forms and Functions
- Situational context
- The degree of imposition, the reasonableness of task
- The formality of the context
- Social context:
- Social distance (degree of familiarity)
- Power relation (differences of status, roles, class, age, ….)
- Cultural context:
 Mitigation devices: to take the edge off FTAs
- Pre-sequence (pre-request, pre-announcement, pre-
invitation)
- Insertion sequence
- Off-record speech acts
 Factors to be considered: social distance, power relations,
and the degree of imposition.
• Politeness principle and cooperative principle are often in
conflict with each other.
• The nature of face varies across cultures and politeness

strategies are not necessarily universal.

• Native speakers of a language are often less tolerant of

pragmatic errors in cross-cultural communication than they are

of grammatical errors.
 People need an awareness and expectation of sociopragmatic
differences as much as they need an understanding of how
these differences might be expressed linguistically.