Towards the Pragmatic Core of English for European Communication by Agata Klimczak-Pawlak

Author:Agata Klimczak-Pawlak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Despite the fact that Goffman’s work became the foundation for an immense amount of studies and models in politeness research, there are several criticisms of his concepts which need to be mentioned, two of which are noted by Felix-Brasdefer (2008). The first criticism is of the Western-centric ‘ideal social actor’ who is “obsessively concerned with his own self-image and self-preservation (Bargiela-Chiappini 2003: 1963). The second criticism refers to social order and the function of the actor—Arundale (2006) notes that s/he should be someone who is “interactionally engaged in sustaining the social order” (p. 198), while for Goffman “socialization provides the individuals with rules of scripts for ritual interaction” (Felix-Brasdefer 2008: 14).

Let us now focus on Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory for which Goffman’s notion of face is a foundation. By being polite, a speaker is attempting to create an implicated context (the speaker stands in relation x to the addressee in respect of act y) that matches the one assumed by the addressee” (Grundy 1995: 126). Our everyday communication is not only constrained by speech act theory but also by social rules and conventions. It is for this reason that our communication is often not as straightforward as it could be if not for the social boundaries. “Politeness allows people to perform many interpersonally sensitive actions in a nonthreatning or less threatening manner” (Holtgraves 2002: 42).

Similarly to the concept put forward by Leech (1983), Brown and Levinson’s theory is based on the maxims of Grice’s cooperative principle, however, it does not add new maxims, but rather it suggests politeness is the reason for deviations from maxims. Another distinctive feature of Brown and Levinson’s theory is that it links cooperative principle and an extension of Goffman’s (1967) notion of face.

Brown and Levinson (1987: 61) defined ‘face’ as “the public selfimage that every member wants to claim for himself” and distinguished between positive face and negative face which they call ‘wants’ of every member of a society. Negative face is the want of being unimpeded: “the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-destruction—i.e. to freedom of action and freedom from imposition” (p. 61); while positive face is our want of being accepted and liked by others: “the positive consistent self-image or ‘personality’ (crucially including the desire that this self-image be appreciated and approved of) claimed by interactants” (p. 61).

These two ‘socio-psychological wants’ (Culpeper 1998: 84) give rise to positive and negative politeness which are employed when face threatening acts (FTAs) occur, and those occur whenever any exchange between speakers takes place. Whenever a FTA is about to occur, one can redress the threat with either positive or negative politeness which shows respect for the hearer’s positive or negative face respectively (Cutting 2002: 45). Since face is vulnerable, it is in the best interest of the speakers engaging in communication to not only defend their own face when threatened, but also to maintain each other’s face. One might ask why we should care about another person’s face. The answer to that

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