CHAPTER TWO

SPEECH ACT THEORY AND LINGUISTIC POLITENESS

2.1 Linguistic actions and politeness

Speech act theory has become one of the predominant issues in the study of language

and human communication ever since it was initiated by such philosophers as J.L.

Austin (1962) and J. Searle (1968, 1979).

In his series of lectures published as How to do things with words (1962), Austin

challenges the view that would place truth conditions as central to language meanings.

He claims that there is a class of sentences which is not used with the intention of

making true or false statements. In other words, they are not used just to say things but

rather to do things by using language, i.e. to perform an act which he calls a speech

act. For example, when a speaker produces the following utterance in an appropriate

context :

(2.1) I hereby pronounce you husband and wife.

she/he has concurrently brought about a change in the state of affairs of the world and

the utterance has acquired a meaning which is said not to be subjected to a true or false

judgement.

Initially, Austin classified this type of utterances as performatives as opposed to

utterances such as statements and assertions, which he called constatives.

There are certain conditions to be met in order for a speech act to be successful, or

to be happy or felicitous as Austin puts it (1962:14). For example, for utterance

(2.1) to be felicitous, the speaker must have the authority to perform the act (i.e. a priest
or a public official), and the act must take place in an appropriate setting (i.e. in a church
 14

or a registry office). In other words, if performatives are to succeed or to be happy, they

have to satisfy certain conditions, which Austin calls felicity conditions, identified in

terms of the speakers beliefs and conventions linking the utterance to the institutional

procedures specific to a culture.

In that sense, performatives can only be assessed as felicitous according to the

satisfaction of their felicity conditions and are to be treated as separate from constatives.

However, later on, Austin subsumed all the performatives and constatives under the

same general theory of illocutionary acts which pertain to any (if not all) utterances

which either implicitly or explicitly perform acts. The constatives vs. performative

distinction thus eventually gave way to Austins distinction among the locutionary,

illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. These acts may all be performed to various

extents in context-specific speech utterances. According to Austin, the locutionary acts

are the acts of saying something while illocutionary acts are performed in saying

something and perlocutionary acts involve what we achieve regarding the addressees

state or behaviour by saying something.

Performatives then were said to have the illocutionary force or illocutionary

point of, for example, a request, a statement, etc. The illocutionary force can be made

explicitly in a performative clause by using a performative verb, i.e., a verb denoting the

actual act performed. For example, in making a request, one can use a verb-the semantic

content of which denotes the act in question, as in :

(2.2) I ask you to move your car.

There are many verbs that can be used performatively provided that they meet certain

formal conditions.

In English, performative utterances can be identified because they take the form of
a first person indicative active sentence with a performative verb in the simple present
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tense. Performative utterances can co-occur with the legalistic-sounding adverb hereby

which literally means in uttering these words. For example, hereby can be inserted in

(2.2) as:

(2.3) I hereby ask you to move your car.

Utterances using performative verbs are called explicit performatives because the

illocutionary force of the utterance is explicitly encoded in the semantic content of the

verb itself.

In addition to the use of explicit performative verbs, there are other means of

realising an illocutionary act such as the use of mood, for example, the imperative:

(2.4) Move your car, please!

This type of utterances is called primary or implicit performatives (Austin, 1962: 69).

They are realised by the use of illocutionary force indicating devices (I.F.I.D.), (Searle,

1969:64).

Any implicit performative can be made explicit by using a performative verb. For

example, the utterance Move your car ! can be expressed as I order you to move your

car. Searle calls this the principle of expressibility, i.e., anything that can be meant can

be said. In that sense, all utterances are said to perform specific actions through having

specific forces. Accordingly, Searle (1971:1) claims that the basic unit of human

linguistic communication is the illocutionary act, which is also the basic tenet of speech

act theory proposed by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969, 1971).

According to Austin, an utterance is perceived as having three basic senses and

that in performing a certain act, the speaker is said to perform simultaneously three kinds

of acts:
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1. locutionary act : the uttering of a sentence with certain sense and reference;

2. illocutionary act : the making of a statement, a request, etc., in uttering the

sentence by virtue of a conventional force associated with it; and

3. perlocutionary act : the effect on the hearer by performing the act.

It is the illocutionary act that is the focus of Austins interest, and the term speech act

is actually used exclusively to refer to that act. He also suggests different speech acts can

be classified and compared on the basis of a classification of speech-act verbs available

in a language. However, he fails to show systematically the connection between

illocutionary force and the explicit and implicit performatives and their felicity

conditions.

Searle (1969) further expands on Austins work by identifying a set of constitutive

rules derived from and defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for the

performance of a particular kind of illocutionary act and a set of semantic rules or

syntactic devices which helps to mark the utterance as an illocutionary act.

Searle suggests four kinds of conditions depending on how they specify

propositional content, preparatory conditions, sincerity and essential conditions of a

certain speech act.

The following rules are said to apply to a requestive speech act:

1. propositional content rules are semantic rules specifying restrictions on reference and

predication, for example, the act of requesting predicates a future action to be carried

out by the speaker;

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2. preparatory rules express the conditions without which an act is deemed impossible, a

request is only realisable if the speaker believes that the hearer is willing and able to

accomplish the intended act;

3. sincerity rules formulate the psychological state of the speaker, for example, a request

is to be made if the speaker wants the hearer to carry out the act; and

4. essential rules specify the nature of the act, for example, a request counts as the

speaker's attempt to get the hearer to do something.

The above rules constitute the necessary and sufficient conditions or felicity conditions

for the successful performance of a certain speech act, in this case, the requestive speech

act.

On the basis of the felicity conditions for different speech acts, Searle (1971,1976)

came up with a taxonomy of speech act types:

1. representatives or assertives which commit the speaker to the truth of the

proposition, for example, asserting or stating;

2. directives, the point of which is to get the hearer to do something, for example,

ordering, requesting;

3. commisives, which commit the speaker to some future action, for example,

promising, offering;

4. expressives, which express a certain psychological state of the speaker, for

example, thanking, apologising; and

5. declarations - acts of announcing the emergence of an event, for example,

declaring, christening.
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Searle's taxonomy takes the illocutionary act or illocutionary point of an utterance as the

starting point in identifying speech act types but not speech act verbs as tentatively

proposed by Austin (1962:151). He (1990:410) also makes a strong claim that "the basic

unit of human communication is the illocutionary act" and that his taxonomy has

universal application stating that "...there are five and only five basic things we can do

with proposition." (Ibid.: 151); we tell people how things are (assertives), we try to get

them to do things (directives), we commit ourselves to doing things (commissives), we

express our feelings and attitude (expressives), and we bring about changes in the world

so that the world matches the proposition just by virtue of the utterance (declarations).

Languages may have different sets of speech act verbs that describe certain ways people

do things with that language or speech act types. Some are culture-specific acts like

"baptising". But according to Searle (1990: 411), every human action is characterised by

having a point of purpose or intentionality and, for every speech act, there is always an

illocutionary point which is closely related to the notions of direction of fit and

expressed psychological state. These three interrelated notions (the illocutionary point,

direction of fit of propositional content, and psychological state) together form the basic

criteria for the classification of speech act types of human languages.

However, according to Searle (1979), in everyday interactions, it is often found

that the speaker may utter a sentence and means what he/she says and also means

another illocution with a different illocutionary content. For example, the utterance "Can

you pass the salt?" can be meant not as a question but as a request to pass the salt. In this

case, for each illocutionary act there are more than one way for the hearer to interpret the

real intention of the speaker, i.e., the illocutionary point intended. In other words, the

speaker's utterance meaning and the sentence meaning diverge. Utterances of this type

fall under what Searle (1979:31) calls "indirect speech acts".

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Indirect speech acts or indirectness are used to refer to cases where the

speaker means more than or other than what she/he says. According to Searle (1979:31),

indirect speech acts are cases in which ... one illocutionary act is performed indirectly

by way of performing another.

Indirectness can underlie such phenomena as irony, metaphor, hints, etc. In

requests, indirectness is used to describe conventional utterances which refer to one of

the felicity conditions of the request, i.e., "the hearer's ability to carry out the act", for

example, Can you shut the door? or even a hint It is cold in here. The illocutionary

force of these utterances is not explicit, thus requiring a certain amount of inferential

effort on the part of the hearer to arrive at the real intention of the speaker. The hearer

has to rely a great deal on contextual clues to get at the illocutionary point of the speech

act and to decode the speaker's real intention. In other words, indirectness is related to

the degree of the illocutionary transparency of the speech act. In the case of directives,

the English language is known to display a wide repertoire of verbal strategies ranging

from the most direct illocution such as the use of the imperative, for example, Open the

door or the conventionalised indirect formula like Would you mind opening the

door? to the most indirect ones like the use of hints, for example, It is hot in here. In

indirect speech acts, there is a mismatch between the primary illocutionary meaning and

the intended illocutionary point of the utterances,

In indirect speech acts the speaker communicates to the hearer more than he
actually says by way of relying on their mutually shared background
information, both linguistic and non-linguistic, together with the general
powers of rationality and inference on the part of the hearer. (Searle, 1975: 61)

The wide range of variations of linguistic structures and strategies available to the

speakers of a certain language in making a speech act and the ways they are interpreted

and understood, have been analysed and explained in various ways.

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Searle (1979) makes a distinction between the speaker's utterance meaning and

sentence meaning. For example, a speaker may utter a sentence, "Can you reach the

salt? and means it not merely a question about the hearers ability but a request to pass

the salt.

Morgan distinguishes between conventions of language which are concerned

with the literal meaning of an utterance and conventions of usage which determine the

meaning of the utterance in context. He claims that the two kinds of conventions are ...

both involved in a full understanding by the hearer of what is intended in the use of the

expression. (1978: 274)

For Gordon and Lakoff (1975:87) the conversationally implied meaning (the

request) can be conveyed only if the literal meaning (the question) is not intended to be

conveyed and if the hearer assumes that it is not. (Parenthesis in original).

The concept of indirectness in speech acts especially in requests as discussed so

far is directly related to the clarity of the meaning of the utterance or the degree of

transparency of the illocutionary force of the utterance.

The distinction between what is meant and what is said takes the form here of

assuming that the polite utterance reveals the speaker's true intentions only indirectly. In

order to avoid confrontation, the speaker seeks ways to modify or transform what he/she

is planning to say, thus achieving two ends at the same time; that of expressing the

speaker's intentions as much as possible, on the one hand, and that of doing so indirectly

enough to avoid a social conflict, on the other.

Indirectness has been associated with the levels of politeness. Searle (1979:36)

asserts that indirectness is ...the chief motivation for politeness. Thus, in a sense,

politeness is basically reduced to a kind of indirectness. Politeness, in that sense,

functions as a mask concealing the speaker's real intentions. The concept of indirectness
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and the closely associated notion of politeness have been claimed by some authors to

operate under universal principles (Searle: 1975,1983; Brown and Levinson: 1978;

Leech: 1983).

Indirectness is said to be conventionalised in languages. Request utterances in

English using interrogative forms can you do X ? are called conventionally indirect

requests and are considered polite in that ... compliance can be made to appear a free

act rather than obeying a command (Searle, 1975:75). In this case, firstly, the speaker

does not presume he/she knows about the hearers ability to perform the act, and

secondly, the form seems to give the hearer the option of refusal since the yes or no

alternative question allows no as a possible answer. In making polite requests, English

speakers resort to the conventionally indirect strategies by either questioning or stating

one of the felicity conditions for the successful performance of the request act such as

querying the hearer's willingness to do the act X, 'Would you do X?', the hearer's ability

to do X 'Can/could you do X?'. Brown and Levinson show that polite requests can be

derived in a systematic way from the simple imperative and claim "[m]ost of these ways

of making indirect speech acts appear to be universal or at least independently developed

in many languages" (1987: 136). In directives, indirectness is considered the main means

for the speaker to achieve politeness.

Brown and Levinson (1987: 142) also argue that "indirect speech acts have as their

prime raison d'tre the politeness functions they perform" and that "indirect speech acts

are universal and, for most part, are probably constructed in essentially similar ways in

all languages".

Leech (1983:108) also claims that indirect illocutions tend to be more polite

because: (a) they increase the degrees of optionality and (b) the more indirect an

illocution is, the more minimised and tentative its force tends to be.
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Within the framework of pragmatics, it is primarily speech-act theory which has

succeeded in accounting for the linguistic aspects of politeness in a systematic and

rational way. This has been achieved mainly through the concept of indirectness. Since

the mid-1970s, Western speech act theorists in their different approaches have more or

less converged views on the relational aspect of language use, which is referred to under

the cover term politeness.

Pioneer works on politeness by Lakoff (1973, 1975), Brown and Levinson (1978,

1987) and Leech (1983) view politeness as a rational, rule-governed, pragmatic aspect of

speech that is motivated by the universal human needs to maintain social relationship

and harmony and to avoid conflicts .

The underlying rational and functional foundations of politeness are assumed to be

of universal applicability in different languages and cultures (Brown and Levinson,

1987: 2). However, while recognising the crucial role language plays in the expression

of the relational aspect of language usage, different authors seem to have different

notions about politeness and the term "politeness" itself has not been properly defined in

the literature on politeness. As Janney and Arndt (1992a:12) comment "[t]he main

problem... is the lack of agreement among investigators about how politeness should be

defined as a subject of study." It would be appropriate at this point to examine the

notions of politeness and different perspectives and view-points expressed or implied by

different authors on politeness phenomena.

2.2 Politeness in the literature

2.2.l The notions of politeness and definition

According to Kasper (1994:3206), distinction should be drawn between the culture-

specific or the 'folk' notion of politeness which is socioculturally and historically

determined in any given language and culture or a social group and the technical
 23

concepts of politeness as constructed by researchers in linguistic pragmatics as

theoretical notions.

Watts in the introduction to "Politeness in Language" (1992: 3) also makes a

similar distinction between first-order and second-order politeness. First-order

politeness corresponds to the various ways in which polite behaviour is perceived and

talked about by members of socio-cultural groups. It encompasses, in other words,

common-sense notions of politeness. Second-order politeness, on the other hand, is a

theoretical construct, a term within a theory of social behaviour and language usage.

As regards first-order politeness, there seems to exist in all cultures and languages

words or notions which refer to proper social conduct and norms of appropriate social

behaviour in ordinary language use. In that sense, what counts as polite behaviour is

relative to a specific culture, a speech community or even a dominant social class within

a society.

According to Kasper (1994:3206), in English, 'polite' dates back to the fifteen

century ('polished'). In the seventeenth century, a polite person was defined as having

'refined courteous manners' (The Oxford Dictionary of Etymology). Politeness is thus

closely associated with the behaviour of the upper classes and hence the expression

'polite society'. In modern usage, 'polite' is defined as having refined manners,

courteous; cultivated, cultured; well-bred; (of literature etc.) refined, elegant(The

Concise Oxford Dictionary). There are equivalent terms for 'politeness' or courtesy in

other European languages. The French politesse or courtois, German hflichkeit,

Spanish cortes are found to have their common roots in the word 'court' which itself has

a clear historical foundation. Thus politeness is characterised in those cultures as having

been associated with the educated, upper classes and an urban form of life - hence the

Latin words urbanitas (urbanity), urbs ('city'). The modern English adjective urbane
which means "courteous, suave, elegant or refined in manner" shares some semantic
 24

properties with the word polite. As Donaldson (1984: 208) observes "polished,

mannerly, cultured, civilised life has come to be associated with the city, rough, rude,

boorish life with the country".

The etymological meanings of politeness mentioned above show that the notions

of politeness in most European languages are value-laden terms, and in all probabilities,

are closely associated with the upper and educated class in urban centres. Watts (1992b:

47) compares politeness in eighteen-century England to a "mask" for the cultivators of

polite manners "to enhance their own social standing and signal their membership in an

elitist social class". That could entail the exclusion, stigmatisation or even the "outright

persecution of out-groupers who opposed their claims to socio-political hegemony".

Such etymological origins might be irrelevant to ordinary modern speakers but

they can influence their views and judgements of other people's behaviour. Therefore,

any attempt to arrive at a theoretical construct of modern notions of politeness in any

culture or society should also take into account the traditional views of politeness in the

language or culture under study. Studies on politeness in non-western cultures also come

up with culture-coloured ways of conceptualisation of politeness which are deep-rooted

in their histories.

In the Chinese culture, according to Gu (1990), the most approximate equivalent

to the English word is limao ('polite appearance') which is derived from the old Chinese

word li. The notion of li was formulated by Confucius (551 B.C.-479 B.C.) which

refers to the social order and hierarchy of the slavery system of the Zhou Dynasty

(dating back to 1100 B.C.) as a model of government and social and moral standards.

The concept of Li as politeness was not well established until Dai Sheng (200-100 B.C.)

compiled the book Li Ji (On Li). Li is equated with the demonstration of self-denigration

and respect for the other person. The concept of Li has since withstood the test of time
 25

and changes in China and still remains at the core of modern conception of Limao in

modern China.

In the Vietnamese language, the closest equivalent to the English word 'politeness'

is lch s which is defined as "... having elegant manners and observing propriety in

conformity with social rules and expectations in interaction." (translated from T in

Vit nam ('AVietnamese Dictionary', Hong ph et al. (eds): 1988). The word Lch s

also reflects a close association with the modern urban form of life as a Vietnamese

saying about the elegant and refined manners of the Hanoi capital residents states "Lch

s ngi Trng An" ('Polite are the Trang An people') (Trang An is the ancient name for

Hanoi, the present day capital of Vietnam).

However, from a traditional point of view, the modern concept of politeness lch

salso encompasses the concept of L (The Sino-Vietnamese word for Li rites). As a

result of extensive contacts with, and influence from Chinese culture, the concept of Li

was introduced and assimilated into Vietnamese culture through nearly a thousand years

of Chinese domination and adoption of Confucianism as an official political doctrine

and a source of moral codes by successive feudal states and Confucian scholars in

ancient Vietnam (see Tran Dinh Huu, 1991: 27-53). L is a set of norms or social

etiquette which prescribes appropriate behaviour in dyadic relationships, mainly of the

vertical nature between the King and his subjects, between the teacher and students,

parent and child, husband and wife, between friends etc. L regulated all aspects of

human behaviour in different dyads in which relationships were based on reciprocity of

prescribed duties and rights. Social juniors were expected to show L php (rites) to

their seniors while social superordinates were supposed to protect and take good care of

the social subordinates. In feudal times, the concept of L or L Ngha was associated

with the upper class and educated Confucian scholars, hence the saying Giu c sinh l

ngha (Rites are born out of riches).

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The concept L Php (rites), has been assimilated from Chinese culture by

indigenous Vietnamese culture and has acquired new meanings in the process of social

change and revolution. The modern concept of politeness in Vietnam today still bears

the marked imprints of traditional social organisation and values (Nguyn Khc Vin:

1971).

Luong (1990: 145) in speaking of the impact of traditional system of values on the

present-day Vietnam says that "In general, institutions in socialist Vietnam can still be

considered to have been reconstructed in a remarkable continuity with the pre-

revolutionary past - an era when Confucianism-reinforced organic unity framework

reigned supreme in the native system."

As discussed above, culture-specific concepts of politeness are historically formed

and culture-dependent as viewed from within, i.e. from an emic point of view and

therefore ethnocentric. It is obvious that culturally constructed notions of politeness

cannot serve as an effective and independent research tool in spite of the fact that those

notions do inform us of how politeness is conceptualised in a given culture or

subculture. Even in closely related languages and cultures, the semantically similar term

may carry culturally different notions. For example, some Romance-speaking cultures

have similar words for politeness, and yet their exact socio-cultural meanings are found

to be of significant variations and contrasts (Ehlich: 1992). The word politesse in French

culture may have social meanings different from politeness in English. Similarly, the

term Li in Chinese and L in Vietnamese, although share the same cultural origin, can

have distinct cultural meanings.

Culture-dependent concepts help us to gain insight into the ways people of

different cultures conceptualise politeness and what they think standards of polite

behaviour in their relative culture are. However, they can not be considered useful tools
of investigating politeness from a cross-cultural perspective, let alone, establishing
 27

universal criteria for comparative studies. As Watts (1992b: 49) comments we cannot

be at all certain that an English native speaker today understands politeness in exactly

the same way as the German native speaker understands Hflichkeit or the French

native speaker politesse. It is even more problematic when one tries to work out

cross-language equivalents for the English word "politeness" due to difficulty in

translation of the culture-dependent and historically-constructed notions. In cross-

cultural pragmatics research, in the absence of a neutral and culture-free term, it seems

legitimate for researchers to proceed from a theoretically constructed term as a starting

point and analyse our findings against the native notion to work out the similarities and

differences in socio-cultural contents as Pike (1967: 37) rightly states that the relative

distinction between etic and emic standpoints is crucial in cross-cultural research.

In the last two decades, various authors working on pragmatics and linguistic

politeness have proposed different models on linguistic interaction and its associated

notions of politeness. Politeness as a technical term as used by the various authors has

not been properly defined and different authors seem to conceptualise politeness in

different ways.

Lakoff (1975: 64) defines politeness as those forms of behaviour which have been

"developed in society in order to reduce friction in interpersonal interaction" and "as a

means of minimising the risk of confrontation in discourse" (1989: 102).

Leech (1983: 104) defines politeness as those forms of behaviour which are aimed

at the establishment and maintenance of comity, i.e., the ability of participants in a

socio-communicative interaction to engage in interaction in an atmosphere of relative

harmony. Politeness is viewed as a means of achieving courteous goals.

Fraser and Nolen (1981) suggest that politeness is a result of a conversational

contract entered into by participants to ensure conflict-free interaction. Politeness is

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thus a set of constraints on verbal behaviour. Politeness is thus defined with regard to

the "conversational contract":

In general, speakers operate within the terms of the conversational contract and,
in doing so, act in a way which we call polite. To be polite is to abide by the
rules of the relationships. (Ibid.1981: 96)

Acting politely is then the same as using language appropriately. Their definition of

politeness is similar to the aspect of appropriateness in the concept of "communicative

competence" developed by Hymes (1972). However, they make a distinction between

the concept of deference and politeness quoting Goffman (1971: 56) "Deference ... is

that component of activity which functions as a symbolic means by which appreciation

is regularly conveyed". Like politeness, deference is associated with an activity or with

an utterance and not with a sentence, per se. A speaker is perceived as polite if he/she by

virtue of his/her utterance, conveys a level of status that is consistent with the prior

agreement. If, however, the speaker assigns a status to the hearer which is either too

high or lower than expected i.e. an inappropriate level of deference, in either case the

speaker can be taken as impolite. For example, for a friend to make a request by saying

either "Could I possibly trouble you to take a moment to do it ?" or "Do it" is to convey

an inappropriate status level and could be taken as impolite.

Braun (1988), in her work on terms of address, also defines politeness in terms of

social adequacy. In that sense, no forms of address or language sentences are ipso facto

polite but the speakers, in using them in context, can be judged as being polite or not.

Speakers of a language are capable of being polite in an impolite way and, vice versa,

impolite in a polite way.

Brown and Levinson (1987), whilst not taking politeness to result from a set of

pragmatic principles but rather from a more underlying need to minimise the potential

imposition on the addressee as a result of the verbal act, nevertheless understand it to

refer to the forms of behaviour which allow communication between potentially
 29

aggressive partners. According to Brown (1980: 114), "What politeness essentially

consists in is a special way of treating people, saying and doing things in such a way as

to take into account the other person's feelings".

The common theme underlying these varying definitions is the idea of appropriate

language use associated with smooth communication. Linguistic politeness thus refers

to verbal ways and means of avoiding conflict and maintaining social harmony of

interpersonal relationships. This is as far as one can go in identifying the common

notion for the variety of concepts proposed by the various authors in pragmatics and

linguistic politeness research. According to Kasper (1994: 3206), "Politeness as a

pragmatic notion refers to the ways in which linguistic action is carried out - more

specifically, ways in which the relational function in linguistic action is expressed." This

relational function is achieved "on the one hand through the speaker's use of intentional

strategies to allow his [(sic!)] utterances to be received favourably by the addressee and

on the other hand by the speaker's expression of the expected and prescribed norms of

speech" (Ide 1988: 371).

The concepts of politeness thus defined by the various researchers are claimed to

be universally applicable .

In a theoretical sense, politeness itself is a neutral term which refers to the

appropriate occurrence of an utterance or a stretch of discourse in context. It is

associated with the notion of social adequacy (Broun: 1988). Any forms which are

considered more than the socially adequate point can be called polite usage, and, vice

versa any forms that are below that point are impolite usage. So on the politeness scale,

the socially adequate point marks the neutral or zero-valued centre.

impolite adequate polite

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Figure 2.1 Scale of politeness

Watts (1992) uses a similar term for the notion of socially adequate behaviour. It is

"politic behaviour" or "socially appropriate behaviour" which he defines as

socio-culturally determined behaviour directed towards the goal of establishing

and/or maintaining in a state of equilibrium the personal relationships between
the individuals of a social group, whether open or closed, during the ongoing
process of interaction. (Ibid. 1992: 50)

From the point of social appropriateness, two directions of marked behaviour may now

be posited, one leading to communicative break-down (impolite/non-politic usage), and

the other to an enhancement of ego's standing with respect to alter, i.e., to "making other
people have a better opinion" of oneself (polite usage). Thus what counts as polite

behaviour is more than politic or socially appropriate behaviour. Linguistic forms can be

considered as polite forms if they go beyond their normal usage as socio-culturally

constrained forms of politic or appropriate behaviour.

The distinction is especially useful in the study of linguistic politeness in some

honorific languages. The use of honorific forms in Japanese (Hill et al.,1986), speech

levels in Javanese (Geertz, 1972) and Korean (Hwang, 1990), personal reference terms

in Vietnamese (Luong, 1990), terms of address in Chinese (Chao, 1956), and Cantonese

(Cheung, 1990) depends crucially on ego's perception of the total set of audience

features in the speech event. The choice of appropriate address forms or speech levels

reflects the speaker's passive observance of the socially imposed norms of behaviour. As

Matsumoto (1989) points out, "...no utterance in Japanese can be neutral with respect to

social context."

Hill et al. (1986) used the Japanese term Wakimae, roughly translated as

"discernment", to refer to "the almost automatic observation of socially agreed-upon

rules" which is similar to the concept of social adequacy or politic behaviour.

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In the situation where the speaker has the choice of choosing a higher form than

the socially adequate one, that form is a polite one, since the strategy of "volition", the

use of politeness strategies according to one's free will (Hill et al., 1986), has taken

precedence over that of discernment. In this case, we are dealing with politeness

phenomena, i.e., any higher forms that can replace a socially adequate form in a certain

interactional context.

In the field of cross-cultural politeness research, many authors have attempted to

construct various models with the aims of establishing universal research frameworks.

Fraser (1990) identifies four major perspectives on the treatment of politeness: the

social-norm view; the conversational-maxim view; the face-saving view; and the

conversational contract view. Kasper (1990), however, distinguishes two major ways of

conceptualisation of politeness as strategic conflict avoidance and social indexing.

Following is an overview of the main approaches as summarised by Fraser and

argument for a rational that calls for the extension, modification and supplementation of

the existing views in order to fully account for politeness phenomena in Vietnamese

culture.

2.2.2 An overview of the theoretical perspectives on politeness

2.2.2.1 The social-norm view

The social-norm view reflects the historical understanding of politeness as defined in the

previous section. Politeness is considered a form of behaviour which conforms to

 32

a particular set of social norms consisting of more or less explicit rules that
prescribe a certain behaviour, a state of affairs, or ways of thinking in a context.
A positive evaluation (politeness) arises when an action is in congruence with
the norm, a negative evaluation (impoliteness = rudeness) when action is to the
contrary. (Fraser, 1990: 220)

Polite behaviour in this sense is dictated by the dominant social group in relations to

specific social events. This view is reflected in the books of etiquette which offer a

variety of rules for appropriate behaviour in certain contexts as to, for example, how to

conduct polite conversations at parties, how to politely begin and end a conversation.

This normative view considers politeness to be associated with speech styles, whereby

the higher degree of formality implies greater politeness.

The normative approach is considered appropriate for describing highly ritualised

behaviour such as greetings, thanking and other formulaic expressions needed for certain

social occasions. Normative behaviour is fossilised in social etiquette prescribed for

different social occasions. Certain forms of verbal behaviour must follow the norms. In

spite of the move towards more informal styles in business correspondence, the

structuring and expressions found in legal and business writings still retain a highly

stylised and formal character. The writer is expected to conform passively to the norms
to avoid negative perception by the recipient. In business letter writing, one is expected

to adhere to fixed formula in the opening greetings and letter endings, for example, the

opening salutation Dear Sir/Madam, should be accompanied by the appropriate ending

Yours Faithfully, but not Yours Sincerely,.

Normative motivation is found to underlie much of our daily behaviour. In the

Vietnamese culture, some forms of behaviour are highly ritualised. At meal times, in

most northern Vietnamese families, the junior members of the families are expected to

politely request (mi) their parents and their elder siblings to be served first. At wedding

ceremonies, people are expected to exchange gifts and conduct conversations in a highly

ritualised manner. Social behaviour in many social events calls for strict observance of
 33

social norms or rites to remove any uncertainty and spontaneous action that might cause

disruption. Failure to observe these socially imposed norms could bring disgrace and a

loss of face to the interactants. The use of speech levels in honorific languages, personal

pronouns and politeness formulae are typical examples of ritualised and normative

behaviour

However, the normative view has its weaknesses as theoretical concepts in

establishing universally valid principles in politeness research. The sets of prescriptive

rules fail to capture the dynamic, contextually negotiated nature of polite behaviour.

They are often culture or even group specific and cannot form a viable theory capable of

accounting for the interactive nature of polite behaviour. They can be best used as social

standards against which to examine and explain the concept of politeness from within,

i.e., from an emic point of view. Brown and Levinson (1987: 86) argue against the norm-

based approach to politeness research stating that since norms-based approaches are

specific to particular social populations or cultures, they have limited explanatory role in

human interactive verbal behaviour. They argue for a rational approach that firmly puts

human verbal behaviour on socio-biological basis. For that reason, the norms-based

approach has few adherents among current western researchers (Fraser, 1990: 221).

However, recently there has been renewed interest in the normative aspect of

politeness among researchers in non-western languages (Hill et al., 1986; Ide, 1989 and

Gu, 1990). Their approach largely originates from the critique of the face-saving view of

politeness posited by Brown and Levinson (1987) and its inadequacy in accounting for

politeness phenomena in some honorific languages and Asian cultures. Hill et al. (1986)

and Ide (1989) in their account of verbal behaviour in Japanese are critical of the over-

emphasis on rational, face-saving motivation for polite verbal behaviour as posited by

Leech (1983) and Brown and Levinson (1987). Western researchers like Leech and

Brown and Levinson are criticised for their bias towards mainly conceptualising
 34

politeness as strategic conflict avoidance by rational agents. This aspect of politeness is

referred to as 'strategic', or 'volitional' politeness, and needs to be distinguished from

politeness as 'social indexing', or 'discernment' which emphasises the normative aspect

of linguistic politeness. Unlike strategic politeness, discernment operates independently

of the speaker's current goals. Discernment represents the speaker's passive and

automatic observation of social norms and conventions. Discernment is claimed to be

the main motivation for the use of polite formula, etiquette, speech levels, forms of

address. Volition and discernment are shown to operate to different degrees in different

languages, speech events and verbal means (Hill et al., 1986). These two aspects of

polite verbal behaviour are said to form the two extremes of the politeness continuum.

These two aspects are also related. For example, the main function of honorifics in a

language is mainly to mark relative role occupancy, i.e., observing discernment, but

when social marking is optional, it lends itself to strategic exploitation. Many honorific

expressions can be historically traced to strategic origins (Brown and Levinson, 1987:

23).

The normative approach has been incorporated by researchers in Asian languages

as supplementary to the 'strategic' approach (Cf. Hill et al., 1986; Ide, 1989 and Gu,

1990) to account for linguistic politeness in the cultures and languages under study. The

discernment aspect of politeness or the social indexing view will be discussed in more

detail in section 2.2.2.4 in Chapter Five on the operation of discernment in Vietnamese

requests.

2.2.2.2 The conversational-maxim view

2.2.2.2.1 Grice's conversational principles

In the early 1960's, the study of language function became a major concern of the

philosophers (rather than linguists) among whom Grice could be considered the first
 35

author to explore systematically the structure of human verbal behaviour from a

pragmatic point of view. His famous work, 'Logic and Conversation' (1975), could be

called a theory of conversation. Although he does not specifically deals with the notion

of politeness, his article can be considered the starting point for many of the theoretical

approaches to linguistic politeness.

Grice looks at language functions from philosophical perspectives such as the

relationships between sense, meanings and reference, and truth and falsity of

propositions. He formulates a set of co-operative principles (CP) and conversational

implicature, claiming that it is the maximum co-operation of the interactants that makes

conversations coherent. His general principles can be summarised as follows:

Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it

occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are
engaged. (Ibid.1975: 45)

His general co-operative principle is again divided into four categories under them are

the maxims and sub-maxims;

QUANTITY:

l. Make your contribution as informative as is required

2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

QUALITY:

l. Do not say what you believe to be false.

2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

RELATION:

- Be relevant.
 36

MANNER :

1. Avoid obscurity of expression.

2. Avoid ambiguity.

3. Be brief.

4. Be orderly.

These are rules of conversation in which the interactants choose to co-operate in a purely

rational manner. In other words, the CP provides for the content, context and manner of

conducting maximally efficient and co-operative conversations. Unlike rules of grammar

which provide for well-formedness of sentences (, for example, subject-verb agreement),

Grice's CP serves to provide a set of constraints for the use of language - for the use of

linguistic forms in conversation.

Grice assumes that the CP is always observed and any violation of any of the

maxim can give rise to conversational implicatures signalling certain speaker intentions.

For example, a university professor providing a scholarship recommendation for a

student, writes Ms. Jones always arrives on time and takes copious notes. His message

is considered a violation of the maxim Be relevant, and according to Grice's theory,

leads to the implicature that the speaker does not think highly of Ms. Jones.

Grice notes that his maxims differ in their relative importance as does the

significance of their violation, and suggests that there might be a need for other maxims

among them, Be polite:

There are of course, all sorts of other maxims (aesthetic, social, or moral in
character) such as 'Be polite', that are also normally observed by participants in
talk exchanges, and these may also generate non conventional
implicatures.(Ibid.1975: 47)

But Grice argues that the four maxims of his co-operative principle are particularly

important for the purpose of talk exchange . He confines his principles to

 37

the standard type of conversational practice not merely as something that all or
most do IN FACT follow but as something that is REASONABLE for us to
follow that we SHOULD NOT abandon.(Ibid. 1975: 48)

Grice also allows for departure from these maxims which he calls flouting. In the

event of one or several maxims being flouted, the hearer has to rely on different lines of

interpretation and inference from the context, i.e., resort to what he terms

conversational implicature.

Since the publication of his theory, one of the key issues in interactional research

as to Grice's maxims has been the question whether other maxims could be added or

even they can be further reduced. Leech (1983), for instance, accepts the co-operative
principle and adds a politeness principle with six sub-maxims; the maxims of tact,

generosity, approbation, modesty, agreement and sympathy. These maxims are said to

explain the apparent violations of the CP. The interactant may be less informative or less

relevant in order to achieve politeness' end. Leech (1983: 104) argues that "politeness is

an important missing link between the CP and the problem of how to relate sense to

force" and that the politeness principle is a necessary complement, which rescues the

co-operative principle from serious trouble(Ibid.: 80). For example, in directives,

speakers commonly use indirect formulations and thus flout the maxims of quantity and

manner respectively in order to reduce possible face-threats (in the sense of Brown and

Levinson [1987]).

Sperber and Wilson, in Relevance; Communication and Cognition (1986) argue

that the number of Grician maxims be reduced to just one, namely, the maxim of

relevance, claiming that their theory is not only more explicit than Grice's co-operative

principle but also more general in its applicability. Relevance theory claims to

accommodate instances of polite but seemingly less than optimally relevant speech

without having to make a distinction between co-operative and polite behaviour.

 38

In natural conversations, we can find many instances where the prime concern

of the interactant is not to exchange factual information. In English, people often

greet each other by inquiring about one's health How are you ? and at times, more

than once a day. The utterance is not aimed at seeking actual information but rather at

maintaining human rapport. In many instances, people tell white lies in order to please

the hearers. False excuses are invented to decline an invitation to a dinner just to appear

to be polite to the host. In making requests, English speakers tend to use elaborate,

indirect constructions instead of using a bare imperative, which is a clear example of

violating the sub-maxims of being brief and clear under Grice's maxims of quality and

manner.

There are many instances of human interactions where non-cooperative

communication is the norm, for example, police interrogations. One may wonder how

many politicians adhere to the maxim Do not say what you believe to be false in their

political discourse. If all the business people and diplomats in the world strictly adhered

the Grician maxims, a great deal of time and money spent on arduous and lengthy

negotiations would be saved.

Examples of 'non-cooperative' communication can also be found in Vietnamese

culture. When people meet, instead of using the standard greeting formula, they often

ask about what the hearer is doing, or whether the addressee has had his/her dinner yet,

which sounds very personal and embarrassing to cultural outsiders. However, these

personal questions in Vietnamese culture have become conventionalised ways of

expressing concern for the hearer's welfare and accepted as greeting rituals but not

information-seeking questions (as may be perceived by people from other cultures).

Vietnamese speakers also prefer indirect ways of asking embarrassing questions.

In asking personal questions about someone's marriage status, instead of asking directly
when a young boy or girl is going to get married, people would say:
 39

(2.5) Bao gi ch cho chng ti n ko y ?

When do you think you can give us a treat of sweets ?

This question is a violation of manner (Avoid ambiguity). In natural conversations one

can find ample evidences of violation of co-operative principle in favour of the social

goal of maintaining social rapport.

Grice's maxims can be best applied to communication to which natural deductive

logic is the guideline and cannot cover other aspects of natural language use. Since

language behaviour is socio-culturally constrained, there are contexts where

informativeness is appreciated, for example, scientific discourse, while in other

situations one should refrain from giving away information either for practical ends, for

example, business negotiations or polite purposes. As the Vietnamese saying goes S

tht mt lng which literally means 'the truth is displeasing'.

Communicative efficiency therefore should be viewed from both the

informative as well as the affective aspects. In making a request, the speaker has

always to try to balance between conveying the maximum amount of information to

accomplish what he/she wants, i.e., achieving locutionary force clarity, and maintaining

rapport with the hearer, for example, by indirectness strategies. In social interaction, one

is constantly faced with the dualism of both being practical and being social.

Grice also claims that his maxims are universal on the assumption that they

account for human rational verbal behaviour. However, research into other languages

shows that what is conceived as socially acceptable differs across cultures due to

different attitudes towards the truth and even natural logic.

Keenan (1976) observes that Malagasy people refrain from disclosing information,

thus violating the maxim of quality. Eades (1982) in a study of Queensland's Aboriginal
 40

languages, also discovered socio-cultural constraints on information exchange in the

Aboriginal culture. In this culture, there are restrictions on who can have access to

certain information.

Leech (1983:80) also contests that Grices CP does not apply to all societies in the

same way. It seems that Grice's maxims do not cover situational and cross-cultural

variations. Different cultures have different ways of conveying and inferring

information. Furthermore, what is considered informative or true is not the only concern,

but what, how and when to be said is also important depending on the roles of the

participants, and their attitude towards factual information in a given socio-cultural and

linguistic community.

Masumoto (1989), in her article on politeness and conversational universals,

criticises Grice's theory for its over reliance on the propositional content of the utterance

alone which leaves out the social markers, the use of which is compulsory in Japanese.

According to her, in the Japanese language, no single sentence can be considered neutral

with regards to the social contexts.

Many politeness researchers have proposed to expand on Grice's CP in various

ways in order to fully account for the social function of language use which, in many

instances, violates in one way or another Grician maxims.

2.2.2.2.2 Lakoff's rules of pragmatic competence.

Lakoff (1973), in her paper The logic of politeness was among the first to adopt

Grice's construct of Conversational Principles in an effort to account for politeness

although she never explicitly states what she means by politeness. However, one can

infer from her writing about the conflict between clarity and politeness that politeness is

the avoidance of offence:

 41

Politeness usually supersedes: it is considered more important in a conversation

to avoid offence than to achieve clarity. This makes sense, since in most
informal conversations, actual communication of important ideas is secondary
to merely reaffirming and strengthening relationships. (1973: 297-298)

Lakoff formulates two rules of pragmatic competence:

(1) be clear (essentially Grice's maxims); and

(2) be polite.

She takes these two rules to be in opposition to each other. In addition, she posits the

following sub-rules:

Rule 1: Don't impose.

(used when formal/impersonal politeness is required)

Rule 2: Give options.

(used when informal politeness is required)

Rule 3: Make A feel good.

(used when intimate politeness is required)

Lakoff (1973: 301) suggests that "all polite action is such because it is in accord with the
dictates of one or more of Rules 1, 2, 3, as is a polite utterance." The speaker, in

choosing a level of politeness, has to assess the situations and adopt the appropriate

rules. However, Lakoff never shows, in a systematic way, how the speaker goes about

choosing a level of politeness.

Lakoff's rules are, to a certain extent, arbitrary and non-discrete. The three rules

above can be said to have the overall function of making A feel good. When one is

trying to give option, it is synonymous with don't impose. The reader is left unclear

as to what is meant by informal politeness and intimate politeness and whether

formal politeness is the same as impersonal politeness.

 42

These rules or maxims mainly reflect rules of politeness in typical Anglo-

American culture which emphasises non-interference and freedom of actions of

individual speakers and cannot be considered pragmatic universal rules.

Impersonalisation is not favourably perceived as a polite strategy in Vietnamese culture

since it violates the maxim of address whereby hierarchical rules in social verbal

interactions demand that status of the hearer and the speaker should be clearly indicated

(Cf. Gu (1990) on the maxim of address, and Chapter Three on personal reference

forms in Vietnamese).

2.2.2.2.3 Leech's maxims of politeness

Expanding on Grice's co-operative principle (CP), Leech attempts to construct a

rhetorical model of pragmatics which studies linguistic communication in terms of

communicative goals and principles of good communicative behaviour. His theory

builds on the speech act theory of Austin and Searle and Grices theory of conversational

implicature, but at the same time incorporates other socio-pragmatic principles of

language use, with politeness principle being the most important factor regulating

human interaction.

Leech makes a distinction between the speaker's illocutionary goals (what speech

act the speaker intends to be conveying by the utterance) and the speaker's social goals

(what position the speaker is taking on being truthful, polite, ironic etc.). In this regard,

he posits two sets of conversational (rhetorical) principles - Textual Rhetoric and

Interpersonal Rhetoric. Interpersonal rhetoric is composed of Grice's co-operative

principle (CP), politeness principle (PP) and the Irony Principle (IP). He believes that

these principles are regulative and socially constrain communicative behaviour:

 43

Politeness does not serve here as a premise in making inferences about S's
communicative intention. Thus, the PP does not seem to help in understanding
S's intention although, obviously, it plays a role in S's choosing the appropriate
expression of his (sic!) communicative intention... Thus the PP may help to
understand reasons S had for choosing the particular content and form of what
he said, but usually does not help to infer S's intentions. (1983: 38-39)

Similar to Lakoff, Leech argues that his CP and PP often create a tension for the speaker

who must make a compromise between what message to convey and how to convey it.

He writes:

The CP enables one participant in a conversation to communicate on the

assumption that the other participant is being co-operative. In this the CP has
the function of regulating what we say so that it contributes to some assumed
illocutionary or discoursal goal(s). It could be argued that the PP has a higher
regulative role than this: to maintain the social equilibrium and the friendly
relations which enable us to assume that our interlocutors are being co-
operative in the first place. (1983: 82)

Like Grice, Leechs global statement Minimise the expression of impolite beliefs

(1983: 81) is further elaborated into six Interpersonal maxims, as follows :

Tact maxim: minimise cost to other. Maximise benefit to other.

Generosity maxim: minimise benefit to self. Maximise cost to self.

Approbation maxim: minimise dispraise of other. Maximise dispraise of self.

Modesty maxim: minimise praise of self. Maximise praise of other.

Agreement maxim: minimise disagreement between self and other. Maximise

agreement between self and other.

Sympathy maxim: Minimise antipathy between self and other. Maximise

sympathy between self and other.

(Adapted from Leech (1983 : 16))

Leech claims that politeness principle is a complement to CP and it is good for both

verbal and non-verbal communication. He also claims that his model could be applied

universally across cultures. Leech says that different cultures tend to show different

priorities given to a certain maxim and that the tact maxim is most important in English
 44

culture. The tact maxim applies to the propositional content of a speech act and can be

identified on three scales which has a bearing on the degree of tact appropriate to a given

speech situation:

1. the cost/benefit scale which specifies how much the proposed action is judged

by the speaker to be of cost or benefit to the speaker or to the addressee;

2. the 'optionality' scale which specifies to what extent the proposed action is at the

choice of the addressee; and

3. the 'indirectness' scale which specifies how much indirectness is involved in the

proposed action.

Leech's model of polite use of language includes such sociocultural factors as scales of

values attached to language use. However, it fails to account for other contextual factors

such as roles of speakers, setting, and gender. These maxims constitute 'norms' of

behaviour out of context, therefore they can by no means be considered a systematic and

dynamic model, since it is almost impossible to make generalisations out of context. In

many instances being too polite may sound insincere, for example, between intimates

and social equals. Furthermore, his model can best be applied to English culture where

social distance is given higher value, especially in formal situations. In making requests,

English speakers tend to use elaborate, indirect constructions to sound more polite like

I wonder if it might be possible for me to ask you a favour... Translated literally this

request sounds superfluous and too formal in Vietnamese. Indirectness may be

interpreted as keeping a distance and therefore not suitable for all situations or

societies where social intimacy is highly valued, hence indirectness may mean

insincerity and lack of consideration. For instance, the structures questioning the hearer's

willingness or future action 'will/would you do X?' serve to express conventional

 45

indirectness in the Germanic and Romance languages, but not in Slavic languages

(Wierzbicka 1991: 32-204).

Research on cross cultural speech act realisations (Blum-Kulka et al.:1985) reveals

that there is not a direct correlate between indirectness and politeness. It seems that there

are numerous superimposing factors and social rules on politeness and these norms

operate differently from culture to culture. It would be inadequate to adopt a prescriptive

rule-based approach to the study of this complex phenomenon. Instead a systematic

approach should be adopted to sufficiently account for the variations across cultures

before one can arrive at an explanatory, adequate universal theory of polite linguistic

behaviour.

As with other conversational-maxim approaches, Leech's list of maxims are to a

large extent prescriptive in nature. Politeness is not shown to be systematically linked to

pragmatic inferencing processes, but rather with the attainment of social goals

characterised by Anglo-American middle class polite behaviour.

In that sense, Leech's maxims move closer to the social-norm approach although

he claims (1983: 84) that he is more concerned with absolute politeness, i.e. the

strategies to maximise the politeness of polite illocutions (offers) and minimise the

impoliteness of impolite illocutions (requests/orders), than with relative politeness, i.e.

social norms of behaviour relative to a culture or a social group.

Since the maxims are culture-specific they can be extended or reduced. There is no

theoretical criterion to delimit the number of maxims, new maxims can be added or

reduced. Gu (1990), in his study on politeness phenomena in China, adds two more

maxims, i.e. the address and self-denigration maxims. Jucker (1988), on the other hand,

suggests that Leech's maxims can be reduced to Sperber and Wilson's principle of

relevance.
 46

The maxim-based approach can be adequate for describing the normative aspect of

linguistic politeness. However, the maxims are not flexible and abstract enough to serve

as universal criteria for comparative study of politeness since norms are found to be at

variance across cultures. Generally speaking, the conversational maxim approach lacks

the theoretical requirements of explicitness, parsimony and predictiveness (Kasper,

1994: 3208).

2.2.2.3 The face-saving view; Brown and Levinson's theory.

Brown and Levinson's work (1978; 1987) is one of the most comprehensive theories on

politeness phenomenon combining linguistic concepts adapted from British speech act

theory (notions of propositions, intentionality, implicature, rational conversational

principles and maxims) and interactional concepts adapted from North American social

psychology (notions of self, partner, face-work, conflict avoidance etc.). Although they

owe a great deal to Grice for his co-operative principles (CP) (i.e. his account of the

nature of communication as a special kind of intention designed to be recognised by the

recipient), their seminal work and approach mark a significant departure from Grice's

maxims which goes beyond a mere extension of the Gricean maxims.

Brown and Levinson have formulated an abstract theoretical framework based on

cross-cultural linguistic data collected from recordings of situated conversational

exchanges in three totally unrelated languages; English, Tamil (a South-Indian language)

and Tzeltal (a Mayan language of Mexico). They also claim that their theory could yield

cross-cultural and linguistic universality from generalisations made on the basis of

empirically tested data.

Brown and Levinson's treatment of politeness is similar to that proposed by Leech

in that linguistic devices are regarded as specific realisations of generalised politeness

strategies. While Leech approaches politeness through a theory of general pragmatics,

 47

Brown and Levinson develop a cohesive theory whereby linguistic devices are

realisations of specific politeness strategies, i.e. from means to ends. Their theories are

said to encompass both verbal and non-verbal behaviour, however, their primary

concern is with linguistic behaviour.

The fundamental advantage of Brown and Levinson's theory over other approaches

is that it takes as its starting point Goffman's notion of face, interprets polite behaviour

as being basic to the maintenance of face wants and links it with the Gricean maxims in

a systematic way without having to extend them. What Brown & Levinson call "Bald

on-record strategies", i.e. the use of the imperative impositive 'Do X', may involve

simply following the maxims, whereas politeness strategies would involve violating the

maxims in specific ways.

Basic to their theory is the concept of face which they assume all competent

adult members of a society have. Their concept of face is derived from Goffman who

(1967: 27-31) defines face as "the positive social value a person effectively claims for

himself by the lines others assume he has taken during a particular contact." By saving

the face of others, each person saves his/her own, and vice versa. Goffman calls

activities directed to this end facework.

Face is defined by Brown & Levinson (1987:61) as "the public self-image that

every member wants to claim for him/herself" which consists of two related aspects:

- negative face : the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, and rights to

non-distraction, i.e. to freedom of action and freedom from imposition; and

- positive face : the positive consistent self-image or 'personality' claimed by the

interactants.
 48

Face can be lost, maintained or enhanced and must be constantly attended to in

interaction. A person will always have two points of view towards face-saving: a

defensive orientation toward saving one's own face and a protective orientation toward

saving others' face. It is this tension that regulates verbal and non-verbal behaviour

according to social and contextual situations as perceived by and mutually recognised by

the interactants in the speech event. These two aspects are also treated as two basic 'face

wants':

- negative face want: the want of every 'competent adult member' that his/her

actions be unimpeded by others; and

- positive face want : the want of every member that his/her wants be desirable to

at least some others.

Some speech acts are considered potentially face-threatening and are called face-

threatening acts (FTAs). Acts, such as requests or commands, which interfere with the

addressee's freedom of action are deemed to threaten his/her negative face. Acts, such as

apologies, which approve of the hearers wants, threaten positive face. Some acts

threaten both positive and negative face, for example, complaints.

In verbal interaction, speakers elect to avoid or minimise the threat to face either

of the speaker, or the hearer or both, therefore people resort to 'politeness' or 'tact'

strategies. In other words, the interactants will have to take into consideration the

relative weighting of (at least) three wants:

- the want to communicate the content of the FTA;

- the want to be efficient or urgent; and

- the want to maintain hearer's and speaker's face to any degree.

 49

On these assumptions, Brown and Levinson have formulated five possible sets of

strategies depending on the degrees of face-risk. The higher (number) the risk will be,

the more polite the strategies are to be selected. The degree of threat or risk posed by an

FTA is calculated by rational members of a culture as the additive weighting (W) of

three dependent variables:

1. social distance between speaker and hearer (D);

2. their relative power (P); and

3. the absolute ranking (R) of impositions in a particular culture.

They also stress that these factors can alter with different contexts and they are not

intended as sociologists' ratings of actual power, distance, etc., but only as actors'

assumptions of such ratings assumed to be mutually assumed, at least within certain

limits." (Brown and Levinson, 1978 :76)

Brown & Levinson assume that rational speakers may assess the strength or, as

they put it, weightiness of an FTA so that they can act accordingly. They suggest the

following formula:

Wx = D(S,H) + P(H,S) + Rx

W represents the weightiness of x, the FTA, which will determine the degree to which

the speaker will choose an appropriate politeness strategy (Fig 2.2). W is calculated by

adding three values on a scale from 1 to n; D(S,H), the social distance between the

speaker and the hearer, which they further qualify as "the degree of familiarity and

solidarity they share", P(H,S) the relative power of the speaker with respect to the hearer,

i.e., the degree to which the speaker is able to impose her/his will on and control the

behaviour of the hearer (similar to the status variable used by Brown and Ford [1961]),
and Rx, the degree to which, according to some absolute ranking of imposition within
 50

the culture concerned, the social act x lies within the speaker's right to perform and

acceptable to the hearer.

Circumstances determining choice of a strategy

Lesser risk
(1) without redressive
action, baldly

on record (2) Positive

with redressive
action
Do the FTA
(4) off record (3) Negative

(5) Don't do the FTA

Greater risk

Fig.2.2 Possible strategies for doing FTAs ( Brown and Levinson 1989:60 )

At the two extremes of this scale of strategies (1 and 5), politeness is deemed

irrelevant since the overriding concern is with communicative efficiency (Grice's

principle of co-operation) and since danger to face is considered either too small or too
great that may lead to inaction to avoid doing the FTA all together.

The strategies for doing FTAs are summarised as follows:

- Strategy 1: This strategy is chosen in cases where there is virtually no risk involved and

the speaker (S) does the act baldly without redressive action (i.e. action that 'gives face'

to the addressee). This is identified roughly with following Grices maxims of co-

operation. The act involves doing it in the most direct, clear, unambiguous way possible,

for example, for a request, saying 'Do X'.

This strategy is preferred when face demands can be suspended in the

interests of urgency or efficiency, or when danger to face is very small as in the
 51

case of making offers that are clearly in the hearers interest or for H's benefit, for

example, 'sit down', or 'come in'. It is also used when S is endowed with absolute

power to request H to do something, for example, military orders, or in situations

where interactants are intimates. By being direct, the sense of in-group solidarity is

appreciated.

- Strategy 2: Positive politeness is oriented toward the positive face of H. The potential

threat to face is reduced by virtue of shared interests, in-group rights and duties, and

expectations of reciprocity.

- Strategy 3: Negative politeness is oriented toward satisfying (redressing) H's negative

face, his/her basic want to maintain claims of territory and self-determination. Negative

politeness is avoidance-based and involves assurances that S recognises and respects H's

freedom of action. This strategy is characterised by the use of apologies, linguistic and

non-linguistic deference devices , for example, honorifics, hedges on the illocutionary

force of the act, and impersonalisation to avoid imposition on H. The consideration

between avoiding imposition and face saving is said to lead to the compromise of using

conventionalised indirectness in English, for example, to question the willingness and

availability of H in a request like 'Can you do X?' or ' Would you mind doing X?' etc.

-Strategy 4 : Off-record strategy means non-commitment to one's intention by appearing

to be ambiguous. Linguistic realisations of off-record strategies include metaphor and

irony, understatements and hints so that the meaning is, to some degree, negotiable and

the illocutionary intent is open to interpretation. For instance, the use of hint 'It is hot in

here' is meant as a polite request for the hearer to open the window.

- Strategy 5 : Don't do the FTA in case the face threat is too great.

The politeness strategies mentioned above are said to have violated Grician maxims in a
systematic way. Of the five strategies, strategy 1 is said to fully conform to Grice's
 52

maxims which account for efficacy of communication in terms of maximum conveyance

of information. Strategy 5 is a complete violation of the principle of co-operation.

Strategy 2 is a violation of the maxim of quality because it employs tactics such as

exaggeration. Negative strategy which relies on indirectness violates the maxim of

quantity (Do not say more than necessary).

Politeness is thus reduced to a cover term indirectness which is related to the

illocutionary opacity of the utterance. The more indirect and elaborate a speech act

utterance is the more polite it becomes.

Like Leech, Brown and Levinson also claim universality of their theory although

allowing for exceptions (in many or perhaps all cultures (1978:79)). Brown and

Levinson believe that their model can offer a framework for cross-cultural comparison

in politeness, according to the different weights assigned to the factors P, D and R in

different societies and cultures.

In order to achieve universally valid and systematic assumptions, Brown and

Levinson attempt to construct a model person. Their model person (MP) is a wilful

fluent speaker of a natural language, further endowed with two properties, rationality

and face (Ibid.: 58). By using or constructing an MP for a culture-specific style of verbal

interaction, it is hoped that the 'ethos' of a culture could be characterised.

Brown and Levinson (1987: 2) claim that specific types of polite activities in

different languages and cultures can be shown to be motivated by a desire to maintain

face. The tendency to defend one's own positive and negative face and the protection of

others' positive and negative face are assumed to be important functions of politeness in

virtually all languages and cultures. They also claim that politeness is essentially based

on rational principles which are systematically related to human intentions. A single and
 53

definable mode of reasoning which governs polite speech in all languages and cultures is

assumed to be available to all speakers.

The concepts of positive and negative face and of positive and negative politeness

are central to Brown and Levinson's theory. These concepts originate in Durkheims

(1915) classical distinction between negative and positive cults. Positive cults are

systems of approach that promote intimacy and consciousness of common identity while

negative cults are systems of avoidance which put people apart to pursue their own

interests. In Brown and Levinsons theory, Durkheimian distinctions are extended to

cover every day interaction. This assumption forces us to recognise that there is always a

constant tension between the social and the personal beings, between society and the

individual, more particularly, in verbal and non-verbal communication, the wants for the

creation and maintenance of positive and negative face. Thus, the affirmation of positive

face often conflicts with the preservation of negative face, for example, the speaker

cannot make a request without intruding on the privacy of the hearer.

Brown and Levinsons theory is a significant departure from other approaches

mentioned above. It provides a dynamic and systematic analytical framework for cross

cultural study of politeness phenomena. According to Kasper (1994: 3208), Brown and

Levinsons face-saving approach is the only one which satisfies the criteria for empirical

theories, such as explicitness, parsimony, and predictiveness. It can be used as a starting

point in the pursue towards a universal theory of human communication and politeness.

However, Brown and Levinson's model, methodology and their claim to

universality have come under criticisms, especially from scholars studying politeness in

various non-western cultures. They all have difficulty confirming the theory's claims and

predictions in the languages and cultures under study.

The two main controversial issues are the concepts of face and rationality. Ide
(1989) argues that if the framework of linguistic politeness is to restrict its scope to a
 54

rational and logical use of strategies, it fails to explain the use of honorifics, speech

levels as politeness devices in some Asian languages such as Japanese, or even the use

of politeness formulas or formal varieties in speech in English. It is argued that the use

of speech levels, pronominal forms, polite formulae, speech etiquette is not mainly

motivated by nor totally dependent on the speaker's will or "Volition" (Hill et al., 1986)

but a matter of passive and almost automatic observation of social norms or

conventions. Convention is said to be the main motivation for polite behaviour in many

social events. The polite behaviour according to social conventions or etiquette is said to

follow the rules of discernment which pertains to the speakers passive observance of

the social norms as apposed to the volitional politeness, the main focus of Brown and

Levinsons theory. The non-western perspectives have actually rekindled the traditional

research interest in the social norm view of politeness and called for revision and

adaptation to account for politeness as both a social and individually motivated

phenomenon.

2.2.2.4 Politeness from non-western perspectives

2.2.2.4.1 Face and the concept of self in Vietnamese culture

One of the problematic issues for Brown and Levinsons theory is the link between face

and politeness.

Although Brown and Levinson's theory differs from the set of maxims proposed

by Lakoff (1973, 1975), and Leech (1983) in epistemological status, their approaches are

all based on conceptualisation of politeness as strategic conflict avoidance or tact. In

linguistic politeness, language is used manipulatively by the speaker(s) to satisfy their

negative or positive face wants, which Brown and Levinson claim to be universally valid

social needs.
 55

Works on politeness by Lakoff (1973, 1975), Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987)

and Leech (1983) mainly focus on the aspect of politeness which is referred to as

'Strategic language use', or 'Tact', with indirectness being the core notion. They

unanimously adopt a rationalistic approach to the study of universal principles of

politeness. According to Brown and Levinson (1978,1987), human communication is

seen as a dangerous and antagonistic effort which may threaten either the hearer's or the

speaker's negative or positive face, therefore 'facework' is called for to redress face

threatening acts (FTA). Requests are seen as threatening the hearer's negative face. and

politeness is therefore defined as redressive action taken to counter-balance the

disruptive effect of the FTA (B&L, 1987: 65). They believe that virtually all polite

behaviour can be attributed to the outcome of rational choices of individuals motivated

by face want (Ibid., 1978: 64). In other words, in carrying out a FTA, the interactants try

to satisfy either a protective or defensive face want, which they claim to be universally

valid social needs.

Brown and Levinsons views and theoretical assumptions, especially the concept

of face, have been contested by scholars researching politeness in non-western languages

and cultures. In their study of politeness phenomenon in the Japanese language, from the

view point of social cognition, Ide (1989) and Masumoto (1989) claim that the concept

of face as posited by Brown & Levinson does not have any counterpart in Japan, and

perhaps, in other Asiatic countries. They claim that Brown and Levinsons approach

reflects the highly individualistic mentality in the conceptualisation of face and its

associated notion of politeness. Ide (1989) explains that politeness in Japanese culture

does not solely revolve around this type of face but is closely linked to the notion of

relative place. In Japanese culture, interpersonal relationships are characterised by

inequality in status, speakers are socially obligated to acknowledge their relative roles

and positions in the group. The parameters of Japanese politeness are fixed and
 56

mandatory and socially oriented while the notion of face, and hence politeness, in Brown

& Levinson's sense, is flexible, negotiable and individually motivated:

In a Western culture where individualism is assumed to be the basis of all

interaction, it is easy to regard face as the key to interaction. On the other hand,
in a society where group membership is regarded as the basis for interaction,
the role or status defined in a particular situation rather than face is the basis of
interaction. (Ide 1989: 241)

Another perspective on the notion of face is elaborated by Ho, a Chinese scholar. In his

account of the historical and the current notion of face in Chinese culture, Ho (1976)

distinguishes two face concepts: one, Mianzi, is face that relates to an individuals

reputation achieved through success; and the other, Lien, is that aspect of face to which

every individual is entitled as a member of the society. Mianzi generally correlates with

age or can be acquired by being born into a high status family. Lien is not something one

can gain, however, it is given to one, connoting general confidence in one's social

performance by society. Neither of these face concepts is compatible with the notion of

negative face posited by Brown and Levinson. Ho also emphasises that both aspects of

face cannot be separated from the reciprocity and interdependence characteristic of

Chinese society. Neither reciprocity nor mutuality, however, should be confused with
equality. Ho's analysis of face can also apply to other Asian cultures, including Japan

and Vietnam, whose cultures have been strongly influenced by Confucianism from

China owing to geographical proximity and political, cultural and economic contacts

over the centuries.

Brown and Levinson's analysis of face as being mutual seems to imply equality in

human relationships based on the separateness of distinct persons. It does not take into

full account the status dimension in interpersonal encounters often found in hierarchy-

based societies. While there may be attention paid to the face of others in unequal

encounters, it may not be mutual. The essence of face in unequal interaction in

Vietnamese culture is reflected in the popular saying, which serves as the guideline for
 57

polite behaviour in unequal relationship: Trn knh di nhng (Show deference to

the superiors, yield to the inferiors). The deference rules require that the social

subordinates must show deference to the older people and those superordinates in senior

kinship and social positions, in return, are expected to protect and take care of the

subordinates. This highlights the reciprocity and mutual dependence of the human

relationships in Vietnamese culture. It seems that the basic difference between the

Vietnamese and Anglo-American systems of politeness lies not in the relative weight

each culture gives to the power or distance variables as posited by Brown and Levinson,

but in the nature of the concept of power. Wetzel (1993:387-406), in her analysis of the

term power, points out the differences in the perception of power in western societies,

Japan and other Asian societies. She comments that in the West the individual is the

locus of power, quoting Galbraith (1983:2) [p]ower is: the possibility of imposing

ones will upon other persons. Power in the West is a tool to create choice and engender

individual autonomy and power is unidirectional and non-reciprocal. Whereas, in Japan,

and for that matter, in other Asian cultures, power in vertical relationships is role-

oriented and tied to paternalism. Vertical relationships in Asian cultures are reciprocal,

collectively oriented and based on mutual dependency. Wetzels comments are of great

relevance to the analysis of the vertical relationships in Vietnamese culture. The

Vietnamese maxim Trn knh, di nhng captures the nature of vertical

relationships in Vietnamese. Pragmatically speaking, the extensive use of kinship terms

for non-relatives (fictive usage) in Vietnamese highlights the dual features of the vertical

relationships in Vietnamese culture: the respect for hierarchy and enduring solidarity and

intimacy of the social dyads.

The unilateral display of deference towards the old and the senior members of the

society can be seen in some highly ritualised polite behaviour displayed by the social

subordinates. In most northern Vietnamese families, at meal times, the junior members
of the family are supposed to Mi (politely request) the senior members to start the
 58

meal. In social encounters, social subordinates are supposed to display deference

towards the superordinates by using such honorific vocatives as d / vng

(honorific forms for 'yes').

The dual distinction of ascribed and acquired aspects of face leads us to the

distinction between tact politeness and deference politeness. Tact politeness is based on

the respect for the hearers freedom as an individual which is based on ascribed face or

lien. Deference politeness is related to acquired face or mien-tsu. Deference and tact

together form the two integrated and yet separate aspects of Vietnamese linguistic

politeness. The most polite strategy is the one which is both deferential and at the same

time, tactful:

[A student asking a teacher to open the door for him/her]

(2.6) Tha thy, thy m h em ci ca c khng .

Hon. teacher, teacher open help younger sibling Cl. door can not Hon. Part.

Sir, can you open the door for me, please?

The request utterance 2.6 uses an indirect form, i.e. questioning the hearers ability, and

a deference particle. However, the speaker can be deferential without being tactful:

(2.7) Tha thy, thy m gim em ci ca .

Hon. teacher, teacher open help younger sibling Cl. door Part. Hon. Part.

Sir, open the door for me, please.

The request utterance 2.7 makes use of the imperative form but also contains an

honorific vocative and particle which shows the speakers deferential attitude to the

hearer, in this case, a teacher. Direct utterances with deferential markers are acceptable

as being polite requests in Vietnamese.

(2.8) M cho em ci ca i.
 59

Open give younger sibling Cl. door Part.

'Open the door for me.'

In (2.7) the speaker simply uses an imperative sentence but also uses deference markers

Tha and . This request is considered deferential and acceptable. Tact and

deference, i.e., the expression of status difference, combine to express politeness in

Vietnamese.

While the deference markers mentioned above can only be used in upward speech

from the junior to the superior, the tact markers can be used reciprocally. The social

junior can be direct in their requests (not tactful) but must always be deferential unless

they deliberately mean to be rude. But the social superiors, for example, one's parent or

teacher, can afford not to be deferential (Knh trng) to their subordinates, for example,

their children or students. Therefore, for our purpose, the two concepts 'tact' and

'deference', should be kept separate although they all form the general notion of

politeness in Vietnamese culture.

As with the notion of politeness, the notion of face as used in Brown and

Levinsons model is also problematic. In their model, the folk term for the body part,

'face' is used as an abstract concept which is systematically linked to the notion of

politeness. In Vietnamese culture, there are metaphorical words and expressions similar

to the literal meaning of face in English: mt ('face') and th din (a Sino-Vietnamese

word for 'face'). Th din is associated with one's sense of self-respect or reputation

achieved by one's relative position and status in the social network. There are several

expressions in connection with mt ('face'), or th din . For example, one can lose mt

('face'), or th din, for example, Mt th din (lit. 'lose face'), p mt (lit. 'beautify

one's face'), or cao th din (lit. 'enhance face').

The concept of face in Vietnamese culture is closely associated with one's own
achievement and behaviour in accordance with moral standards. The behaviour and the
 60

achievement of one individual is expected to bring about not only self-respect but also

respect and honour to one's family, village, community and even the country at large,

p mt gia nh (enhance one's family's face). Face concept in Vietnamese culture

has a strong orientation towards group and community's moral behaviour. An improper

behaviour of a family member or his/her failure to live up to the family's expectations is

said to bring disgrace or a loss of face to the whole family, even the whole clan. The

heavy emphasis on moral conduct and maintaining community-oriented face, but not the

force of laws, played a crucial role in maintaining social order in traditional Vietnamese

culture, hence the popular saying Php vua thua l lng (The the King's order stops at

the villages gate).

The individual's endeavour to maintain face in the Vietnamese context is thus

mainly interpersonally motivated while in Western context, the individual is mainly held

responsible for one's own behaviour and consequences. Thus face-want in Brown and

Levinson's terms is basically motivated by intrapersonal needs, as Werkhofer (1992:168)

says that the Brown & Levinson's notion of face is not defined in terms of "socially

created, interpersonal realities, but of wants of the model person, and thus, of

intrapersonal ones." In Vietnamese culture, there is no exact equivalent to the concept of

negative face as posited by Brown and Levinson, which is said to pertain to basic claim

to individual territory and freedom of action.

The conceptualisation of face will naturally lead us to the concept of self, either as

a self-interested independent entity, or as a socially-defined interdependent being. These

seemingly conflicting concepts underlie different interpretations of human behaviour,

and politeness. They are two sides of the same coin and need not be separated. After all,

society is not just the sum of unique individuals, but is organised and structured into

complex patterns. Western cultures and societies attach greater value to the individual

freedom of action while Eastern cultures tend to emphasise group membership. As

 61

Kunihiro (1980: 330) says, Japanese standard of behavioural evaluation is outside of

them, while Americans is inside of them.

The interdependent self is also highly valued and shares similar properties in

Vietnamese culture as in China or Japan. Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism (tam gio

"three religions") have been the foundations of Vietnamese culture, ways of life and

world views over the centuries. Among them Confucianism has left the strongest imprint

(Phan K Bnh: 1990; Tng Lai: 1991). Confucianism served as both a moral code of

conduct and as a political foundation for successive feudal dynasties in ancient Vietnam.

Confucian influence was still strongly felt even in the process of the Vietnamese culture

coming into contact with Western influence and ideologies during the French colonial

rule (Luong, 1988). Confucianism was still strongly felt today in Vietnam. In his article

"Confucianisme et Marxism ", the Vietnamese scholar Nguyen Khac Vien comments

that the Marxists in Vietnam had successfully borrowed and adapted Confucianism in

the process of the Marxist-led struggle for independence and socialist transformation in

modern Vietnam, "[i]n Vietnam, as in China, it could be said that Confucianism has left

its mark on some aspects of Marxist thought. Revolutionary morality in Confucian

countries is often more influential than the notions of the law of historical development"

(Ibid.: 50).

Confucianism is a doctrine which takes the family as the basic social unit and uses

its united structure as the micro model for building an ideal society. The Li Chi or The

Book of Rites, a lively book containing many anecdotes about Confucius as well as

prescriptions for proper social conduct, served as a principal guide on how to deal with

people and how to govern the country. The message of this book was so profound and

popular that even the peasants, most of them illiterate, came under the influence of this

classic. The aim and the effect of this book has been primarily to enhance social

harmony by curbing individuality. Self-expression and self-assertion are deemed to

 62

create strife. The social role of an individual is of more consequence than the special

characteristics of his personality. Respect for authority, tradition and social hierarchy

was the norm. The father has to be obeyed because he is a father. An elder person is

dominant and respected because of his/her age. A person is considered as a member of a

community (family, village, kin) rather than as distinct individual.

Such views of personality and of social relationships result in a strong emphasis

upon ritualistic politeness. Instead of doing what comes naturally, the injunction was to

do what is approved traditionally. Conventions become the norms of polite behaviour.

A lack of self-control is looked down upon.

These different orientations towards 'face' and the concept of self and individuality

are said to underlie interactional patterns in different cultures. Gu (1990) argues that it

is not so much the participant's needs, but the normative orientations that motivate

politeness in China. Ide (1989) and Matsumoto (1988) propose that the overriding

interactional imperative in Japanese culture is not to save face but to mark place, i.e., to

appropriately index social relationships. On those assumptions, they go on to make the

distinction between discernment and strategic politeness, with the former leaning

towards the norms and social conventions and the latter stressing the manipulative, goal-

directed behaviour of the individual actor to achieve his/her practical ends. At this point,

it seems that different cultures react differently to the two concepts of face that Ho

(1976) describes. In Anglo-American cultures, which de-emphasise status differences

and attach great importance to the individual, lien or ascribed face is more important

while other cultures like Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese, give more value to the

acquired aspect of face, that is, status. Harris (1994) also calls for the distinction

between the institutional status-based requirements of face and the more individualistic

side of face which has much to do with the notion of tact in Western cultures.
 63

2.2.2.4.2 Rationality and social conventions; strategies and social norms.

The other controversial issue is whether politeness is primarily a matter of social

conventions or rationality-based strategic manipulation according to ego's goals. Leech

(1983: 84) makes a distinction between "relative politeness" which is perceived as being

"relative to some norm of behaviour", which, in turn, is regarded as typical for a

particular setting, in a particular culture or language community, and "absolute

politeness", which covers strategies for producing and interpreting polite illocutions.

Leech postulates that "general pragmatics may reasonably confine its attention to

politeness in the absolute sense" (1983: 84). Brown and Levinson's model also plays

down the importance of politeness routines and the role of conventions in favour of the

'generative' production of linguistic politeness (Ibid.,1987: 43). They categorise the use

of conventional, formulaic forms under the rubric "politeness as ritual" (1987: 43). They

claim that their model goes beyond table manners and etiquette book, theoretically

reducing all forms of politeness to goal-directed behaviour of a rational and

individualistic model person to address his/her face wants.

Studies on politeness and honorifics in non-western cultures and languages that

have highly developed honorific systems such as Japanese (Ide, 1989), Korean (Hwang,

1990), Javanese (Geertz, 1972), Chinese (Gu, 1990) and Vietnamese (Luong, 1990),

demonstrate the importance of conventions and social norms of polite behaviour in those

Asian languages. Conventional politeness is found to play a crucial role in speech acts of

non-honorific languages as well. Held (1989:172) remarks that conventional politeness,

namely "classical acts of politeness such as greetings, wishing, introducing ...." has

received little attention and he argues for more concern in research on linguistic

politeness with interaction rituals as ceremonial forms of paying respect and honour.

Goffman (1981) postulates the notion of "ritual constraints" that are concerned with

safeguarding feelings and communication.

 64

Ide (1989) emphasises the importance of "formal linguistic forms" such as speech

levels in Japanese, and the use of modality and nominalisation in English in linguistic

politeness. The use of these formal forms is said to be motivated by different principles

from those underlying the more open-ended strategies suggested by Brown and

Levinson.

Geertz (1960) and Errington (1984), in their studies of the culture of Java,

Indonesia, describe the "etiquette-centred ethos" (Geertz,1973:137) of the priyayi

members of the elite culture of Java. The Javanese society was stratified hierarchically,

accordingly, the master/servant or superior/inferior dichotomy informed all social

relationships. This duality was found to be also present in Western languages. Haverkate

(1988: 404) points out that the use of the Spanish word servidor for the first-person

referring form suggested a "fictitious" master-servant relationship. The Vietnamese word

for first-person reference ti also means servant or subject of the King.

Although this inequality is no longer an explicitly recognised basis for societal

organisation in Indonesia, Errington (1984) notes that one concomitant of the

hierarchical master/servant relationship was the affect-laden mutual obligation, such

that the master becomes the source of values, help, protection and education. I would

also argue that the same type of relationship also exists in Vietnamese culture that is

captured in the folk saying about appropriate interaction in unequal and hierarchical

relationships Trn knh , di nhng. The extensive use of kin terms, in fictive and

non-fictive sense, in Vietnamese culture points towards the status-based and stable

solidarity of the Vietnamese social dyads.

Geertz (1960:241) argues for the importance of convention and rituals in social

interaction stating that the functions of etiquette, and formal, conventional behaviour

are two fold: (1) the external world becomes predictable and (2) the inner world is less
easily disturbed when unexpected events do arise and that this form of politeness is a
 65

kind of instrument or tool for making others peaceful within, and thus yourself also...

He also specifies four main principles underlying etiquette: (1) relative status marking,

(2) indirection, (3) dissimulation, and (4) avoiding the lack of self-control.

Although the Vietnamese language does not have the same sophisticated speech

level systems as in Javanese, or for that matter, Japanese, the four principles have

correlation in Vietnamese, especially in the requestive speech act. The honorific element

is mainly embedded in the system of personal reference terms (Luong,1990). The use of

appropriate address and reference terms in Vietnamese mainly serves to mark the

relative status of the speaker, setting the interactional frame in which interactants can act

with certainty within the rights and obligations of the tacit social contracts. Robson

(1987: 507), in his study of the Javanese kinship, also points out the importance of the

need to mark ones relative role within the kinship network of consanguineal and affinal

relations in social interaction, stating that the general subject of social relations is a

prominent one in Javanese thinking.

According to Fraser and Nolen (1980), politeness is essentially obeying the norms

of the society, and no form of behaviour is inherently polite or impolite without due

regard to the sociocultural norms of behaviour in context. In other words, the feature of

being polite is only possible as a result of contextualisation within the norms and

system of values and beliefs of a culture or subculture. The Brown and Levinsons view

of politeness that emphasises the generative production of linguistic politeness

(1987:43) has neglected the role of social constraints on the process of politeness output

and the basic human needs as members of a community and the need to maintain social

order.

Ide (1989:273) criticises the over-emphasis on rationality and individualism in

politeness research for prioritising the individual as a pre-social subject and the main
source of social action. This view of rationality emphasises personal intentions that are
 66

claimed to underlie the mismatch between what is said and what is meant, as in the

violations of Grices Cooperative Principle and maxims. Leech (1983) also maintains a

similar means-ends notion of rationality as the main motivation for linguistic politeness.

The over-emphasis on rationality and intentionality as the main source of polite

behaviour postulated by Brown and Levinson and others has been contested for having

cultural bias by Ochs (1984) and Rosaldo (1990), both of whom studied non-western

cultures, in Samoa and the Philippines respectively. They claim that the emphasis on

personal intentions is western and not a universal postulate. Masumoto (1988), Ide

(1989), and Irvine (1974) also share the same view, claiming that cultures may differ on

the extent to which personal intentions play a salient role in social action and that

rationality may not be valued or weighed in the same way interculturally. Ide (189:243)

states that "[l]inguistic politeness seen through a non-Western eye is the phenomenon

associated mainly with proper behaviour in a social organization by complying with the

social conventions."

Within a language and a culture, conventions and normative behaviour are also

found to vary in extent with different kinds of speech events. Casual conversations call

for more spontaneous, adaptive strategies while verbal behaviour at ceremonious and

official events, such as the courtroom settings, demands a high degree of

conventionalisation or rituals that to remove uncertainty and facilitate communication in

a predictable way.

Within a language, the degrees of conventionalisation are also found to vary with

linguistic categories. The use of deixis as linguistic expressions of role or status

relationships such as honorifics, for example, forms of address/reference, speech levels,

formal lexical items, polite formula tends to be motivated more by the speaker's passive

conformity to social norms than his/her conscious manipulative goals (Ide, 1989).
 67

The polite use of language according to social conventions is also found in western

languages though to a lesser extent than some honorific languages in Asia. The use of

Tu/Vu in some European languages, Tittle (Mr/Mrs/Sir)(TT), Titles+Last name (TLN)

or First Name (FN). The use of formal variety, for example, "to dine" for "to eat" and

nominalisation in the English language is said to be mainly motivated by the need to

conform to social conventions rather than the speaker's conscious manipulation for

personal benefits (Watts,1992). Since the English language lacks the pronominal

alternative system, it has to rely on address terms and structural elaboration to indicate

status difference, or deference. Fraser and Nolen (1981) attempted to rate English

request forms in terms of deference. Hill et al. (1986) empirically demonstrated the

operation of discernment factor in American and Japanese requests. In English, social

markings are also conveyed, to a lesser extent, by the use of terms of address according

to discernment. Watts (1992: 65) comments that

Rules controlling address terms in English are subject to a complex interplay of

socio-cultural constraints such that native speakers need to exercise their
powers of discernment in order to choose the socially appropriate term of
address as much as the Japanese native speakers need to be able to discern the
features of the social contexts that will motivate the correct choice of honorific
form.

In some honorific languages like Japanese, Korean, Javanese and Vietnamese, deixis or

honorifics play a central role in expressing politeness. They are embedded in the speech

levels, the use of honorific semantic items (including the particles), the personal address

and reference system. These constitute a closed system of markers, the use of which is

mandatory and provides strict social constraints on polite language use. The use of this

set of social markers is motivated by psychological principles different from those

underlying the use of tact strategies described by Brown and Levinson as an open system

of linguistic forms to be chosen by the speaker for his/her manipulative ends. Although

Brown and Levinson (1987:25) seem to be aware of the important function of deixis as
conventional forms of expressing politeness, to wit "...in some languages the burden of
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politeness might be carried more by the grammaticalized system of honorifics and less

by matters of language use", they (1978: 64) claim that "Conventions can themselves be

overwhelming reasons for doing things... and there can be and perhaps often are rational

bases for conventions".

While social marking is found to exist in all languages, the degree of its mandatory

usage and markedness differs greatly across languages and cultures. In English, the

assertives are considered neutral as regards politeness (Leech, 1983: 105) while in

Japanese, according to Matsumoto (1989), there are no such things as socially unmarked

sentences. For example, there are three ways of saying Today is Saturday in Japanese. A

Japanese speaker is forced to choose from those three variants in order to convey the

information depending on the contextual relationships between the speaker and the

hearer, by-standers and referents whereas the conveying of such information in European

languages does not require such a level of social marking. Masumoto further argues that

improper use of social markings also gives rise to interactional implicatures, much in

the same way that violations of Grician maxims would lead to conversational

implicatures.

In Vietnamese, social marking as an indicator of status difference is not as highly

gramaticalized as it is in Japanese. Social marking is mainly embedded in the system of

personal reference and address and the choice of some lexical pairs and honorific

particles. There are no socially neutral forms of personal reference, and the speaker has

to choose between different alternatives according to context. In requests, the speaker

has constantly to make self-, second-person and third-person reference by choosing

among different alternatives of personal pronouns, kinship terms, proper names and non-

kin common nouns. The social meanings these forms are deeply rooted in the native

speakers' perception of the socio-political reality and organisation which revolves around

the kinship network. The social and pragmatic meanings of personal reference forms in
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Vietnamese cannot be fully interpreted and understood without referring to the social

structure of the Vietnamese society and the native speakers' perception of social reality

(Luong: 1990).

The use of personal reference terms in Vietnamese also points toward the dual

aspects of linguistic politeness. Their use, on the one hand, reflects the speaker's

absolute observation of the socio-cultural rules of hierarchy and the need to maintain

social order, i.e., the observation of discernment. On the other hand, it can be

manipulated by the speaker if he/she has the legitimate rights to choose between the

alternatives. In that situation, the speaker is said to consciously adjust the social

distance. The speaker can strategically adopt different perspectives in address and

reference to restructure interactional situations. In other words, reference terms can be

used manipulatively and strategically for the speaker's communicative goal. In

Vietnamese requests, personal referential strategies are as important as strategies of

illocutionary indirectness. They combine to indicate linguistic politeness in Vietnamese.

The use of forms of personal reference and address, in Vietnamese both as social

markings and as referential strategies to adjust social distance, hence politeness in

interaction, will be discussed further in Chapter Three.

Hill et al. (1986) and Ide (1989) claim that social indexing or discernment are

found to exist along side with volition in all systems of linguistic politeness. However,

the degree of markedness and dominance of each component varies with languages.

English is shown to have a strong volitional orientation, while in such honorific

languages like Japanese, discernment is found to occupy a major proportion in the

speaker's decision as to the amount of politeness investment.

Hill et al. (1986) also argues that social indexing or discernment is unduly

accounted for in Brown and Levinson's theory, suggesting that the research framework
should be supplemented and extended in order to adequately account for linguistic
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politeness phenomena in honorific languages like Japanese. This view will be further

elaborated in Chapter Three on the system of personal reference and Chapter Five on the

operation of discernment in Vietnamese.

2.3 Concluding remarks

Linguistic politeness as an important means of avoiding social conflict is found to be

realised by two main verbal channels; the system of honorifics and strategic language

use. Languages differ in terms of degrees of markedness given to each category (Brown

and Levinson: 1987, Haverkate: 1988). However, politeness researchers like Lakoff

(1973), Brown and Levinson (1978) and Leech (1983) mainly conceptualise politeness

as strategic conflict avoidance (tact), thus giving undue attention to the normative aspect

of polite language use, which is often historically linked to a specific culture or

subculture. The speaker's passive observation of the social norms of appropriate

behaviour is described as discernment politeness as opposed to volition politeness which

pertains to the speaker's intentional manipulation with the choice of alternative forms to

adjust social distance and restructure interactional situations. Languages are also found

to vary in degrees of importance given to either discernment or volition (Hill et al.,

1986).

The distinction between these two analytical approaches to politeness also reflects

the polarity of Western conceptions on human action as a representation of a supra-

individual, monolithic, and self-regulating order, and as goal-directed behaviour of self-

interested, manipulative, and unique individuals. The former view is represented by F.

de Saussure (1959), whose view of language focuses exclusively on how it corresponds

perfectly to another order, either of inner thought, or of outer reality, or both. The goal-

directed view, which conceptualises language as choice is represented by Malinowski

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(1935). He proposes that the non-referential and predicational functions of language

dominate to various extents in utterances of all kinds and in all contexts, claiming that

The fact is that the main function of language is not to express thought, not to
duplicate mental processes, but rather to play an active pragmatic part in human
behaviour. (Ibid. 1935: 7)

It is within this polarity of opinions that I shall attempt to account for the system of

politeness markers in the Vietnamese language with specific reference to the requestive

speech act.

The use of person referring forms in Vietnamese shall be dealt with in Chapter

Three. It is necessary to examine the use of person referring forms as prompted by both
the indication of the speaker's need to show his/her place as relative to the addressee(s)

and/or the third party in the social networks, for example, in the kinship grid, and his/her

conscious use of personal referring forms to show deference by adjusting social distance

on the status and solidarity dimensions, for example, the choice among dozens of

pronominal alternatives ranging from the use of kinterms, status terms to personal

names and pronouns.

The social meanings of these markers cannot be fully understood without an

adequate understanding of the Vietnamese social structure, especially the kinship

network and the native perception of social and political order, and the perception of the

place and role of the individual in the overall social network.

It is also within this theoretical framework, that I set out to examine the various

indirectness strategies in requests in Vietnamese. I also attempt to empirically

demonstrate the operation of discernment in requests in Vietnamese and show how

important social conventions play in encoding and decoding politeness messages in

requests which may, on the surface, share similar syntactic configurations across

cultures but be differently perceived in different cultures.

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The status dimension is unduly accounted for in Brown and Levinsons theory.

The enduring family solidarity and the respect for hierarchy underlies the great concern

for the expression of role relationships in polite verbal behaviour of the Vietnamese.

The general high level of directness of syntactic configurations in requests in

Vietnamese (as empirically demonstrated in Chapter Four) could be attributed to the

general tendency towards positive politeness strategies (the extension of family

solidarity) and the higher value placed on the expression of hierarchy and relative status

than the avoidance of imposition in requests in Vietnamese.

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2.1 Linguistic actions and politeness ......................................................................... 13

2.2 Politeness in the literature .................................................................................... 22
2.2.l The notions of politeness and definition ............................................... 22
2.2.2 An overview of the theoretical perspectives on politeness ................. 31
2.2.2.1 The social-norm view ............................................................. 31
2.2.2.2 The conversational-maxim view ........................................... 34
2.2.2.3 The face-saving view; Brown and Levinson's theory. ........ 46
2.2.2.4 Politeness from non-western perspectives............................ 54
2.3 Concluding remarks.............................................................................................. 70