Face-saving View of Politeness

The face-saving view of politeness proposed by Brown and Levinson (B&L) (1987) contains three universal notions: face, face-threatening acts (FTAs), and politeness strategies. The rationale of the theory is to figure out linguistic universals that account for politeness phenomenon across different languages and cultures.

According to B& L (1987:61), face is “...the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself... “and it operates in all cultures. An individual’s face consists of two universal face wants to be maintained —“negative face”, the desire to act without

being impeded, to be independent, autonomous, and “ positive face”, the desire to belong, to be liked, appreciated, accepted and approved of. Though it is the mutual interest of every individual to maintain each other’s face in conversation, some speech behaviors are inherently face-threatening acts (FTAs) and tend to damage or threaten speakers’ (S) or hearers’ (H) faces, positive or negative. For instance, speech acts such as requests, orders, promises, etc. are likely to threat H’s negative face whereas disagreement, criticism, etc. are likely to threat H’s positive face; while S’ negative face tends to be threatened by act such as making excuse, S’ positive face tends to be threatened by act such as apology (B& L, 1987).

The “weightiness (Wx)” of an FTAx can be computed by adding the value of social variables of Distance (D), Power (P) and Rank of Imposition (R) which is formulated as follows (2.3).

(2.3) The Formula of Computing the Weightiness of An FTA

(Brown & Levinson, 1987:75-77):

Formula: Wx= D (S, H) + P(S, H) + Rx x= the speech act

- Social Distance (D): the degree of familiarity between interlocutors

- Relative Power (P): the degree to which H can impose his own self-evaluation (face) at the expense of S's self-evaluation

- Absolute rank of Imposition in the particular culture (R): Ranking of imposition varies culturally and situationally by the degree to which they are considered to interfere with an agent’ wants of self-determination or of approval (his negative-and positive face wants). Take the act of request for example; the relative degree of obligation for the H to comply with is a critical factor in certain cultures (Blum-Kulka

& House 1989:14).

Based on speakers’ assessment of the weightiness of a FTA, four strategies, arranged hierarchically from the most threatening to the least threatening (strategies1 to 4) as illustrated in Figure 2.1 below, could be adopted in order to reduce the potential threat or damage to H or S’s positive or negative face. The assumption behind those strategies is that there is a linear relationship between directness of linguistic realizations and degree of politeness—the more indirect of the linguistic realization of an utterance, the more polite it is.

Taking the scenario” asking someone to lend you a note” in the present study for example, the most direct and impolite is the strategy “Do the FTA baldly on record” such as “Lend me your note” and the most indirect and polite is the strategy “Do the FTA off record” such as the use of metaphor understatement, or hints as “Did you take notes in class?” What falls between the two extreme ends is doing FTAs with redressive actions, which are further categorized into two sub-strategies—positive politeness and negative politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987:70.) The former characterizes as expressing solidarity, intimacy, the use of in-group identity markers etc. and minimize the distance between interlocutors, and the latter characterizes as avoiding intruding, minimizing imposition, using conventionalized indirectness and more face redressive actions and emphasizing social distance between interlocutors. For instance, utterances “Buddy, we are good friends, right?” belongs to positive politeness and “I was wondering if you could lend me your notes?” belongs to negative politeness.

Figure 2. 1 Possible strategies for doing FTAs

Note:

(a) On record: The communicative intention is clearly specified so that one is able to commit him/herself to the future act clearly.

(b) Off record: The communicative intention is vague so that the meaning of utterance is under negotiation. Strategies such as metaphor and irony, understatement, etc. belong to this type.

(c) With redressive action: The strategy used to reduce the possible damage of the FTA by using modifications to “give face” to the addressee.

Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory has drawn lots of attentions and criticisms as well and two main criticisms are depicted below.

Firstly, some researchers criticized the notion of universality of face that in the Western cultures, face, either positive or negative, is self-oriented and highly individualistic (Penman, 1994; Ting-Toomey, 1988) whereas in many Asian cultures, “ social relativism” (Kasper, 1990: 195),which concerns group membership, belonging and acceptance, is emphasized.

Matsumoto (1988) argued that B& L’s negative face want of preserving individual territories is “alien” (p. 403) in Japanese culture for the essential notion behind Japanese’ face is to

“maintenance of the relative position of others rather than preservation of an individual’s proper territory (Matsumoto, 1988: 405). ”

The notion face in Chinese is "an interactional orientation on the part of the individual

5. Don’t do the FTA

Least threatening to hearer’s face Most

Based on Brown, & Levinson (1987:68)

speaker toward establishing connectedness to, and seeking interpersonal harmony with, one's own community (Mao, 1994: 459)." Jia (1997/1998) suggested that contrasting to B&L’s face want which emphasizes the concept of self, Chinese politeness concept in terms of face characterizes in four aspects—relational, communal/social, hierarchical, and moral. First, the relational notion can be described as mianzi (i.e. face-giving) which refers to individuals’

need to gain “prestige or reputation” or to show by obeying culture norms or being assigned by other members of one’s own community (Hu, 1944, cited in Mao, 1994). It is the relational nature of Chinese’s mianzi that reinforces and expresses the harmonious relationship in the Chinese society. In other words, interpersonal harmony is maintained by appropriate face-negotiating or facework management among interactants in communication (Gao, 1998). Furthermore, Ho (1976) argued that Chinese “face” is communal, and is only meaningful when it is understood in term of “reciprocity” or interdependence in relation to others, which is the key to maintain full membership in the community. Third, originated from Confucian ideology, the Chinese face “mianzi,” operates according to the relational hierarchy within the family and the society (Chang & Holt, 1994), and misunderstanding may occur if the concept of hierarchy is not taken into consideration while interpreting Chinese face (Scollon & Scollon, 1994). Lastly, Chinese face cannot be recognized correctly without realizing the concept of lian which is defined as individuals’ desire to show one’s good morals to be respected by the group (Hu, 1944, cited in Mao, 1994). An individual who loses face (diu lian) will be regarded as behaving immorally or being socially unacceptable.

In short, both Chinese and Japanese concept of face emphasize the public, communal aspect of social relationships which is opposed to B& L‘s (1987) universal notion of face focusing on the face of individuals (Gu, 1990; Mao, 1994).

The second criticism came from B & L’s universal assumption of the linear relation between the directness and politeness. B& L (1987), same as Leech (1983), regarded the choice of strategies device as the decisive factor that determine the degree of politeness; in

other words, indirectness increases politeness. Politeness thus seems to become “strategic avoidance” (Kasper, 1990, p. 194) that direct strategies should be avoided when any speech act is to be performed politely. However, some empirical studies rejected the automatic linear association of indirectness with politeness. In House’s (1986, cited in Blum-Kulka, House, Kasper, 1989)) study comparing British English and German, it was found that it was conventional indirectness (i.e. negative politeness), but not non-conventional indirectness (i.e.

Off record) that was regarded as the most polite strategy. By comparing Polish and English directives, Wierzbicka (1985) also challenged this view by suggesting that a bare imperative was generally perceived as inoffensive behavior in Polish whereas in English, it was offensive, impolite and seldom used and thus further claimed the concept of universality on speech acts studies was nothing but an Anglo-centric bias. Besides, the use of imperative constructions was also regarded as appropriate in Russian (Thomas, 1983) and German (House, 1989) in normal situations. The issue of universality of directness versus politeness was also called into question in languages such as Chinese (Lee-Wong 1994, Yu 1999), Japanese (Takahashi

& Beebe 1993), Nepali (Upadhyay, 2003) etc. According to results of the studies mentioned above, the relation between directness and politeness is regarded as a cultural-specific instead of universal phenomenon.