POLITENESS AS DEFERENCE: A PRAGMATIC VIEW

Politeness and strategic interaction

In 1978, Brown and Levinson had published a revised version of paper for the first time, that discussed about the stronger case in cross-cultural universals. In this paper, there was a definitive nature of their work and the wide responses. consequently, it also meant to elicit from other sociolinguistics and discourse analysis therefore the theoretical framework will now be explained and discussed in a brief.

Brown and Levinson's starting point is "the extraordinary parallelism in the linguistic minutiae of the utterances with which persons choose to express themselves in quite unrelated languages and cultures".

Their main aim is to describe and account for this parallelism, and they set about achieving it by providing evidence from three unrelated languages (British and American English, Tamil and Tzeltal) the language spoken by Mayan Indians in Chiapas, Mexico), hence proposing a theory of politeness in which specific linguistic devices universally form the realisations of underlying politeness strategies.

In order to account for the systematic elements that they have observed in language use, Brown and Levinson construct a Model Person (MP). An MP, we are told, consists of a fluent speaker of a natural language who is endowed with the properties of rationality (the ability to reason from ends to the means that will achieve them) and face.

Cross-cultural diversity in language use

Although such theories of the universality of language use clearly contain a certain degree of truth, many sociolinguists have expressed reservations. Saville-Troike (1982) suggests that while many functions of language are indeed universal, the way language operates in any one society to serve these functions is culture-specific.

Loveday (1982) says much the same thing in his observation that cross-cultural differences reside, not in what we do, but in how, we do it. Like others, such as Varonis (1981), Schmidt and Richards (1985), Fasold (1990), Odlin (1990), he stresses the part played by cross-cultural transfer, for example in the ways ritual formulae are used.

Different systems of politeness

Most of those who disagree with theories of politeness systems focus their arguments on the work of Brown and Levinson (1987), since this is the most comprehensive statement of the universal case.

Criticisms of Brown and Levinson's theory concentrate on four main areas:
1. the absense of context (both situational and cultural)
2. the neglect of discourse
3. the rigidity of the politeness scale in relation to the three sociological variables (P,D, and R).
4. the universality of the concept of face and of their ranking of politeness strategies.

Our claim is that the universality hypothesis lacks empirical evidence, in spite of the fact Brown and Levinson provide with sufficient data from three different languages.