Читать книгу The Politeness/Impoliteness Divide. English-Based Theories and Speech Acts Practice in Moroccan Arabic онлайн

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3. Politeness viewed as a conversational contract (Fraser 1990)

As noted above, in recent decades politeness has been one of the central areas of work in pragmatics (cf. for example, Thomas 1983, Blum-Kulka 1987, 1992, Sifianou 1992, Kienpointner 1997, Watts, Ide and Ehlich 1992, Eelen 2001, Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris 2006). However, no consensus appears to exist in terms of how to define politeness; “politeness will always be a slippery and ultimately indefinable quality of interaction which is subject to change through time and across cultural space. There is, in other words, no stable referent indexed by the lexeme polite” (Watts, Ide and Ehlich 1992: xiii). The perennial discussion over how to define politeness is still a matter of contention. In what follows, I will offer an overview of the different trends and approaches.

Politeness as face-saving strategy: Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory is based on the existence of a Model Person who is rational and is endowed with face. Rationality denotes that the Model Person is “endowed with… a precisely defined mode of reasoning from ends to the means that will achieve those ends” (Brown & Levinson, 1987: 63). In addition, face is to be understood in terms of Goffman’s definition of the term as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact” (Goffman 1955: 213). Brown and Levinson define face as the “public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself” (Brown and Levinson 1978: 66). Then, they divide face into two different, but related aspects, namely positive and negative face which are to be understood in terms of wants that every person knows every other person has (Brown and Levinson 1987: 67). Positive face denotes the desire to be appreciated and approved by others, whereas negative face concerns a person’s desire to be unimpeded and free from imposition (Tracy 1990: 210).