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

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Critiques of politeness theories: Some scholars have been criticized for their view of interaction as problematic and for seeing speakers in a permanent struggle to avoid the ‘conflict’, ‘threat’ and ‘friction’ which is supposedly a constant feature of interaction with others. Scholarly notions of politeness have also been criticized for being too vague (Watts, Ide and Ehlich 1992: xvi), pessimistic and overtly paranoiac. Richard Smith, in his critique to Brown and Levinson’s conceptualization of politeness as the realization of face-threat mitigation (Schmidt 1980: 104), argues that it is “an overtly pessimistic, rather paranoid view of human social interaction”. Lakoff (1975, cit. in Watts 2003) suggests “politeness is developed by societies in order to reduce friction in personal interaction”. On the other hand, Leech (1980: 19) defines politeness as “strategic conflict avoidance and it can be measured in term of the degree of effort put into the avoidance of conflict situation”.

On the same lines, Brown and Levinson (1978-1987) claim politeness to be “a rational behaviour aimed at strategic softening (or mitigation) of face threatening acts”. Kasper (1990) regards politeness as a set of strategies “to diffuse the danger and to minimalise the antagonism” in so far that he envisages communication as “a fundamentally dangerous and antagonistic endeavour” (Kasper 1990: 194). Hill et al. (1986) regard politeness as “one of the constraints on human interaction, whose purpose is to consider others’ feelings, establish levels of mutual comfort and promote rapport”. Another case in point is the issue as to whether im/politeness should be studied as a lay or folk notion, which has been termed First Order im/politeness (Cf. Eelen 2001, Watts 2003, Locher 2004, 2006, Locher and Watts 2005), or as a theoretical construct to be used for the sociolinguistic and pragmatic research, termed Second Order im/politeness (Watts 2003). However, even those who consider im/politeness to be a theoretical concept diverge as to a definition. Politeness has been approached in terms of maxims and norms, embracing face-work, adherence to social norms and adequate behaviour, and impoliteness as a deviation or infraction of such these norms.