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Politeness theory addresses one of the most fundamental puzzles in pragmatics: why do speakers so often say less, or other, than they mean? Why "I don't suppose you could possibly lend me a fiver?" instead of "Lend me a fiver"? The dominant answer turns on the concept of face — the public self-image every person claims and wants others to ratify. The most influential model is that of Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, first published in 1978 and reissued with a long new introduction in 1987 as Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Their account builds directly on the sociologist Erving Goffman's concept of face, and it has generated decades of application, criticism and refinement. Like every analytical method on the AQA specification, politeness theory is integrated across Paper 1, Paper 2 and the Non-Examined Assessment (NEA), serves AO1 most directly, and reaches into AO3 when you connect politeness choices to power, social distance, context and culture. Two further AOs are especially live here: AO2 (engaging with the theory itself and its critics) and the evaluative awareness that lifts answers into the top band.
The sociologist Erving Goffman introduced face into social science in his essay "On Face-Work" (1955, collected in Interaction Ritual, 1967), drawing on Chinese and English folk notions of "losing face" and "saving face". Goffman defined face as:
"The positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact."
In plainer terms, face is the public self-image a competent member of society claims for themselves in a given encounter — the version of self we project and want others to accept. Two of Goffman's emphases are worth carrying forward. First, face is not a private possession but something on loan from the encounter: it is claimed in interaction and can only be sustained if others co-operate in honouring it. Second, social life involves continuous face-work — the small, largely automatic moves by which we protect, repair and restore both our own face and that of others (a quick apology, a tactful change of subject, a face-saving excuse offered on someone else's behalf).
Key Definition: Face (Goffman, 1967) — the public self-image a person claims for themselves in interaction; a sense of dignity and social worth that is sustained jointly by the participants. Face-work is the set of actions taken to maintain it.
Brown and Levinson took Goffman's single notion of face and split it into two complementary "wants" that they argued every rational, competent adult possesses. This bifurcation is the analytical core of the theory.
Positive face is the desire to be liked, approved of and valued — the wish for one's self-image, personality, goals and possessions to be appreciated and accepted by at least some others.
Negative face is the desire for autonomy, freedom of action and freedom from imposition — the wish not to be impeded, obligated or told what to do. The word "negative" here does not mean bad; it means "freedom from", as in a negative right.
Key Definition: Positive face — the want to be approved of and to belong. Negative face — the want to be unimpeded and autonomous. Every interactant is assumed to have both, and politeness is the work of attending to them. (Brown and Levinson, 1987.)
A subtle but important point: the same act can threaten different faces of different people simultaneously. A request threatens the hearer's negative face (it imposes) and can also threaten the speaker's own positive face (it admits need). Tracking whose face and which face is threatened is the first move of any politeness analysis.
A face-threatening act is any act that runs contrary to the face wants of the speaker, the hearer, or both. Brown and Levinson's striking claim is that a great many ordinary speech acts are intrinsically face-threatening — politeness is not an optional garnish but a structural response to the constant low-level threat that interaction poses.
These imply the speaker does not value or approve of the hearer:
These impinge on the hearer's autonomy:
Key Definition: Face-threatening act (FTA) — any act that potentially damages the positive or negative face of the speaker or the hearer. The choice of how to perform an unavoidable FTA is what politeness strategy describes.
Faced with an FTA, a speaker chooses among five super-strategies, ordered from most to least face-threatening. As the weight of the threat rises, speakers generally move down the list towards greater indirection.
The FTA is performed directly, clearly and unambiguously, with no attempt to mitigate.
Bald on-record is appropriate when the threat is tiny, the relationship is very close, efficiency overrides face (emergencies: "Watch out!", "Stop!"), or the speaker decisively outranks the hearer and need not soften the imposition. It is also, importantly, used between intimates as a token of solidarity — needing no politeness can itself signal closeness.
The FTA is performed with redress to the hearer's positive face — emphasising approval, solidarity and common ground, treating the hearer as a friend whose wants the speaker shares.
| Strategy | Example |
|---|---|
| Attend to the hearer's interests/needs | "You look tired — have a rest." |
| Use in-group identity markers | "Hey, mate, can you lend us a hand?" |
| Claim common ground | "We both know how tough this job can be." |
| Seek agreement | "Lovely weather, isn't it?" |
| Avoid disagreement | "Well, you're sort of right, but..." |
| Joke | "How about lending me your car — just for the decade?" |
| Compliment | "That's a really smart idea. Could you also...?" |
| Use inclusive 'we' | "Let's have a look at this together, shall we?" |
| Give reasons | "I need your notes because I was ill last week." |
| Offer/promise reciprocity | "I'll wash up if you cook tonight." |
The FTA is performed with redress to the hearer's negative face — minimising the imposition, showing deference, giving the hearer room to refuse. This is the politeness of distance and respect, and it is the most elaborately codified in English.
| Strategy | Example |
|---|---|
| Be conventionally indirect | "Could you possibly close the window?" |
| Hedge / qualify | "I was sort of wondering if you might be able to..." |
| Be pessimistic about compliance | "I don't suppose you could lend me a fiver?" |
| Minimise the imposition | "Could I just borrow this for one second?" |
| Show deference | "Excuse me, sir, I was wondering whether..." |
| Apologise for imposing | "I'm so sorry to bother you, but..." |
| Impersonalise (passive, no 'you') | "It would be appreciated if the report could be submitted by Friday." |
| Nominalise | "Your cooperation would be appreciated." |
| State the FTA as a general rule | "Passengers are requested to remain seated." |
The FTA is performed so indirectly that the speaker can deny having performed it at all. The hearer must infer the intended meaning, and the speaker retains plausible deniability — the chief reason for going off-record. Off-record strategies are, in Gricean terms, flouts that generate implicatures.
| Strategy | Example |
|---|---|
| Give hints | "It's a bit warm in here, don't you think?" (implicating: open the window) |
| Give association clues | "I've got the dentist later..." (implicating: I'll be away) |
| Understate | "That meal was... interesting." (implicating: it was bad) |
| Use rhetorical questions | "How many times do I have to tell you?" (implicating: stop) |
| Be ironic | "Oh brilliant, another meeting." (implicating: unwelcome) |
| Be vague / overstate | "Someone should do something about that." / "I've waited absolutely ages." |
The speaker decides the threat is too great and says nothing at all. Sometimes the most polite move is silence — the unsaid criticism, the unmade request.
Brown and Levinson argued that how weighty an FTA is — and therefore how much redress it warrants — depends on three social variables, which they combined in a (deliberately schematic, not literally arithmetical) formula:
| Variable | Description | Symbol |
|---|---|---|
| Social distance | the familiarity/closeness between speaker and hearer | D |
| Relative power | the power of the hearer over the speaker | P |
| Ranking of imposition | how great the imposition is, as the culture rates it | R |
The weightiness of an FTA is given as Wx = D(S,H) + P(H,S) + Rx. The greater the sum, the more elaborate and indirect the politeness chosen. Asking a close friend to pass the salt (low D, low P, low R) needs little or no redress. Asking your boss for a pay rise (high P, high R) calls for maximal negative politeness or off-record approaches. Crucially, these variables are contextually and culturally defined: the R-value of, say, asking a colleague their salary differs sharply between communities, which is exactly the seam along which the model's universality claims are contested.
Brown and Levinson are the dominant model, but two earlier theorists are frequently cited and worth deploying for breadth.
Robin Lakoff proposed an early, rule-based account, framing politeness as a set of pragmatic rules: (1) Don't impose (keep your distance — the territory of negative face), (2) Give options (let the hearer choose — hedging, indirectness), and (3) Make the hearer feel good — be friendly (the territory of positive face / camaraderie). Her work is an important precursor that anticipates the positive/negative split.
Geoffrey Leech (Principles of Pragmatics, 1983) proposed a Politeness Principle to complement Grice's Cooperative Principle, broken into maxims such as Tact (minimise cost to other, maximise benefit to other), Generosity (minimise benefit to self), Approbation (minimise dispraise of other), Modesty (minimise praise of self), Agreement and Sympathy. Leech's framework is useful precisely where Grice is silent — explaining why speakers so often flout the maxim of Quantity by being more verbose and indirect than strictly informative: they are trading informational efficiency for politeness. Leech later (2014) added the notion of a Pragmalinguistic Politeness Scale, refining the model.
A top-band answer evaluates the model as well as applying it. The principal criticisms are:
Richard Watts (Politeness, 2003) argued that Brown and Levinson conflate first-order politeness (politeness1: the everyday, folk sense of what counts as polite in a community) with second-order politeness (politeness2: the linguist's technical, analytic construct). For Watts, what counts as "polite" is not a universal given but is discursively constructed and negotiated in situ; he prefers to study "politic behaviour" — what is socially appropriate and largely goes unnoticed — and reserves "polite" for behaviour heard as marked.
Gino Eelen (A Critique of Politeness Theories, 2001) levelled several charges:
Scholars of Japanese pragmatics (notably Sachiko Ide and Yoshiko Matsumoto) argue that Japanese politeness foregrounds group belonging, social role and discernment (wakimae) rather than the autonomous negative face of the Anglo-American model; concepts such as wa (harmony) operate differently from individual face wants. This body of work casts serious doubt on Brown and Levinson's claim to have identified cultural universals. The takeaway for analysis is caution: a strategy that reads as deferential negative politeness in a British context may carry different social meaning elsewhere.
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