- Email: [email protected]
A Critique of Politeness Theories
Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 811–818 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review A Critique of Politeness Theories Review of Gino Eelen, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2001, viii+280 pages, paperback, £17.99 It is generally recognized that the pioneering work of Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Geoffrey N. Leech, and Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, launched in the 1970s, has greatly contributed to the ensuing enthusiasm in politeness studies. This shows that more and more people have realized the need to carry out research on politeness. On the one hand, we human beings do not and can not possibly live in isolation; rather, we are in essence ‘‘at once biological, psychological, and cultural/ social beings’’ (Pyysia¨inen, 2002: 167) and need to interact constantly with other people, and politeness is one of the things we should bear in mind to ensure smooth and successful interaction. On the other hand, advances in science and technology have gradually eliminated the distance of time and space and greatly contributed to easier and more frequent human interaction, putting the study of politeness on a high agenda. To ignore politeness studies entails running the risk of miscommunication, conflict and friction, among other things. In other words, where there is communication, there is politeness studies. As a result, politeness as a research topic of much concern has been and is still enjoying much popularity with people specialized in the areas of, say, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psychology, anthropology, inter-cultural and intra-cultural communication and even cognitive linguistics. The second point that can be inferred from the large body of literature on politeness is that there must be some things on which researchers and scholars can not see eye to eye with one another. In point of fact, if we give more than passing thought to the nearly geometric, or ‘mammoth-like’ (Chen, 2001: 87) increase in the number of books and articles dealing with politeness in the last three or so decades, then we will find, to our surprise, that several central and fundamental issues in politeness studies (for example, What is the nature of politeness? How should we approach politeness?) have not yet been comfortably or satisfactorily resolved. That politeness is ‘‘ubiquitous in language use’’ (Brown, 2001: 11620) makes it a ‘‘definitionally fuzzy and empirically difficult area’’ (Held, 1992: 131). Moreover, as it stands, almost all the scholars and researchers doing politeness have developed some or many presuppositions about the very notion of politeness long before they start to talk and write about the subject matter. And where do these presuppositions come from? They do not come from their talk with ordinary speakers asking what these ordinary speakers, constituting a significant part of the communicative communities, have to
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Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 811–818
say on this matter; ironically, few politeness theorists have ever carried out much down-to-earth fieldwork of this sort. The presuppositions many politeness theorists have about the conceptualizations of politeness come from the books they read, from the stories they hear, from the experiences they experience, from whatever idea that comes to their mind. More serious, some if not many of them naively infer that their own views on politeness, which may turn out to be wrong or inaccurate, can represent the views of their people if not the whole of human culture, assuming the universality of human nature, taking little into consideration such things as individual differences, regional divergences, and contexts of social interaction. So, why are there so many varied conceptualizations of politeness? What is hidden behind these conceptualizations? For me, it is all because of varied thinking patterns, or different cultural backgrounds. Actually, all the conceptualizations have been ingrained for a long time in the minds of these scholars and researchers. The conceptualizations actually mirror more or less their cultural values. As a result, it comes as little surprise that there are currently numerous definitions and investigations of politeness. Further, the profusion of research work on politeness does not necessarily mean that this line of inquiry is one that is theoretically sound, methodologically rigorous and without any theoretical or conceptual ambiguity, or empirical confusion. Rather, the reverse may often be the case, which is reminiscent of the following words in the first circular announcing the establishment of the International Pragmatics Association in early 1986 (quoted in Verschueren, 1995: x): Today, pragmatics is a large, loose, and disorganized collection of research efforts. . .. Researchers in an ever-increasing number of different disciplines make constant or occasional use of pragmatic notions. But their contribution to our understanding of human verbal communication often does not reach its fullest potential as a result of the emerging theoretical, methodological, and terminological diversity. And the same can, in my view, be said about the present situation of politeness studies. At this point, therefore, a book seems to be both in good order and in dire need, a book that surveys and scrutinizes the state of the art in contemporary politeness analysis, that compares and contrasts the mainstream theories of politeness, that points out what has been thoroughly researched and what has been left completely untouched or inadequately explored and that, finally, looks to future directions in which politeness could be sufficiently pursued. And this is all that Gino Eelen tries to tackle in his A Critique of Politeness Theories, which is, though the author does not explicitly state, a revised version of his doctoral dissertation titled Ideology in politeness: A critical analysis completed in 1999. In this text, the first of a new series on language and diversity titled ‘Encounters’ with Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen as the editors, Eelen, by way of adopting a ‘‘critical reflexive metatheoretical research’’ (p. v) approach using ‘‘the scientific texts as texts, as discourse on language and society’’ (p. iii; italics original), presents an in-depth anatomy of ‘‘current conceptualizations of politeness in terms
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of their social and linguistic presuppositions’’ (p. ii), asserting among other things that politeness theorists should formulate the scientific notion of politeness (politeness 2), on the basis of the commonsense notion of politeness (politeness 1), but not vice versa. In other words, ‘‘A ‘theory of politeness’ should first and foremost be an ‘examination of politeness 1’, of the everyday phenomenon of politeness’’ (p. 252). Eelen’s ultimate goal for this metatheoretical analysis of politeness theorizing is ‘‘to make a more positive contribution to theory formation, by the proposal of an alternative framework that provides an answer to the issues raised by the critique’’ (p. v). This book, I believe, should deserve a large audience in that it is not only a book reviewing and critiquing politeness theories but also an endeavor to explore how we human beings, by using the language in ordinary communication, construct the self, social and cultural membership and the world within and without us. This book contains six chapters. Chapter 1 provides some background information about the nine major theories of politeness under discussion. These nine perspectives on politeness are those advocated by Robin T. Lakoff, Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, Geoffrey Leech, Yueguo Gu, Sachiko Ide, Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Bruce Fraser and William Nolen, Horst Arndt and Richard Janney, and Richard Watts. A reservation appears to be in order here. Although ‘‘the nine core theories are representative for a large part, if not most, of current scientific thinking about politeness’’ (p. 29), some readers may still wonder why Eelen does not mention at all those contributions adopting a relevance-theoretic approach to politeness studies (see, for example, Jucker, 1988; Escandell-Vidal 1996; Jary, 1998; Ruhi and Dodan 2001; Terkourafi, 1999; Zegarac and Clark, 1999). The reason why Eelen does not discuss the relevance-theoretical approach to politeness may be that, as claimed by some researchers (e.g. Turner, 2000), given the fact that one of the deep-rooted and irreparable weaknesses with relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) lies in its ‘‘conceptual incoherence’’, an effort to integrate relevance theory into politeness studies may end up in failure. In my view, it appears to be a bit early to make such a pessimistic prediction and I hope future studies will prove that the marriage of relevance theory and the theory of politeness is successful. Recently, some other researchers have even attempted to ground politeness within the cognitive linguistic framework with special references to metaphor and metonymy (see, among others, Pe´rez Herna´ndez, 1996, 1999; Pe´rez Herna´ndez and Ruiz de Mendoza, 2002). Since most of these theories selected by Eelen for his text have been widely cited and debated, it seems to be of little necessity to repeat what they propose, but it pays to point out what they have in common: these theories all view politeness as ‘conflict-avoidance’ and as ‘social indexing’ (pp. 21–23). More serious, as shown later in this book, ‘‘all the different theories share a common substratum of ontological, epistemological and methodological presuppositions’’ (p. 245). Another point worth mentioning is that at no time should we forget that whatever definition of politeness we give, the definition should be a working or operational one and no more than that. Jaworski (1993: 32) comes close to this view when he asserts that ‘‘all definitions of concepts have to be treated as theoretically (versus objectively) motivated, and their value is no more than operational’’. Further, Levinson’s (1983; cited in
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Turner, 1993: 61) argument that ‘‘pragmatics should not be defined and then done but done and then defined’’ is also true of the definition of politeness. After all, the act of defining something itself has in a sense limited the extent to which this very something can be studied. Following Watts et al. (1992), Eelen, in Chapter 2, gives top priority to distinguishing first-order politeness (politeness 1) from second-order politeness (politeness 2), which turns out to be one of the major themes underlying the discussion. Politeness 1 refers to politeness notions of the outsiders (ordinary speakers) or emic accounts, while politeness 2 refers to those of the insiders (researchers and scholars) or etic accounts. More specifically, politeness1, ‘‘a socio-psychological concept’’ (p. 30), ‘‘is intimately connected with (social) values’’ (p. 37), ‘‘is always an instance of everyday social life’’ (p. 38), ‘‘is inherently a reflexive activity’’ (p. 43) and ‘‘is restricted to the polite end of the polite-impolite continuum’’ (p. 47). Eelen distinguishes three different kinds of politeness 1: expressive politeness 1, classificatory politeness1 and metapragmatic politeness 1, which are mainly characterized by evaluativity, argumentativity, and normativity. Politeness 2 is ‘‘the scientific conceptualization of politeness100 (p. 45), seeking to expound everyday politeness phenomena. And an adequate theory of politeness has three major characteristics, viz. ‘‘non-evaluativity, non-normativity, and a broad scope covering the whole of the continuum between polite and impolite’’ (p. 49). As argued by Eelen, the politeness 1–politeness 2 distinction fails to receive due attention and demarcation at both the input stage (from politeness 1 to politeness 2) and the output stage (from politeness 2 to politeness 1) of current theorizing. Many politeness theorists do not derive politeness 2 from politeness 1; rather, they first have politeness 2 and then use it to account for politeness 1. To put it another way, many researchers have followed a deductive instead of inductive reasoning process in accounting for politeness. For Eelen, this is a danger and more serious, it is disregarded or neglected by all the politeness theories. In Chapter 3, Eelen shows that most current politeness theories are flawed with a triple conceptual bias, with more attention devoted to the polite side of the polite-impolite distinction, to the speaker in the interactional dyad, and to the speaker production of behavior rather than hearer evaluation (p. 119). Eelen accounts for this conceptual bias in terms of sociolinguistic scientific thinking and commonsense notions of politeness (pp. 113–119), arguing in favor of an ‘‘evaluation-centered approach’’ (pp. 110–113) to make impoliteness, the Cinderella of politeness studies, on a par with politeness, whereby the embarrassing situation in which impoliteness ‘‘only has a walk-on part’’ (p. 88) or even ‘‘never really enters the picture’’ (p. 90) might be hopefully improved. For Eelen, evaluation is ‘‘the basic, primordial mode of being of (im)politeness’’ (p. 109). The blurred distinction of politeness 1 and politeness 2, as explored in Chapter 4, also contributes to the fact that most of the current politeness theories attach much importance to norms and normativity, accounting for everyday politeness phenomena in terms of ‘‘socially shared norms’’ (p. 243). Further, theoretical norms lead to empirical norms in terms of statistical analysis, systematic variability and subjective judgment (pp. 141–158). As a result, ‘‘although theoretical and commonsense models share the same ontology, neither of them seems to square with empirical reality’’
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(p. 158). In other words, empirical data are made to fit theoretical norms but not vice versa; individual differences or variability present in empirical findings are made systematic or even disregarded. This is also true of empirical hearer variability, which is often accounted for in association with the notion of culture when in fact various aspects pertaining to this very notion such as its nature, scope, ontology and variation, among others, are very problematic (cf. Mantovani, 2000). Consequently, politeness is viewed as ‘‘a characteristic of language’’ (p. 243), ‘‘as a form of (expressive) behaviour, driven by a system of culturally shared social norms, and constituting a socially regulative force in the maintenance of social order and stability’’ (p. 245). And this is one of the things that Eelen seeks to rectify in Chapter 5. Linking the various theoretical perspectives on politeness under examination to Talcott Parsons’ structural functionalism, Eelen argues that both are similar in emphasizing ‘‘priority of the social over the individual, normative action, social consensus, functional integration and resistance to change’’ (p. 203), in calling for paying exclusive attention to ‘‘matters cultural’’ (p. 215), while taking little into account the individual. As a matter of fact, the notions of the cultural, the social and the individual are in intimate relation and ‘‘ultimately the social/cultural relies on the individual for its existence, as it is individuals who perform the action through which societies and cultures arise’’ (p. 216). I agree with Eelen when he points out that power should be considered ‘‘as a practical factor co-determined by individual action, as something that can be asserted, maintained, claimed, and challenged’’ (p. 226). In other words, power is not always static and predetermined but often dynamic and measurable; power is a contextually sensitive phenomenon, which can be effected on various levels (cf. Thornborrow, 2002). And I am inclined to think that the same can be said about notions of politeness, that is, politeness is also a dynamic concept, the study of which should be closely related to the situations in which it is observed (cf. Pan, 2000). There cannot be a once-for-all, all-inclusive golden rule guiding the study of politeness or impoliteness; rather, a pluralistic approach to the study of politeness should be adopted to explore the panorama pertaining to politeness. Recurring to the Bourdieuan notion of ‘habitus’ complemented by discursive psychology, Eelen argues for an alternative conceptualization of politeness with the characteristics of variability, evaluativity, argumentativity, and discursiveness. This view of politeness (p. 247; see also p. 240) takes full account of the hearer’s position and the evaluative moment; is able to capture both politeness and impoliteness; provides a more dynamic, bi-directional view of the social-individual relationship; and thus acknowledges the individual (in terms of both variability and creativity) as well as evolution and change as intrinsic to the nature of politeness. Judging from the above, one may determine that this alternative model of politeness is promising; however, since this alternative model of politeness proposed by Eelen is not based on data gathered by observing spontaneous interaction in the real life, at this point, therefore, there is no knowing whether this approach can really provide a full-fledged picture of politeness; it needs empirical evidence. However, if
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we apply his approach (politeness 2) to examine everyday politeness conceptualizations (politeness 1), then we will find ourselves moving from politeness 2 to politeness 1 and this is what Eelen has been arguing against throughout this book! One of Eelen’s major arguments is that we should come from politeness 1 to politeness 2 instead of from politeness 2 to politeness 1. Eelen is also aware of some possible difficulties with empirical research adopting this alternative view of politeness (pp. 254–255). He is right in arguing against collecting data in ‘‘hypothetical situations’’ (p. 39) and calling for ‘‘the need for real-life spontaneous conversational data’’ (p. 255). I find it hard to understand why the socalled Discourse Completion Tests or the role play that fail to mirror accurately and genuinely the complexities of real-life communication activities should be so notoriously popular with so many researchers. For one thing, human interaction is an extremely complicated activity with numerous factors involved, verbal and nonverbal, and the so-called Discourse Completion Tests are simply unable to reflect those nonverbal elements that more often than not play a nontrivial part in the interaction process. Actually, looking back, we will find that most of current politeness theories are devoted to exploring linguistic politeness rather than nonlinguistic politeness (cf. p. iv). However, it seems to be a hard fact that non-linguistic politeness or impoliteness should also occupy a place in politeness studies. Antonopoulou (2001), for example, has empirically shown that requests in brief service encounters can be made silently. In point of fact, to appreciate to what extent nonverbal communication has been enthusiastically studied, one only needs to take a look at Poyatos (2002). Another reason why the Discourse Completion Tests instrument should not be adopted is that, as argued by some researches (e.g. Pan et al., 2002) that there is some distance between what people say they do and what people actually do. So, how can we resort to imaginary situations to account for real-life encounters? Although participants have, before they start to role play, been told ‘‘Do not think too much and try to be as spontaneous as possible’’ (Ma´rquez Reiter, 2000: 185), what is the picture of real life? The real picture is that human interlocutors do think too much when it comes to interacting with others. After all, this is a world of laws, and we are constrained by a variety of laws, written or unwritten. I subscribe to the view that only non-reactive naturally occurring conversations can truly reflect the complexities of everyday (im)politeness phenomena one examines, despite the time, energy and financial constraints involved (Xie, in press). Besides, it has long been proved that ‘‘the raw data of everyday conversational interaction can be subjected to rigorous analysis’’ (Schegloff, 1968: 1075). In Chapter 6, the last one, Eelen summarizes the major arguments made in previous chapters, reiterates his views on politeness and points out possible directions of future research before warning us that ‘‘this perspective may well lead to a notion of politeness that is more vague and less tangible—less ‘systematic’—than the traditional notions’’ (p. 257). To sum up, this book is at once remarkable and thought-provoking: remarkable in the sense that it represents a valuable critical review of nine major and influential theoretical perspectives on politeness when such work is desperately needed, tracing
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out new avenues of research into politeness; thought-provoking in the sense that it will probably spark and inspire a new surge of debate and discussion as to how to account for politeness and that, all the more significantly, it will draw renewed attention paid to ontological, epistemological and methodological bases on which a coherent, if not all-inclusive theory of politeness could be possibly built. Of course, it pays to remember that (im)politeness cuts across numerous levels of language use and (im)politeness can not, and can never be confined to only one branch of linguistics; rather, (im)politeness is an area of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary nature. Indeed, this volume, which has gone beyond the study of politeness per se and into other important and essential domains of our life, may probably be conducive to reconsidering, among other things, what social reality we have, what a life philosophy we can adopt, and what culture really means to our socialization. For me, politeness is simply a way of living, or rather, a way to live, a way to get to know the world, whereby we learn and seek to establish ourselves as human, social and cultural beings, among others. And it should be borne in mind that we do not and should not study (im)politeness for the sake of (im)politeness; the ultimate goal of studying (im)politeness consists, as with many other human sciences, in coming to grips with how we can better construct the self, social and cultural membership and life worlds. Herein lies the name of the game.
References Antonopoulou, Eleni, 2001. Brief service encounters: gender and politeness. In: Bayraktarogˇu, A., Sifianou, M. (Eds.), Linguistic Politeness Across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 241–269. Brown, Penelope, 2001. Politeness and language. In: Baltes, P.B., Smelser, N.J. (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (revised ed.). Elsevier Science, Oxford, pp. 11620–11624. Chen, Rong, 2001. Self-politeness: a proposal. Journal of Pragmatics 33, 87–106. Escandell-Vidal, Victoria, 1996. Towards a cognitive approach to politeness. Language Sciences 18 (3/4), 629–650. Held, Gudrun, 1992. Politeness in linguistic research. In: Watts, R.J., Ide, S., Ehlich, K. (Eds.), Politeness in Language: Studies in Its History, Theory and Practice. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 131–155. Jary, Mark, 1998. Relevance theory and the communication of politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 30, 1–19. Jaworski, Adam, 1993. The Power of Silence: Social and Pragmatic Perspectives. Sage, London. Jucker, Andreas, 1988. The relevance of politeness. Multilingua 7, 375–384. Levinson, Stephen C., 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Mantovani, Giuseppe, 2000. Exploring Borders: Understanding Culture and Psychology. Routledge, London. Ma´rquez Reiter, Rosina, 2000. Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay: A Contrastive Study of Requests and Apologies. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Pan, Yuling, 2000. Politeness in Chinese Face-to-Face Interaction. Ablex, Stamford, CT. Pan, Yuling, Scollon, Suzanne Wong, Scollon, Ron, 2002. Professional Communication in International Settings. Blackwell, Malden and Oxford. Pe´rez Herna´ndez, Lorena, 1996. The cognition of requests. Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 4, 189–208. Pe´rez Herna´ndez, Lorena, 1999. Grounding politeness. Journal of English Studies 1, 209–237.
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Pe´rez Herna´ndez, Lorena, Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco Jose´, 2002. Grounding, semantic motivation, and conceptual interaction in indirect directive speech acts. Journal of Pragmatics 34, 259–284. Poyatos, Fernando, 2002. Nonverbal Communication Across Disciplines (3 vols.). John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Pyysia¨inen, Ilkka, 2002. Ontology of culture and the study of human behavior. Journal of Cognition and Culture 2, 167–182. Ruhi, S¸u¨kriye, Dogˇan, Gu¨rkan, 2001. Reevance theory and compliments as phatic communication: the case of Turkish. In: Bayraktarogˇu, A., Sifianou, M. (Eds.), Linguistic Politeness Across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 341–390. Schegloff, Emanuel A., 1968. Sequencing in conversational opening. American Anthropologist 70 (6), 1075–1095. Sperber, Dan, Wilson, Deirdre, 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, second ed. Blackwell, Oxford. Terkourafi, Marina, 1999. Frames for politeness: a case study. Pragmatics 9, 97–117. Thornborrow, Joanna, 2002. Power Talk: Language and Interaction in Institutional Discourse. Pearson Education, Harlow. Turner, Ken, 1993. Review of Davis Steven (1991). IRAL 31 (1), 61–65. Turner, Ken, 2000. Review of Asa Kasher (1998). Linguistics 38 (1), 199–205. Verschueren, Jef, 1995. Preface. In: Verschueren, J., O¨stman, J.-O., Blommaert, J. (Eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics: Manual. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. ix–xiv. Watts, Richard, Ide, Sachiko, Ehlich, Konrad, 1992. Introduction. In: Watts, R., Ide, S., Ehlich, K. (Eds.), Politeness in Language: Studies in Its History, Theory and Practice. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 1–17. Xie, Chaoqun. Review of Song Mei Lee-Wong, 2000. Multilingua (in press). Zegarac, Vlad, Clark, Billy, 1999. Phatic interpretation of phatic communication. Journal of Linguistics 35, 321–346. Chaoqun Xie is a Lecturer at the Foreign Languages Institute, Fujian Teachers University, China. His main research areas include pragmatics, sociolinguistics, intra-cultural and inter-cultural communication, translation and cognition.
Chaoqun Xie Foreign Languages Institute Fujian Teachers University Fuzhou 350007, Fujian, China E-mail address: [email protected]
doi:10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00175-3
Book review A Critique of Politeness Theories Review of Gino Eelen, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2001, viii+280 pages, paperback, £17.99 It is generally recognized that the pioneering work of Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Geoffrey N. Leech, and Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, launched in the 1970s, has greatly contributed to the ensuing enthusiasm in politeness studies. This shows that more and more people have realized the need to carry out research on politeness. On the one hand, we human beings do not and can not possibly live in isolation; rather, we are in essence ‘‘at once biological, psychological, and cultural/ social beings’’ (Pyysia¨inen, 2002: 167) and need to interact constantly with other people, and politeness is one of the things we should bear in mind to ensure smooth and successful interaction. On the other hand, advances in science and technology have gradually eliminated the distance of time and space and greatly contributed to easier and more frequent human interaction, putting the study of politeness on a high agenda. To ignore politeness studies entails running the risk of miscommunication, conflict and friction, among other things. In other words, where there is communication, there is politeness studies. As a result, politeness as a research topic of much concern has been and is still enjoying much popularity with people specialized in the areas of, say, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psychology, anthropology, inter-cultural and intra-cultural communication and even cognitive linguistics. The second point that can be inferred from the large body of literature on politeness is that there must be some things on which researchers and scholars can not see eye to eye with one another. In point of fact, if we give more than passing thought to the nearly geometric, or ‘mammoth-like’ (Chen, 2001: 87) increase in the number of books and articles dealing with politeness in the last three or so decades, then we will find, to our surprise, that several central and fundamental issues in politeness studies (for example, What is the nature of politeness? How should we approach politeness?) have not yet been comfortably or satisfactorily resolved. That politeness is ‘‘ubiquitous in language use’’ (Brown, 2001: 11620) makes it a ‘‘definitionally fuzzy and empirically difficult area’’ (Held, 1992: 131). Moreover, as it stands, almost all the scholars and researchers doing politeness have developed some or many presuppositions about the very notion of politeness long before they start to talk and write about the subject matter. And where do these presuppositions come from? They do not come from their talk with ordinary speakers asking what these ordinary speakers, constituting a significant part of the communicative communities, have to
812
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 811–818
say on this matter; ironically, few politeness theorists have ever carried out much down-to-earth fieldwork of this sort. The presuppositions many politeness theorists have about the conceptualizations of politeness come from the books they read, from the stories they hear, from the experiences they experience, from whatever idea that comes to their mind. More serious, some if not many of them naively infer that their own views on politeness, which may turn out to be wrong or inaccurate, can represent the views of their people if not the whole of human culture, assuming the universality of human nature, taking little into consideration such things as individual differences, regional divergences, and contexts of social interaction. So, why are there so many varied conceptualizations of politeness? What is hidden behind these conceptualizations? For me, it is all because of varied thinking patterns, or different cultural backgrounds. Actually, all the conceptualizations have been ingrained for a long time in the minds of these scholars and researchers. The conceptualizations actually mirror more or less their cultural values. As a result, it comes as little surprise that there are currently numerous definitions and investigations of politeness. Further, the profusion of research work on politeness does not necessarily mean that this line of inquiry is one that is theoretically sound, methodologically rigorous and without any theoretical or conceptual ambiguity, or empirical confusion. Rather, the reverse may often be the case, which is reminiscent of the following words in the first circular announcing the establishment of the International Pragmatics Association in early 1986 (quoted in Verschueren, 1995: x): Today, pragmatics is a large, loose, and disorganized collection of research efforts. . .. Researchers in an ever-increasing number of different disciplines make constant or occasional use of pragmatic notions. But their contribution to our understanding of human verbal communication often does not reach its fullest potential as a result of the emerging theoretical, methodological, and terminological diversity. And the same can, in my view, be said about the present situation of politeness studies. At this point, therefore, a book seems to be both in good order and in dire need, a book that surveys and scrutinizes the state of the art in contemporary politeness analysis, that compares and contrasts the mainstream theories of politeness, that points out what has been thoroughly researched and what has been left completely untouched or inadequately explored and that, finally, looks to future directions in which politeness could be sufficiently pursued. And this is all that Gino Eelen tries to tackle in his A Critique of Politeness Theories, which is, though the author does not explicitly state, a revised version of his doctoral dissertation titled Ideology in politeness: A critical analysis completed in 1999. In this text, the first of a new series on language and diversity titled ‘Encounters’ with Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen as the editors, Eelen, by way of adopting a ‘‘critical reflexive metatheoretical research’’ (p. v) approach using ‘‘the scientific texts as texts, as discourse on language and society’’ (p. iii; italics original), presents an in-depth anatomy of ‘‘current conceptualizations of politeness in terms
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of their social and linguistic presuppositions’’ (p. ii), asserting among other things that politeness theorists should formulate the scientific notion of politeness (politeness 2), on the basis of the commonsense notion of politeness (politeness 1), but not vice versa. In other words, ‘‘A ‘theory of politeness’ should first and foremost be an ‘examination of politeness 1’, of the everyday phenomenon of politeness’’ (p. 252). Eelen’s ultimate goal for this metatheoretical analysis of politeness theorizing is ‘‘to make a more positive contribution to theory formation, by the proposal of an alternative framework that provides an answer to the issues raised by the critique’’ (p. v). This book, I believe, should deserve a large audience in that it is not only a book reviewing and critiquing politeness theories but also an endeavor to explore how we human beings, by using the language in ordinary communication, construct the self, social and cultural membership and the world within and without us. This book contains six chapters. Chapter 1 provides some background information about the nine major theories of politeness under discussion. These nine perspectives on politeness are those advocated by Robin T. Lakoff, Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, Geoffrey Leech, Yueguo Gu, Sachiko Ide, Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Bruce Fraser and William Nolen, Horst Arndt and Richard Janney, and Richard Watts. A reservation appears to be in order here. Although ‘‘the nine core theories are representative for a large part, if not most, of current scientific thinking about politeness’’ (p. 29), some readers may still wonder why Eelen does not mention at all those contributions adopting a relevance-theoretic approach to politeness studies (see, for example, Jucker, 1988; Escandell-Vidal 1996; Jary, 1998; Ruhi and Dodan 2001; Terkourafi, 1999; Zegarac and Clark, 1999). The reason why Eelen does not discuss the relevance-theoretical approach to politeness may be that, as claimed by some researchers (e.g. Turner, 2000), given the fact that one of the deep-rooted and irreparable weaknesses with relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) lies in its ‘‘conceptual incoherence’’, an effort to integrate relevance theory into politeness studies may end up in failure. In my view, it appears to be a bit early to make such a pessimistic prediction and I hope future studies will prove that the marriage of relevance theory and the theory of politeness is successful. Recently, some other researchers have even attempted to ground politeness within the cognitive linguistic framework with special references to metaphor and metonymy (see, among others, Pe´rez Herna´ndez, 1996, 1999; Pe´rez Herna´ndez and Ruiz de Mendoza, 2002). Since most of these theories selected by Eelen for his text have been widely cited and debated, it seems to be of little necessity to repeat what they propose, but it pays to point out what they have in common: these theories all view politeness as ‘conflict-avoidance’ and as ‘social indexing’ (pp. 21–23). More serious, as shown later in this book, ‘‘all the different theories share a common substratum of ontological, epistemological and methodological presuppositions’’ (p. 245). Another point worth mentioning is that at no time should we forget that whatever definition of politeness we give, the definition should be a working or operational one and no more than that. Jaworski (1993: 32) comes close to this view when he asserts that ‘‘all definitions of concepts have to be treated as theoretically (versus objectively) motivated, and their value is no more than operational’’. Further, Levinson’s (1983; cited in
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Turner, 1993: 61) argument that ‘‘pragmatics should not be defined and then done but done and then defined’’ is also true of the definition of politeness. After all, the act of defining something itself has in a sense limited the extent to which this very something can be studied. Following Watts et al. (1992), Eelen, in Chapter 2, gives top priority to distinguishing first-order politeness (politeness 1) from second-order politeness (politeness 2), which turns out to be one of the major themes underlying the discussion. Politeness 1 refers to politeness notions of the outsiders (ordinary speakers) or emic accounts, while politeness 2 refers to those of the insiders (researchers and scholars) or etic accounts. More specifically, politeness1, ‘‘a socio-psychological concept’’ (p. 30), ‘‘is intimately connected with (social) values’’ (p. 37), ‘‘is always an instance of everyday social life’’ (p. 38), ‘‘is inherently a reflexive activity’’ (p. 43) and ‘‘is restricted to the polite end of the polite-impolite continuum’’ (p. 47). Eelen distinguishes three different kinds of politeness 1: expressive politeness 1, classificatory politeness1 and metapragmatic politeness 1, which are mainly characterized by evaluativity, argumentativity, and normativity. Politeness 2 is ‘‘the scientific conceptualization of politeness100 (p. 45), seeking to expound everyday politeness phenomena. And an adequate theory of politeness has three major characteristics, viz. ‘‘non-evaluativity, non-normativity, and a broad scope covering the whole of the continuum between polite and impolite’’ (p. 49). As argued by Eelen, the politeness 1–politeness 2 distinction fails to receive due attention and demarcation at both the input stage (from politeness 1 to politeness 2) and the output stage (from politeness 2 to politeness 1) of current theorizing. Many politeness theorists do not derive politeness 2 from politeness 1; rather, they first have politeness 2 and then use it to account for politeness 1. To put it another way, many researchers have followed a deductive instead of inductive reasoning process in accounting for politeness. For Eelen, this is a danger and more serious, it is disregarded or neglected by all the politeness theories. In Chapter 3, Eelen shows that most current politeness theories are flawed with a triple conceptual bias, with more attention devoted to the polite side of the polite-impolite distinction, to the speaker in the interactional dyad, and to the speaker production of behavior rather than hearer evaluation (p. 119). Eelen accounts for this conceptual bias in terms of sociolinguistic scientific thinking and commonsense notions of politeness (pp. 113–119), arguing in favor of an ‘‘evaluation-centered approach’’ (pp. 110–113) to make impoliteness, the Cinderella of politeness studies, on a par with politeness, whereby the embarrassing situation in which impoliteness ‘‘only has a walk-on part’’ (p. 88) or even ‘‘never really enters the picture’’ (p. 90) might be hopefully improved. For Eelen, evaluation is ‘‘the basic, primordial mode of being of (im)politeness’’ (p. 109). The blurred distinction of politeness 1 and politeness 2, as explored in Chapter 4, also contributes to the fact that most of the current politeness theories attach much importance to norms and normativity, accounting for everyday politeness phenomena in terms of ‘‘socially shared norms’’ (p. 243). Further, theoretical norms lead to empirical norms in terms of statistical analysis, systematic variability and subjective judgment (pp. 141–158). As a result, ‘‘although theoretical and commonsense models share the same ontology, neither of them seems to square with empirical reality’’
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(p. 158). In other words, empirical data are made to fit theoretical norms but not vice versa; individual differences or variability present in empirical findings are made systematic or even disregarded. This is also true of empirical hearer variability, which is often accounted for in association with the notion of culture when in fact various aspects pertaining to this very notion such as its nature, scope, ontology and variation, among others, are very problematic (cf. Mantovani, 2000). Consequently, politeness is viewed as ‘‘a characteristic of language’’ (p. 243), ‘‘as a form of (expressive) behaviour, driven by a system of culturally shared social norms, and constituting a socially regulative force in the maintenance of social order and stability’’ (p. 245). And this is one of the things that Eelen seeks to rectify in Chapter 5. Linking the various theoretical perspectives on politeness under examination to Talcott Parsons’ structural functionalism, Eelen argues that both are similar in emphasizing ‘‘priority of the social over the individual, normative action, social consensus, functional integration and resistance to change’’ (p. 203), in calling for paying exclusive attention to ‘‘matters cultural’’ (p. 215), while taking little into account the individual. As a matter of fact, the notions of the cultural, the social and the individual are in intimate relation and ‘‘ultimately the social/cultural relies on the individual for its existence, as it is individuals who perform the action through which societies and cultures arise’’ (p. 216). I agree with Eelen when he points out that power should be considered ‘‘as a practical factor co-determined by individual action, as something that can be asserted, maintained, claimed, and challenged’’ (p. 226). In other words, power is not always static and predetermined but often dynamic and measurable; power is a contextually sensitive phenomenon, which can be effected on various levels (cf. Thornborrow, 2002). And I am inclined to think that the same can be said about notions of politeness, that is, politeness is also a dynamic concept, the study of which should be closely related to the situations in which it is observed (cf. Pan, 2000). There cannot be a once-for-all, all-inclusive golden rule guiding the study of politeness or impoliteness; rather, a pluralistic approach to the study of politeness should be adopted to explore the panorama pertaining to politeness. Recurring to the Bourdieuan notion of ‘habitus’ complemented by discursive psychology, Eelen argues for an alternative conceptualization of politeness with the characteristics of variability, evaluativity, argumentativity, and discursiveness. This view of politeness (p. 247; see also p. 240) takes full account of the hearer’s position and the evaluative moment; is able to capture both politeness and impoliteness; provides a more dynamic, bi-directional view of the social-individual relationship; and thus acknowledges the individual (in terms of both variability and creativity) as well as evolution and change as intrinsic to the nature of politeness. Judging from the above, one may determine that this alternative model of politeness is promising; however, since this alternative model of politeness proposed by Eelen is not based on data gathered by observing spontaneous interaction in the real life, at this point, therefore, there is no knowing whether this approach can really provide a full-fledged picture of politeness; it needs empirical evidence. However, if
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we apply his approach (politeness 2) to examine everyday politeness conceptualizations (politeness 1), then we will find ourselves moving from politeness 2 to politeness 1 and this is what Eelen has been arguing against throughout this book! One of Eelen’s major arguments is that we should come from politeness 1 to politeness 2 instead of from politeness 2 to politeness 1. Eelen is also aware of some possible difficulties with empirical research adopting this alternative view of politeness (pp. 254–255). He is right in arguing against collecting data in ‘‘hypothetical situations’’ (p. 39) and calling for ‘‘the need for real-life spontaneous conversational data’’ (p. 255). I find it hard to understand why the socalled Discourse Completion Tests or the role play that fail to mirror accurately and genuinely the complexities of real-life communication activities should be so notoriously popular with so many researchers. For one thing, human interaction is an extremely complicated activity with numerous factors involved, verbal and nonverbal, and the so-called Discourse Completion Tests are simply unable to reflect those nonverbal elements that more often than not play a nontrivial part in the interaction process. Actually, looking back, we will find that most of current politeness theories are devoted to exploring linguistic politeness rather than nonlinguistic politeness (cf. p. iv). However, it seems to be a hard fact that non-linguistic politeness or impoliteness should also occupy a place in politeness studies. Antonopoulou (2001), for example, has empirically shown that requests in brief service encounters can be made silently. In point of fact, to appreciate to what extent nonverbal communication has been enthusiastically studied, one only needs to take a look at Poyatos (2002). Another reason why the Discourse Completion Tests instrument should not be adopted is that, as argued by some researches (e.g. Pan et al., 2002) that there is some distance between what people say they do and what people actually do. So, how can we resort to imaginary situations to account for real-life encounters? Although participants have, before they start to role play, been told ‘‘Do not think too much and try to be as spontaneous as possible’’ (Ma´rquez Reiter, 2000: 185), what is the picture of real life? The real picture is that human interlocutors do think too much when it comes to interacting with others. After all, this is a world of laws, and we are constrained by a variety of laws, written or unwritten. I subscribe to the view that only non-reactive naturally occurring conversations can truly reflect the complexities of everyday (im)politeness phenomena one examines, despite the time, energy and financial constraints involved (Xie, in press). Besides, it has long been proved that ‘‘the raw data of everyday conversational interaction can be subjected to rigorous analysis’’ (Schegloff, 1968: 1075). In Chapter 6, the last one, Eelen summarizes the major arguments made in previous chapters, reiterates his views on politeness and points out possible directions of future research before warning us that ‘‘this perspective may well lead to a notion of politeness that is more vague and less tangible—less ‘systematic’—than the traditional notions’’ (p. 257). To sum up, this book is at once remarkable and thought-provoking: remarkable in the sense that it represents a valuable critical review of nine major and influential theoretical perspectives on politeness when such work is desperately needed, tracing
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out new avenues of research into politeness; thought-provoking in the sense that it will probably spark and inspire a new surge of debate and discussion as to how to account for politeness and that, all the more significantly, it will draw renewed attention paid to ontological, epistemological and methodological bases on which a coherent, if not all-inclusive theory of politeness could be possibly built. Of course, it pays to remember that (im)politeness cuts across numerous levels of language use and (im)politeness can not, and can never be confined to only one branch of linguistics; rather, (im)politeness is an area of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary nature. Indeed, this volume, which has gone beyond the study of politeness per se and into other important and essential domains of our life, may probably be conducive to reconsidering, among other things, what social reality we have, what a life philosophy we can adopt, and what culture really means to our socialization. For me, politeness is simply a way of living, or rather, a way to live, a way to get to know the world, whereby we learn and seek to establish ourselves as human, social and cultural beings, among others. And it should be borne in mind that we do not and should not study (im)politeness for the sake of (im)politeness; the ultimate goal of studying (im)politeness consists, as with many other human sciences, in coming to grips with how we can better construct the self, social and cultural membership and life worlds. Herein lies the name of the game.
References Antonopoulou, Eleni, 2001. Brief service encounters: gender and politeness. In: Bayraktarogˇu, A., Sifianou, M. (Eds.), Linguistic Politeness Across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 241–269. Brown, Penelope, 2001. Politeness and language. In: Baltes, P.B., Smelser, N.J. (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (revised ed.). Elsevier Science, Oxford, pp. 11620–11624. Chen, Rong, 2001. Self-politeness: a proposal. Journal of Pragmatics 33, 87–106. Escandell-Vidal, Victoria, 1996. Towards a cognitive approach to politeness. Language Sciences 18 (3/4), 629–650. Held, Gudrun, 1992. Politeness in linguistic research. In: Watts, R.J., Ide, S., Ehlich, K. (Eds.), Politeness in Language: Studies in Its History, Theory and Practice. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 131–155. Jary, Mark, 1998. Relevance theory and the communication of politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 30, 1–19. Jaworski, Adam, 1993. The Power of Silence: Social and Pragmatic Perspectives. Sage, London. Jucker, Andreas, 1988. The relevance of politeness. Multilingua 7, 375–384. Levinson, Stephen C., 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Mantovani, Giuseppe, 2000. Exploring Borders: Understanding Culture and Psychology. Routledge, London. Ma´rquez Reiter, Rosina, 2000. Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay: A Contrastive Study of Requests and Apologies. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Pan, Yuling, 2000. Politeness in Chinese Face-to-Face Interaction. Ablex, Stamford, CT. Pan, Yuling, Scollon, Suzanne Wong, Scollon, Ron, 2002. Professional Communication in International Settings. Blackwell, Malden and Oxford. Pe´rez Herna´ndez, Lorena, 1996. The cognition of requests. Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 4, 189–208. Pe´rez Herna´ndez, Lorena, 1999. Grounding politeness. Journal of English Studies 1, 209–237.
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Pe´rez Herna´ndez, Lorena, Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco Jose´, 2002. Grounding, semantic motivation, and conceptual interaction in indirect directive speech acts. Journal of Pragmatics 34, 259–284. Poyatos, Fernando, 2002. Nonverbal Communication Across Disciplines (3 vols.). John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Pyysia¨inen, Ilkka, 2002. Ontology of culture and the study of human behavior. Journal of Cognition and Culture 2, 167–182. Ruhi, S¸u¨kriye, Dogˇan, Gu¨rkan, 2001. Reevance theory and compliments as phatic communication: the case of Turkish. In: Bayraktarogˇu, A., Sifianou, M. (Eds.), Linguistic Politeness Across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 341–390. Schegloff, Emanuel A., 1968. Sequencing in conversational opening. American Anthropologist 70 (6), 1075–1095. Sperber, Dan, Wilson, Deirdre, 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, second ed. Blackwell, Oxford. Terkourafi, Marina, 1999. Frames for politeness: a case study. Pragmatics 9, 97–117. Thornborrow, Joanna, 2002. Power Talk: Language and Interaction in Institutional Discourse. Pearson Education, Harlow. Turner, Ken, 1993. Review of Davis Steven (1991). IRAL 31 (1), 61–65. Turner, Ken, 2000. Review of Asa Kasher (1998). Linguistics 38 (1), 199–205. Verschueren, Jef, 1995. Preface. In: Verschueren, J., O¨stman, J.-O., Blommaert, J. (Eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics: Manual. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. ix–xiv. Watts, Richard, Ide, Sachiko, Ehlich, Konrad, 1992. Introduction. In: Watts, R., Ide, S., Ehlich, K. (Eds.), Politeness in Language: Studies in Its History, Theory and Practice. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 1–17. Xie, Chaoqun. Review of Song Mei Lee-Wong, 2000. Multilingua (in press). Zegarac, Vlad, Clark, Billy, 1999. Phatic interpretation of phatic communication. Journal of Linguistics 35, 321–346. Chaoqun Xie is a Lecturer at the Foreign Languages Institute, Fujian Teachers University, China. His main research areas include pragmatics, sociolinguistics, intra-cultural and inter-cultural communication, translation and cognition.
Chaoqun Xie Foreign Languages Institute Fujian Teachers University Fuzhou 350007, Fujian, China E-mail address: [email protected]
doi:10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00175-3