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AWARENESS OF NEGATIVE POLITENESS IN CONVERSION
Where positive politeness enhances the hearer's positive and consistent self-image through recognizing the hearer's need for his or her wishes and desires to be appreciated socially, negative politeness addresses the hearer's need for freedom of action and freedom from imposition in making his or her own decisions. This is also known as negative face redress. The first approach to negative politeness is to be direct by being conventionally indirect. A second approach is to not assume or presume. These strategies include questions and hedges. (A hedge is a "softening" of a statement by employing less-than-certain phrasing such as perhaps, might, can, or could.) Third, negative politeness can be employed by not coercing the hearer. This can be accomplished by being pessimistic ("I'm sure you won't want to do this…"), minimizing the imposition ("It's a small thing I need…"), or giving deference ("you know much more about this than I do…"). The speaker can also communicate his/her desire to not impinge on the hearer. This can be accomplished through apologizing strategies that include admitting the impingement ("I know this is a big deal…"), indicating reluctance ("I hate to ask this…"), giving overwhelming reasons for having to ask, or begging forgiveness. Further efforts to not impinge on the hearer include impersonalizing the speaker and hearer. This strategies include using passive and circumstantial voices ("It's generally done this way…"), replacing "I" and "you" with indefinites ("people tend to…"), pluralizing "I" and "you" ("We don't always know what we're up against…"), and avoiding use of "I" and "you" all together. Therefore, negative politeness comments might include, "some people might approach the situation in this way," or "I think I might do it differently, but of course whatever you think is best," or "I don't know a lot about this but it seems that this approach might be reasonable and the situation" or "I know you know a lot more about this than I do, but it seems to me…" In these examples, the speaker is recognizing and addressing the hearer's right to make his or her own decisions freely, thus attending to the hearer's negative face needs.
Off-record politeness is a politeness strategy that relies upon implication. This strategy is very indirect, and involves the breaking of conversational norms to imply a particular recommended course of action. Here, the speaker is relying upon the hearer's ability to decipher and interpret the speaker's intended meaning, although it is indirectly suggested. Off-record politeness is accomplished in a couple of ways with several strategies for each. First, the speaker can invite conversational implicatures. Strategies here are to give hints, give clues of association, presuppose, understate, overstate, use tautologies, use contradictions, be ironic, use metaphors, and use rhetorical questions. Secondly, the speaker can be intentionally vague or ambiguous, also over-generalizing, displacing the hearer, and being incomplete by using ellipsis. Examples might include the following exchanges:
A) "What do you think about these pants?"
B) "I think you have a lot a very nice clothes in your closet, especially pants."
A) "Do you think we should leave at 7 or 7:30?"
B) "I think your sister is a stickler for punctuality."
A) "I think I'd like to watch the football game."
B) "Yes, a little violent aggression is a good way to spend a Monday night."
In each of these scenarios, speaker B is offering a suggestion to speaker A. Speaker B's intended meaning may or may not be clear to you as you read through this, but hopefully, given the context and their relationship, speaker A will understand the implications offered by speaker B. The risk in off-record politeness, of course, is that the implications are so vague they are not understood as intended. Such is the nature of off-record politeness.
The ideas presented in this article reflect those put forth by Brown and Levinson in their attention-grabbing work of the 1970s and 1980s, which served as the source for a great deal of additional research. As is often the case with new research in an area, some researchers have criticized Brown and Levinson's theory for various reasons. Some say it is overly pessimistic, in that it reduces all interactions to potential face threats and requires constant monitoring of these potential face threats, which could easily rob social interactions of all elements of pleasure. Others say it is individualistic, presenting the speaker as a rational agent, unconstrained by social considerations. Perhaps one of the greatest shortcomings to Brown and Levinson's work has been identified as the essential decision-tree, which speakers have to work through to locate the utterance appropriate to the particular situation in which s/he finds her/himself. This method also excludes the possibility of invoking two or more strategies at the same time. The theory put forth by Brown and Levinson, and the subject of this article, is the most foundational work in politeness, and therefore garners its section. It is not the only view of politeness available in the research literature, however.
Much research has been conducted on this topic, perhaps especially in the wake of Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory. Though we all feel we have a sense for what politeness is, it's very difficult to pin it down when someone asks you to define it. One thing that researchers agree upon is that politeness is something that is learned or acquired. We are not born into it, but rather socialized into it. Further, because we are socialized into it, it naturally follows that different cultures have different ideas of what it is, and how it should be appropriately employed.
The idea that politeness is essentially indirectness has captured the attention of several scholars conceptualizing and examining politeness. Some argue that indirectness does not necessarily imply politeness, as results from a study indicate that individuals don't always evaluate the most indirect approaches as the most polite. In this research, politeness is defined as a balance between two needs: the need for pragmatic clarity and the need to avoid coerciveness. Respondents considered that a certain adherence to the pragmatic clarity of a message is an essential component of politeness – that is, the practicing of social conventions yielding clarity in the message.
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