Tuesday, May 31, 2005
On Language 5/31: Debut of Journal of Politeness Research
New journal accompanies changing view of politeness
Chicago Tribune, May 31, 2005
By Nathan Bierma
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Politeness can play a crucial role in professional and personal relationships, says Chris Christie, linguist at Loughborough University and founding member of the Linguistic Politeness Research Group, an organization of academic researchers who study polite speech and behavior. Christie and her colleagues have just launched the Journal of Politeness Research, which will publish two issues per year, with Christie as editor.
“Understanding the wide range of politeness behavior that is expected in a culture, and the way this is influenced by the context of an institution or the social relationship between speakers, is very complex, and far from self-evident,” Christie writes by e-mail. “Misjudging the effect of what you say can be extremely important—for communicating ideas and for fostering personal relationships.”
The journal can be read for free online until July 15.
Chris Christie agreed to have her full written responses to my questions posted here. I greatly appreciate the time she took to provide such thorough responses.
What is the relationship between the Linguistic Politeness Research Group and JPR?
The journal came about as a result of the shared interests of the group.
The core members of LPRG are seven academics whose publication interests cover a number of fields that fall broadly within the discipline of linguistics: pragmatics, gender and language studies, intercultural communication, business communication, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, communication studies, and conversation analysis. About five or six years ago, at the instigation of Sara Mills of Sheffield Hallam University, the core group began to meet to discuss our shared interest in the way that politeness scholarship intersected with our own specific fields of research.
The core group have been meeting once or twice a term for the past five years or so. At our meetings we either discuss issues raised in recent politeness research and/or organise events such as conferences, symposia, joint publications etc. After the first year or so, we expanded the group to include academics who are interested in politeness and who wish to be kept informed of events and publications. The members of the wider group are welcome to join our meetings, but as they are spread across the world, we tend to keep in touch by email and only meet up at events such as conferences or symposia.
In 2002, on behalf of the group, I organised a conference at Loughborough University that focused on Politeness and Power. It was at the conference that the members of the core group, in conjunction with the plenary speaker, Richard Watts, decided that as there were so many papers being written about politeness behaviour across so many different academic disciplines it would be a good idea to launch a journal that would bring all of this research together. The members of the group put together a proposal for the journal, it was accepted by Mouton, and four members of the group, and Richard Watts agreed to form the editorial board.
Is linguistics the closest thing there is to a common link among all the disciplines and specialties represented in JPR?
The goal of the editorial board is to attract the interest of contributors and readers from across the full range of fields that have found the concept of politeness a useful analytical tool with which to explore their specific interests. We feel that politeness is very much a multidisciplinary concern. However, since the theories of politeness that have had the highest profile were initially those that addressed it as a linguistic phenomenon, the fields of interest that have generated a lot of politeness research in the past have tended to fall within the discipline of linguistics, particularly within pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, language development, and applied linguistics such as language learning. And it is still the case that most politeness research falls within linguistics.
However, politeness has also always been seen as a social and cultural phenomenon, and so it has been, and continues to be, of interest to anthropologists and sociologists. There has also been a lot of interesting work carried out across a number of fields that address some aspect of communication but which do not explicitly address politeness as a linguistic phenomenon. For example there has been research on communication within the disciplines of medicine, criminology, business studies, marketing and computing. Politeness phenomena have also featured increasingly in research in social psychology, clinical psychology, anthropology as well as literary studies over the past few years. It is also of interest to scholars researching intercultural communication.
So although a lot of the papers in the journal come from fields of linguistics, it wouldn’t be true to say that this is a common link amongst all of the disciplines and specialities represented by the journal.
How do you define politeness, for research purposes?
As with most academic fields, the scope of politeness research is subject to continual debate. The easiest answer to that question is to say that the definition depends on the theoretical framework that informs any given study.
The earliest models of politeness, developed in the 1970s saw politeness as behaviour that is designed to minimise conflict. Robin Lakoff’s 1975 account distinguished speech that is designed to be as clear as possible, and which does not take into account inter-personal relations, from speech that is indirect, because it is taking into account inter-personal relations. For example, according to that model if you said ‘Lend me some money’ to a work colleague your utterance would be clear, but not polite. However, if you said ‘I’ve left my wallet at home’, it might be intended by you to imply the same thing, but because it is indirect and therefore the colleague is not put in the uncomfortable position of having to agree or refuse to lend you some money, it would be classed as polite.
A similar model of conflict avoidance is proposed by the most influential model of politeness, that developed by Brown & Levinson and first published in 1978. What these theorists add is the concept of ‘face’ to the analysis of politeness, and in that early work and their 1987 publication they develop a highly systematic account of how we look after our own and others’ face. Brown & Levinson argue that everyone has a sense of their own and others’ face – and they gloss this roughly as ‘self-esteem’. They say that face has two aspects, characterised by them in terms of ‘wants’. One aspect, positive face, is the want that one’s own wants are desirable to (at least some) others. The other aspect, negative face, is the want that our actions are unimpeded by others. Brown & Levinson’s argument is that we risk conflict if we do not take into account these wants when we interact with other people. To avoid this conflict – or what they call ‘face threats’ we use politeness strategies.
The example that I gave about the money would come within the category of negative politeness. But the Brown & Levinson account adds a level of explanation not found in the Lakoff account. It would be classed as negative politeness if you phrased your request for a loan indirectly because you are taking into account your colleague’s desire that his actions are unimpeded by others. Other ways of doing negative politeness would include using ‘hedges’ or ‘mitigating devices’, such as saying ‘Would you mind very much if I asked you to lend me some money?’
What is interesting about this second model is that it also includes all sorts of behaviour that we would not ordinarily consider polite. So for example if you say to me that you really like Bach’s music, and I talk enthusiastically about how much I love his Partitas then this would be classed as positive politeness because I am looking after your positive face by demonstrating that your own wants – your want to enjoy Bach – are also desirable to me. Other forms of positive politeness include behaviour that is ‘face enhancing’ – i.e. takes into account someone’s self-esteem – such as saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ etc. These fall more into people’s usual definition of politeness.
However, this specificity of what face consists of, and the fact that speakers would not themselves describe as polite those utterances that Brown & Levinson would classify in this way, has led recent scholars to rethink definitions of politeness. Richard Watts in his 2003 account argues that what counts as politeness is behaviour that is concerned with conflict avoidance or face enhancement, but which is beyond what is normally expected in a situation. So if in a given situation, such as a child talking to her grandparents, there is the expectation that the child will always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, then this is considered ‘politic’ rather than polite behaviour. Polite behaviour would be behaviour that goes beyond what is expected.
There is also a move in recent theories of politeness to take into account what speakers consider politeness to be rather than what theorists perceive as politeness. So, for example, in Sara Mills’ recent book, she makes the point that some people see politeness as pointless or frivolous, or as socially divisive, and analyses should be able to take these views into account.
You identify politeness research as an expanding field. To what do you attribute its expansion?
Partly, I think that it is because the analysis of politeness has practical applications that are of use in a world made smaller through globalisation, advances in communication, and ease of travel. Understanding the wide range of politeness behaviour that is expected in a given culture, and the way that this is influenced by the institutional context, or the social relationship between speakers is very complex, and far from self evident. Misjudging the effect of what you say can be extremely important – both at the level of communicating ideas and in terms of fostering personal relationships. As an academic research area therefore it is attractive because it has an immediate usefulness as well adding to our sum of knowledge.
And it is not just communication across cultures that has this practical application. There is a growing understanding of the extent to which individuals at different levels in an institution, or else engaged in different practices within a single institutional setting, have very different beliefs about what is appropriate behaviour. This can influence our linguistic behaviour, both in terms of how successfully we communicate as well as how we manage our relationships with people. For example, there have been studies that have shown that differences in status between airline staff, or between medical staff, as well as differences in role such as that between doctors and patients or between police officers and victims of domestic violence can influence politeness behaviour, and this can radically affect people’s effectiveness in their roles: in terms of their ability to be sufficiently communicative, or sufficiently supportive to be effective in their jobs. One of the findings of studies of communication between air traffic controllers and pilots for example is that in certain instances politeness can get in the way of effective communication in that it can lead to potentially dangerous misunderstandings.
I also think that the expansion has happened because the theorisation of politeness has recently been subject to some critiques that have opened up its application and have raised some fundamental questions about our understanding of behaviour within and across social groupings. The interest in politeness across so many initial publications came about because the major theory of politeness, that set out by Brown & Levinson (1987 [1978]) was very systematic, and made claims about politeness behaviour that, the authors argued, were valid across all cultures. These claims were eminently testable, which made them very attractive to academics. So a great deal of scholarship was about showing where the original theory was right or wrong about specific behaviours and whether their claims did actually hold across different cultures. Recent theories take into account cultural and social diversity more, and also see social identity as something that is achieved through the use of language choices such as politeness behaviour, rather than something that influences politeness behaviour. So a whole new set of questions has opened up that make the study interesting to academics across a range of disciplines.
Finally, I think that the expansion is because communication is at the core of so much that we do today, and understanding politeness is fundamental to understanding communication.
Why is politeness such a rewarding subject of study?
Mostly because of the insights it provides into such a wide range of social behaviour, and in particular the way that it can capture distinctions in behaviour that are related to class, gender, culture, age, occupation, and many other aspects of social identity. Because the way we are treated, and the way we treat others, is strongly related to our sense of who we are and how we fit into society, politeness behaviour is fundamental to an understanding of social interaction. As an analytical tool it has been used to address a wide range of issues: it has been used to explain the frequency of domestic violence; it has been applied to managerial speech to explain why the glass ceiling can exists for professional women; it has been used as a measure of the socio-communicative capabilities of children with autism-spectrum disorders; it has been used to explain why politicians’ apologies are effective in some cases, but not in others; and it has been used on many occasions to explain why people from different cultures are insulted, or offended by the behaviour of foreigners. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, one of the problems with politeness research in the past has been that it is of use in so many different fields that important findings and applications have not always fed back into a development of the theories. We hope that the launch of the Journal of Politeness Research will ensure that this doesn’t happen in future.