We can show our
feelings and awareness toward others through politeness which we use in
language.
Janet Holmes in
her book An Introduction to
Sociolinguistics (1992, p. 296) states that politeness involves taking
account of other people’s feeling in order to make themselves feels
comfortable.
Politeness
itself is socially prescribed. This doesn’t mean that we must be always polite.
We may be impolite in several occasion, this act depends on the existence of
standards and norms.
When we interact
with others we must be aware of both kinds of face and therefore have a choice
of two kinds of politeness:
- Positive politeness leads to achieve solidarity through offers of friendship, the use of compliments, and informal language. Treat others as friends and allies and never threaten their face.
- Negative politeness leads to deference, apologizing, indirectness, and formality in language we use.
In
communication, we are obliged to respect ourselves and the other participant
each time we interact with others, we have to carefully show our ‘face’ in
order to avoid mini-drama (Goffman: 1955: 1967).
What is ‘face’?
Face according to Brown and Levinson
(1987, p. 61) is a public self-image that everyone wants to claim for
themselves. There are two kinds of ‘face’, which are positive face and negative
face.
· Positive face is defined as personal desire of a
person that their personality is appreciated by their social groups. It leads
to the appreciation of individual achievement. For instance, a painter artist
such as Van Gogh wants other people’s appreciation of their paintings.
- On the other hand, negative face describes the basic personal rights and freedom of action in an individual. Someone’s negative face can represent as a threat towards the other individual’s rights such as, not to be interrupted by other while speaking during presentation.
Symmetric pronominal use is a good example of positive
politeness and asymmetric T/V use of negative politeness. This approach to
politeness has quite revealing when applied to many Western societies. It may
also not work so well in other cultures, for example: Javanese.
Some languages seem to have built into them very complex
system of politeness.
1. Javanese
is a language in which as Geertz (1960, p. 248) says:
“It is nearly impossible to say anything without indicating
the social relationship between the speaker and the listener in terms of status
and familiarity”
Before one Javanese speaks to
another, they must decide on an appropriate speech style: high, middle, or low.
For example: The equivalent to
English word now is samenika in high
style, saniki in middle style, and saiki in low style.
You can’t freely shift styles, so
the choice of saiki will require the
speaker to use arep for the verb
equivalent to go rather than adjeng
or bade, which would be required by
the choices of saniki and samenika, respectively.
2. Japanese
The Japanese are also always
described as being an extremely polite people.
Martin (1964) has summarized some
of the ways in which the Japanese use language to show this politeness:
honorific forms incorporating negatives (analogous to English ‘Wouldn’t you
like to . . . ?’) are more polite than those without negatives; the longer the
utterance the more polite it is felt to be; Martin says that there are four
basic factors at work here: in choosing the proper, or polite, address term for
another, a Japanese considers out-groupness, social position, age difference,
and gender difference in that order
3. French
According to Vigner (p. 88), this
French politeness formula is made up of three components: (1) an initial
mitigating component (which can be short, e.g., Pouvezvous, or long, e.g.,
Est-ce que vous voudriez bien) or its absence; (2) the central request or order
component; and (3) a final component, the presence or absence of something like
s’il vous plaît.
Politeness is a very important
principle in language use; we must consider others’ feelings. The next chapter
will again take up the issue of politeness and try to place it in a still
broader context
