Universität Rostock
Institut für Anglistik & Amerikanistik
PS: Linguistic Politeness
SS 2005

Topic:

The use of Positive Politeness Strategies considering a Specific Speech Act.

Anett Senftleben

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ... 3

2. Politeness in General ... 4

3. Positive Politeness on the Example of a Radio Documentary ... 4
3.1 Claim Common Ground  ... 4
3.2 Convey that Speaker and Hearer are Cooperators ... 10
3.3 Fulfil Hearer’s Wants  ... 11

4. Conclusion  ... 12

5. Attachment  ... 13

6. References ... 20

1. Introduction

Positive politeness strategies are based on Brown and Levinson’s theory about politeness in general. They distinguish between two kinds of politeness – positive and negative politeness. Even though their theory about speech acts has been developed in 1978, it does not seem to be outdated. Brown and Levinson are still the leading linguists in the field of politeness who explain which positive politeness strategies people follow during speech acts.

The strategies of positive politeness not only apply to speech, to spoken language and recorded speech; but also to written texts. There seems to be a difference in use of positive politeness strategies in written texts and speech act. Various problems occurred while working on the paper. First, it was very difficult to find an interview, which could be downloaded from the internet. Secondly, this interview had to be interesting enough to make it pleasurable to work on. And lastly, it was necessary to find an interview which can be used throughout this paper as an example to illustrate all 15 strategies of positive politeness. This seemed to be the most substantial problem. It is almost impossible to find an interview, which follows all 15 strategies. I assume that not all 15 strategies of positive politeness had been used during the interview.

This paper will deal with documentary of the British rock band Coldplay. It was recorded from the BBC homepage, where you find links to British radio stations, and I edited the interview by cutting out musical interludes. The talk was broadcasted on Radio 1 in the Steve Lamacq’s show “Bigger, Stronger - Coldplay′s early days”¹. Even though I contacted Radio 1, I was not able to find out the exact date when the interview was broadcasted.

2. Politeness in General

According to many linguists, the importance of politeness strategies lies in maintaining a social order and is seen as “a precondition of human cooperation” (Brown & Levinson, 2000, xiii). Lakoff said that the purpose of politeness is to avoid conflicts (Lakoff, 1889. 101). Politeness strategies are learned when your mother tells you to thank someone who has, for example , given you a present for your fifth birthday. It seems to be very important to stick to these conventions, which have developed since human being exists.

Brown and Levinson found out that politeness can be divided into positive and negative politeness, and both forms of politeness are distinguished by negative and positive “face”. While the positive face describes every member’s wish to be desired by at least some others, negative politeness differentiates in “the want of every competent adult member” (Brown & Levinson, 2000, 62) to be unimpeded in his actions by others. (Brown & Levinson, 2000, 62)

The “face” is the central term, which explains the ways of being polite. The basic strategy of politeness is not to lose face by minimising the face-threatening act – the negative face – and improve the positive face (Matthews, P. H., 1997, 125)

3. Positive Politeness on the Example of a Radio Documentary

This chapter will deal with the use of positive politeness strategies in the chosen example of a radio documentary. To work on the politeness strategies in this chapter, I have chosen to divide the subchapters as suggested by Brown and Levinson in “claim common ground”, “convey that speaker and hearer are cooperators” and “fulfil hearer’s wants for something”. (Brown & Levinson, 2000, viii f.)

For the following section, I only worked on passages spoken by the band members during the documentary, neither the introductory passages spoken by the interviewer nor the introduction itself were analysed in terms of positive politeness.

[....]

1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/alt/coldplay2005/index.shtml