Im/Politeness Implicatures

Michael Haugh

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9783110483291
• eBook ISBN: 9783110394665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

This volume brings together two highly researched but also highly controversial concepts, those of politeness and implicature. A theory of implicature as social action and im/politeness as social practice is developed that opens up new ways of examining the relationship between them. It constitutes a fresh look at the issues involved that redresses the current imbalance between social and pragmatic accounts of im/politeness.

Chapter One:

Indirectness and im/politeness

In this chapter we start by exploring a number of key analytical themes associated with the broader notion of indirectness, themes which seed the exploration of im/politeness implicatures in the subsequent chapters of this book. In the first section of this chapter, the presumed relationship between politeness and indirectness is critically examined, before moving on in section two to consider the various interpersonal functions of indirectness. The different ways in which indirectness itself has been conceptualised not only in pragmatics, but also in conversation analysis and linguistic anthropology, are then teased out in section three. In the course of deconstructing the notion of indirectness a number of key analytical themes are identified. This chapter thus concludes in section four by explicating these key themes, and the ways in which the subsequent chapters will build on them.

1 Politeness and indirectness

It has traditionally been assumed in pragmatics that one of the main reasons for being indirect is a concern for politeness. Searle (1975, 1979) was one of the first to explicitly link indirectness to politeness.¹ He claimed that in the case of directives (e.g. requests, commands and so on), “politeness is the chief motivation for indirectness” (p.36). This claim was built on the observation that some requests are realised not through imperatives (e.g. pass me the salt), which in Speech Act theory is treated as the so-called basic sentence type for directives and thus a “direct” speech act (Searle 1969, 1979), but rather “indirectly” through interrogatives (e.g. can you pass me the salt?) or declaratives (e.g. this could do with a little more salt). Searle’s intuition was that the latter two “indirect” speech acts tend to be regarded as more “polite” than requests realised through imperative formulations. Searle recognised, of course, that there might be other motivations for these kinds of indirect forms, but nevertheless claimed that “politeness is the most prominent motivation for indirectness in requests” (Searle 1979: 49, emphasis added), particularly those indirect forms that are conventionalised for use as requests. The “can you” form, for instance, is commonly treated in pragmatics as conventionalised for making “polite” requests in English. Searle went on to argue that conventionally indirect forms of requesting are polite for two reasons:

Firstly, X does not presume to know about Y’s abilities, as he would if he issued an imperative sentence; and, secondly, the form gives – or at least appears to give – Y the option of refusing, since a yes-no question allows no as a possible answer. Hence, compliance can be made to appear a free act rather than obeying a command. (Searle 1979: 48)

This sort of approach was subsequently extended by Searle (1979) to encompass indirect commissives (i.e. indirect promises, apologies and so on) (pp.54–55).

Searle’s line of argumentation in relation to politeness as the motivation for indirect speech acts, and for indirect requests in particular, arguably reflects two of the so-called “rules of politeness” that were proposed by Lakoff (1973), “Don’t impose” and “Give options” (p.298), respectively. In formulating these rules for politeness, Lakoff also noted that indirectly requesting via a conversational implicature (Grice 1967, 1975) can be regarded as “polite”.² However, she went on to point out that such conversational implicatures “may or may not be a polite way of saying [something], depending on the situation” (Lakoff 1973: 302, emphasis added). For instance, saying “It’s cold in here” in order to implicate that one would like the addressee to “shut the window” may be construed as polite when it is assumed the speaker is giving the addressee options (p.302). However, if the speaker is actually in an institutionally superior or more powerful position than that of the addressee, Lakoff argues that a different set of implications can arise. She claims that given such an indirect request is actually masking an order in the latter situation, it could be interpreted as further implicating something like, “You must interpret my every wish as your command, you are so beneath me” (p.303), and so could be regarded as quite impolite in that case.

In both Searle’s and Lakoff’s early work, then, a somewhat qualified claim about the presumed relationship between politeness and indirectness was developed. Searle argued that such a relationship held for indirect requests and other select speech acts, in particular, those forms conventionalised for use as indirect speech acts, while Lakoff noted that conversational implicatures can be interpreted as either polite or not depending on the context. However, in spite of these provisos, the assumed relationship between politeness and indirectness began to treated as much more widely applicable in subsequent theorisations of politeness.

Leech (1983), for instance, is often read as claiming that politeness correlates with indirectness, that is to say, the more indirect an illocution, the more polite it will be. This was initially based on his claim that by being more indirect in making a request the “degree of optionality” for the hearer to comply is increased, while the “force” of the act becomes “more diminished and tentative” (p.108). However, Leech extended his claims about the correlation between indirectness and politeness beyond requests to other speech acts, such as offers, and noted a general “connection between politeness and obliquity (indirectness)” (p.169). Yet he also noted, although this is generally not well recognised in the literature as Culpeper and Haugh (2014) point out, that increasing the degree of indirectness can actually work in the opposite way in the case of impoliteness. That is to say, increasing indirectness can also result in an increase in the degree of impoliteness in the case of so-called “impolite beliefs” (Leech 1983: 171).

The strongest claims about the correlation between politeness and indirectness are thus in fact made by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987). They propose in their overall ranking of politeness super-strategies that off-record strategies are generally more polite than conventionally indirect strategies, which are, in turn, generally more polite than bald on record strategies. Off record strategies refer to instances where there are a number of “defensible interpretations” of an act, such as in the case of hints, allusions, understatements and so on, where the speaker can avoid “responsibility” for such acts by “leav[ing] it up to the addressee to decide how to interpret it” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 211). Conventionally indirect strategies, on the other hand, encompass the “the use of phrases and sentences that have contextually unambiguous meanings (by virtue of conventionalisation) which are different from their literal meanings. In this way the utterance goes on record, and the speaker indicates his desire to have gone off record (to have conveyed the same thing indirectly)” (p.132). Finally, bald on record strategies include instances where there is no mitigation or modification of the basic speech act, as in the case of direct imperatives (p.95). Thus, according to Brown and Levinson, albeit depending on the particulars of the social distance and power relations between the speaker and hearer (thereby perhaps dealing with Lakoff ’s earlier concern to some extent), a hint such as “This soup’s a bit bland” (p.215) is considered more polite than a conventionalised indirect form such as “Can you pass the salt?” (p.133), which is regarded as more polite, in turn, than a direct imperative such as “Pass the salt.”³ This claim builds on a general “folk understanding” of indirectness as “speaking in a roundabout, circuitous, or even devious way, serving ulterior motives, such as tentativeness, politeness, deniability and so on” (Terkourafi 2013: 214).

Brown and Levinson (1987) went on to argue that “in the absence of definitive evidence that we got the ranking wrong, there are good arguments for insisting that off-record strategies are generally more polite than on-record” (p.20). However, subsequent research has since called this broad claim into question. There is now a growing body of evidence that off-record indirectness (e.g. hints) are not universally or uncontroversially perceived as polite (e.g. Blum-Kulka 1987; Dillard, Wilson, Tusing and Kinney 1997; Félix-Brasdefer 2005; Holtgraves and Yang 1990; Lwanga-Lumu 1999; Marti 2006; Marquez Reiter 2000; Pinker, Nowak and Lee 2008; Terkourafi 2002, 2011b; Weizman 1993; Yu 2011).⁴ There is also strong evidence that while conventional indirectness might be perceived as more polite in some languages (such as English or Hebrew – see Blum-Kulka 1987), this generalisation does not hold for all languages, even in the apparently straightforward case of directives (Field 1998; Wierzbicka 1985; Yu 2011).

The relationship between politeness and indirectness has thus turned out to be much more complex than originally assumed in early work in pragmatics. While being “indirect” can certainly give rise to politeness in some instances, it is not necessarily always interpreted as polite. As we shall see in the following section, one of the reasons that indirectness is not always perceived as polite is that it can in fact give rise to a whole range of interpersonal effects, of which politeness is just one.

2 Interpersonal functions of indirectness

One of the main interpersonal functions of indirectness was initially assumed to involve politeness. However, subsequent work has identified a whole range of interpersonal functions that can arise as a consequence of indirect speech. The various functions of indirectness that have been identified in the literature revolve largely around four key interpersonal loci: persons, relationships, interactional goals and language play.

A person, following Mead (1934), refers to a (biologically autonomous) individual as construed by a cultural group with whom he or she is linked in social interaction. Indirectness in relation to persons involves positioning the self vis-à-vis the other. This encompasses enacting, attributing, ratifying, and challenging identities and relational roles, including power relationships, an interpersonal function that has been well attested to in the literature (Chang 1999; Kiesling and Johnson 2010; Macauley, 2001; Morgan 2010; Rundquist 1992; Tannen 2010; Terkourafi 2011a, 2013). It also involves defending the self through avoiding responsibility or sanctions on the speaker (Bell 1997; Morgan 2010; Nemesi 2013), avoiding loss of face (Tannen 1981; Roberts and Kreuz 1994; Weiser 1974), and maintaining self-interests, such as ‘privacy’ (Bazzanella 2011).

A relationship, on the other hand, can be understood as “establishing and maintaining of connection between two otherwise separate individuals” (Arundale 2010b: 138), in non-summative system of two or more persons. Such relational systems can range from dyads to relatively closed social groupings through to large, diffuse social networks. Indirectness vis-à-vis relationships can involve, on the one hand, indexing “solidarity” or closeness/intimacy (Bazzanella 2011; Boxer 1993; Holtgraves 1997; Kiesling and Johnson 2010; Sifianou 1993, 1997; Soltys, Terkourafi and Katsos 2014; Terkourafi 2011a, 2013). For instance, Tannen (1981) makes reference to “the satisfaction of being understood without explaining oneself, of getting what one wants without asking for it” (p.223). On the other hand, indirectness can also enable or facilitate relationship negotiation itself (Chang 1999; Lee and Pinker 2010; Pinker, Nowak and Lee 2008; Silverstein 2010; Terkourafi 2011b). Pinker, Nowak and Lee (2008) argue that this is because

[t]he literal form of a sentence is consistent with the safest relationship between speaker and hearer. At the same time, by implicating a meaning between the lines, the speaker counts on the listener to infer its real intent, which may initiate a different relationship. (Pinker, Nowak and Lee 2008: 835, original emphasis)

In other words, relationships can be maintained or re-negotiated through various forms of indirectness. Chang (1999) also refers to the way in which being indirect can generate an “indeterminate linguistic space”, which “allows interactants to negotiate their relational status without directly challenging the well-defined cultural rules of relationship, while at the same time protecting and serving their own ends” (p.542, original emphasis). In this way, the interconnections between these two key functions of indirectness, that is, between addressing person-oriented and relationship-oriented concerns, can also be seen.

The way in which being indirect helps maintain relationships with others is also discussed in the context of politeness research, as we briefly noted in the previous section. Through indirectness participants can occasion perceptions they are being polite, or at least avoid offending others (Bazzanella 2011; Lakoff 1973; Leech 1983; Roberts and Kreuz 1994; Searle 1975; Weiser 1974), as well as maintain relational harmony or minimise social tension more generally (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987; Obeng 1994; Tsuda 1993). However, indirectness can also be drawn upon in interpersonal attacks or conflict, or what is broadly termed impoliteness (Culpeper 1996, 2011a; Kiesling and Johnson 2010; Lakoff 1973; Lee and Pinker 2010; Leech 1983; Obeng 1994), a point which will be explored in greater depth in the subsequent chapters. Thus, as we noted in the prior section, while indirectness is involved in various forms of person/identity and relational work, it is not restricted to being “polite” by any means.

A third key loci of indirectness involves what might be termed “interactional goals” (Spencer-Oatey 2005, 2009). Interactional goals refer to those (higher order) intentions that participants are held to be committed to, or accountable for, by other participants in interaction. These can range from mundane tasks such as “obtaining written approval for something, clinching a business deal, or finishing a meeting on time” or more relationally-oriented concerns, such as “peace-making, promoting friendship, currying favour or exerting control” (Spencer-Oatey 2005: 107). Indirectness in relation to the achievement of interacti...

Table of contents

• Michael Haugh - Im/Politeness Implicatures
• Mouton Series in Pragmatics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Table of Figures
• List of Tables
• Transcription conventions
• Morphological gloss conventions
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Indirectness and im/politeness
• Chapter Two: Approaches to implicature
• Chapter Three: Implicature, social action and indeterminacy
• Chapter Four: Implicature, im/politeness and social practice
• Chapter Five: Situating im/politeness implicatures in interaction
• Chapter Six: Politeness implicatures and social action
• Chapter Seven: Impoliteness implicatures and offence
• Chapter Eight: Conclusion
• References
• Index