Brown And Levinson's Theory Of Politeness Theory

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Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory has been considered as the most influential theory of politeness. Their theory is based on Goffman’s (1971) assumptions, focusing mainly on his notion of face. Goffman defined the concept of face as the “positive social value of a person effectively claims for himself by the live others assume he has taken a particular contact” (2005, p. 5). In politeness theory that is adopted from Grice’s (1975) cooperative principle, Brown and Levinson (1987) attempted to clarify Austin’s (1962) classification of utterances, which related to the social functions of language within interaction bearing and speaker’s rationality in conversation. Brown and Levinson defined the notion of face with “the aspects of face as basic wants, which every member knows every other member desires, and which in general, it is in the interests of every member to partially satisfy” (1987, p. 62). Hence, the relationship between the concept of face and interaction was described as “the means employed to show awareness of another person’s face” (Yule, 1996, p. 60). Face depends on whether the speaker choices to perform a face threatening act (FTA) or face saving act (FSA). A FTA is defined as “those acts that by their nature run …show more content…

Additionally, positive politeness strategies is defined as aimed “to save positive face by demonstrating closeness and solidarity, appealing to friendship, making other people feel good, and emphasizing that both speakers have a common goal” (Cutting, 2008, p. 48). Similarly, Yule (1996) emphasized the notion of solidarity as a positive politeness strategy by which the speaker tends to use positive politeness linguistic forms to reduce the distance and emphasize closeness; the main linguistic resources to achieve solidarity are the use of “personal information, use of nicknames, abusive terms, and shared dialect or slang expressions” (p.

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