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Robin Lakoff's Theory Of Politeness

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In our daily interactions to friends, relatives, officials, and others, we use many expressions during our speaking. With each of them, we use a different range of expressions. Politeness is an arrangement of interpersonal relations intended to encourage collaboration by minimizing the potential for conflict and confrontation innate in every single human communication and transactions. It is the consciousness of another person’s "face" or the methods utilized to recognize the self- image of a man. The concept of Politeness has been part of linguistic studies since the late 1970s but it was the publication of Brown and Levinson’s famous Politeness book, in 1978 that established this issue as one of the main areas of Pragmatics theory, …show more content…

According to lakoff politeness depends on three maxims which are don’t impose, the maxim of formality or distance which means an individual should keep distance to the interlocutor. Another is give option which is the maxim of hesitancy or deference which means that hesitancy is required by using indirect speech and last one is make audience feel good, the maxim of equality or camaraderie which means that speaker should be nice and friendly to the hearer. (Margetan, Ratih, Ratri, 2014:1-3) Lakoff proposes that speaker must try to maintain balance between these three maxims because these three maxims cannot all be maximized at the same time. When people faced these three maxims they realized behavior or speech to be improper or impolite (Johnstone, 2008). Theory of politeness by Lakoff considers politeness is a universal thing (Terkourafi, n.d.). Further, Brown and Levinson (1978) gave the theory of politeness that drew for Goffman’s idea of face and more extended upon Lakoff’s standards for politeness. As stated by Brown and Levinson there are two sorts of face. Negative face which desire to express individual’s ideas without resistance and positive face which desire to have individual’s contributions approved of. These negative and positive faces reflect two different desires present in every communication (Johnstone,

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