Politeness: Is there an East-West Divide?

(Lancaster University, UK) Abstract: The theory of politeness of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) has remained the most seminal and influential starting point for cross-cultural and cross-linguistic contrastive pragmatics. Yet is has also provoked countervailing arguments from Ide (1989, 1993), Matsumoto (1989), Gu (1990), Mao (1994) and others, pointing out a Western bias in Brown and Levinson’s theory, particularly in their construal of the concept of ‘face’, in their overemphasis on face-threat and their assumption of individualistic and egalitarian motivations, as opposed to the more group-centred hierarchy-based ethos of Eastern societies. This leads to the question in the title of this article: Is there an East-West divide in politeness? The following argument will be presented. There is an overarching framework for studying linguistic politeness phenomena in communication: a common principle of politeness (Leech, 1983, 2002) and a Grand Strategy of Politeness (GSP), which is evident in common linguistic behaviour patterns in the performance of polite speech acts such as requests, offers, compliments, apologies, thanks, and responses to these. The GSP says simply: :In order to be polite, a speaker communicates meanings which (a) place a high value on what relates to the other person (typically the addressee), (MAJOR CONSTRAINT) and (b) place a low value on what relates to the speaker. (MINOR CONSTRAINT). It is clear from many observations that constraint (a) is more powerful than constraint (b). The following hypothesis will be put forward, and supported by very limited evidence: that the GSP provides a very general explanation for communicative politeness phenomena in Eastern languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean, as well as in western languages such as English. This is not to deny the importance of quantitative and qualitative differences in the settings of social parameters and linguistic parameters of politeness in such languages. A framework such as the GSP provides the parameters of variation within which such differences can be studied. Hence this article argues in favour of the conclusion that, despite differences, there is no East-West divide in politeness.