Brown, P. and S. Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Watts, R. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. With some stuff from:

SummaryBrown and Levinson (1987) are showing that individual's self-esteem (face) motivates strategies of politeness (solidarity, restraint, avoidance of unequivocal impositions).

"All MPs have positive face and negative face, and all MPs are rational agents--i.e. choose means that will satisfy their ends.

i)

"Given that face consists in a set of wants satisfiable only by the actions (including expressions of wants) of others, it will in general be to the mutual interest of two MPs to maintain each other's face. So S will want to maintain H's face, unless he can get H to maintain S's without recompense, by coercion, trickery, etc.

ii)

"Some acts intrinsically threaten face; these 'face-threatening acts' will be referred to henceforth as FTAs.

iii)

"Unless S's want to do an FTA with maximum efficiency (defined as bald on record) is greater than S's want to preserve H's (or S's) face to any degree, then S will want to minimize the face threat of the FTA.

iv)

[This is an attempt to render a chart on page 60--it's not verbatim]

a.

Without redressive action, baldly (smallest estimated risk of face loss)

1)

With redressive action (greater risk than baldly)

2)

On the recordi.Do the FTAb.

"Given the following set of strategies, the more an act threatens S's or H's face, the more S will want to choose a high-numbered strategy; this by virtual of the fact that these strategies afford payoffs or increasingly minimized risk:

v)

Here's the starting point. Among Model Persons, it is mutual knowledge that for all Model Persons (verbatim, including bold, from B&L 1987: 59-60):

Definitions and examplesFace: See below (including definitions of positive/negative face).

Atkinson and Heritage (1984: Part II)•Levinson 1983: 332ff)•Pomerantz (1975, 1978, 1984a)•For my purposes, what's most interesting is that a delay gives the first speaker a chance to adjust--Davidson (1984), Pomerantz (1984b)--or withdraw (Goodwin 1979).

•

Preference organization: What conversation analysis use to refer to the phenomenon that after specific kinds of conversational turn, responses are often strictly non-equivalent--one kind of response (the preferred), is direct, abbreviated, structurally simple and immediate. Others are dispreferred and are indirect, elaborate structurally, and delayed.

Schegloff (n.d.) observes that there is a tendency for "innocent" utterances to be interpreted as complaints.

•

"By orienting to the 'virtual offence', an offender can display that he has the other's interests at heart. Equally, a failure to orient to the virtual offence counts as a diplomatic breach. Thus is constructed a precise semiotics of peaceful vs. aggressive intentions (where the measure of precision is sometimes in fractions of a second--see e.g. Davidson 1984), which in assigning such momentous significance to what are often trivial substantive acts requires a constant vigilance over the manner in which social interaction is conducted. This semiotic system is then responsible for the shaping of much everyday interaction, and in so shaping it, constitutes a potent form of social control" (B&L 1987: 1-2).

•

Virtual offence: Goffman's notion "which predicts that the non-communication of the polite attitude will be read not merely as the absence of that attitude, but as the inverse, the holding of an aggressive attitude" (B&L 1987: 33).

Politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987)Wednesday, April 27, 201112:04 PM

Reading notes Page 1

positive politeness (lesser risk)

a)

negative politeness (greater risk)

b)

(greater risk than baldly)

Off record (greater risk than on the record)

ii.

Don't do the FTA (greatest estimated risk of face loss)

c.

Since i-v are mutually known to all MPs, our MP will not choose a strategy less risky than necessary, as this may be seen as an indication that the FTA is more threatening than it actually is."

vi)

In their (1987) forward, B&L say that other researchers have "persuaded us that we may have been in error to set up the three super-strategies, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off record, as ranked unidimensionally to achieve mutually exclusivity" (B&L 1987: 18).

•

"The social valence of linguistic form has two especially important sources: the intrinsic potential impact that a specific communicative intention may have on a social relationship, and the ways in which by modifying the expression of that intention participants seek to modify that impact--such modification measuring for participants the nature of the social relationship. On this view a very considerable intentional and strategic mediation connects linguistic form with social relationships. In short, language usages are tied to strategies rather than directly to relationships, although relationships will be characterized by the continued use of certain strategies" (B&L 1987: 281).

Social orderHere's how Gumperz puts it in the forward to Brown and Levinson (1987):

"A major reason for [interest in politeness], as the authors define it, is basic to the production of social order, and a precondition of human cooperation, so that any theory which provides an understanding of this phenomenon at the same time goes to the foundations of human social life" (Gumperz 1987: xiii).

"What counts as polite may differ from group to group, from situation to situation, or from individual. If we can find some underlying

potent form of social control" (B&L 1987: 1-2).

See Haviland (1977) on how people gossip.

•

Goffman is fond of theater metaphors, but there's another kind of performer he likes--the diplomat. In his 1971 work he develops the notion of a virtual offence, which is the "worst possible reading" of some action by A that might trespass on B's interests/equanimity/personal preserve. If you orient to the virtual offence, you can avoid a diplomatic breach.

•

Efficiency factor: Lakoff's idea that it is rude to ask a superior to spend time/energy calculating the illocutionary potential of an off-record request. B&L don't see this as universal or intrinsic in negative politeness as Leech (1983) and Lakoff (1977b) do.

About face

"negative face: the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction--i.e. to freedom of action and freedom from imposition

•

"positive face: the positive consistent self-image or 'personality' (crucially including the desire that this self-image be appreciated and approved of) claimed by interactants" (B&L 1987: 61).

•

The notion of face is derived from Goffman (1967) and the English folk term ("losing face"). Watts (2003), of course, says Goffman's definition is closer to what's going on than B&L's interpretation.

•

For Goffman, face is "the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact...an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes" (Goffman 1955/1967, I think, mentioned in Watts 2003: 124).

•

"Face is a socially attributed aspect of self that is temporarily on loan for the duration of the interaction in accordance with the line or lines that the individual has adopted. It is not our personal construction of the self, although the different faces we are required to adopt in different interactions do contribute towards that construction...If our constructed role remains relatively stable across interactions it will result in a form of

•

Face: "The public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself, consisting of two related aspects:

Reading notes Page 2

individual. If we can find some underlying grammatical and social regularities which account both for this type of variation and for the recurrent patterns, we will have taken a major step in demonstrating and not just claiming the basically social nature of human language" (Gumperz 1987: xiii).

For B&L, conflict and cooperation are fundamental:

See also Maynard-Smith on Origins of Social Behavior, B&L say.

○

"From a gross ethological perspective, perhaps we can generalize somewhat: the problem for any social group is to control its internal aggression while retaining the potential for aggression both in internal social control and, especially, in external competitive relations with other groups" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 1).

The hearerWatts (2003) argues that B&L offer a production model of politeness that leaves the hearer pretty much out in the cold (only the hearer's face needs are considered, says Watts 2003: 51).

Hearers in B&L aren't absent, of course (how could they be?)

"The uses of each [politeness strategy] are tied to social determinants, specifically the relationship between speaker and addressee and the potential offensiveness of the message content" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 2).

In their 1987 introduction, B&L say that they would probably drop some of the speech act stuff (though they still think it's handy as a shorthand). Part of the reason has to do with the hearer:

See Rosaldo (1982) for a critique of speech act theory based on the Ilongot of the Philippines--do they interpret each other in terms of expectations of group membership/role structures/situational constraints and

○

"Speech act theory forces a sentence-based, speaker-oriented mode of analysis, requiring attribution of speech act categories where our own thesis requires that utterances are often equivocal in force" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 10).

across interactions it will result in a form of institutionalisation of the self. However, if face is the 'condition of interaction, not its objective', it is equally clear that we have an obligation to maintain the faces of the other participants in the interaction" (Watts 2003: 125).

"The universal need of individual human beings to be valued, respected, appreciated in social groups, i.e. that the self-image that an individual has constructed of her/himself should be accepted and supported by others, and

•

"The universal right of individual human beings to relative freedom of thought and action, i.e. to perceived 'territory', in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the term" (Watts 2003: 101).

•

The first is positive face, the second is negative face.

•

For Watts, B&L are focused on a model person who does things to guarantee:

It is a mutual construct (see also de Kadt 1998: 176). "An interactant will not merely need to avoid certain behaviours, but will be expected to produce certain other behaviours" (1998: 177, cited by Watts 2003: 107).

•

Watts takes pains to say that B&L get face from Goffman but don’t use it as he intended. For Watts, the key to Goffman's notion of face is that it is "not something that the individual somehow builds for her/himself, which then needs to be supported and respected in the course of interaction, but is rather 'public property', something which is only realised in social interaction and is dependent on others" (Watts 2003: 107).

Accepting Goffman's notion of face means "we are constrained to accepting that we are attributed face socially in accordance with the line or lines we have adopted for the purposes of the communicative interaction. This leads to two logical conclusions, firstly that we can be assigned different faces on different occasions of verbal interaction, and secondly that all social interaction is predicated on individuals' face needs, i.e. that we can never get away from negotiating facework" (Watts 2003: 259).

Significance of the work"We believe that patterns of message construction, or 'ways of putting things', or simply language usage, are part of the very stuff that social

Reading notes Page 3

structures/situational constraints and NOT as expressions of sincere feelings/intentions?See Clark and Schunk (1980, 1981) for ranking of indirect speech acts as B&L suggest (contra Kemper and Thissen 1981). See B&L (1987: 142-144) for the politeness predictions. See Walters (1980) and Fraser and Nolan (1981) for Spanish and Bates (1976) for Italian.

○

Power (and distance and ranking of imposition)

Grimshaw (1980a, b, c, and 1983) has the same three factors as do (in different ways) Bates (1976), Lakoff (1977b), Lakoff and Tannen (1979) and Leech (1980, 1983).

•

"In broad terms, research seems to support our claim that three sociological factors are crucial in determining the level of politeness which a speaker (S) will use to an addressee (H): these are relative power (P) of H over S, the social distance (D) between S and H, and the ranking of the imposition (R) involved in doing the face-threatening act (FTA)" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 15)

Notice, in this that they are talking about relative power of H over S. This is interesting (and where I first began in my own inquiries), but how do we define power? Is it always "power-over"? What about "power-to"?

Falbo and Peplau (1980)•

Greater politeness for friends. Slugoski (1985) says this is because friendships don't legitimize instrumental goals--so B&L's "Distance" variable should distinguish familiarity from affect.

○

Baxter (1984)•

High degree of encoded politeness indicates higher reciprocal liking between speaker and addressee.

○

Holtgraves (1984) •

About power, B&L say to see:

Rosaldo (1982: 23) argues that power is very different in egalitarian and hierarchical societies.

Liking•Presence of an audience•

B&L are prepared to add other things to P, D, and R, but they say that the do capture most stuff. They'd think about adding:

usage, are part of the very stuff that social relationships are made of (or, as some would prefer, crucial parts of the expressions of social relations). Discovering the principles of language usage may be largely coincident with discovering the principles out of which social relationships, in their interactional aspect, are constructed: dimensions by which individuals manage to relate to others in particular ways" (B&L 1987: 55).

"In the case of sociolinguistics, the theory argues for a shift in emphasis from the current preoccupation with speaker-identity, to a focus on dyadic patterns of verbal interaction as the expression of social relationships; and from emphasis on the usage of linguistic forms, to an emphasis on the relation between form and complex inference….In the case of linguistic pragmatics a great deal of the mismatch between what is 'said' and what is 'implicated' can be attributed to politeness, so that concerns with the 'presentational functions' of language should be supplemented with attention to the 'social functions' of language, which seem to motivate much linguistic detail" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 2-3).

"The implication for sociology and anthropology is, first and most generally, that more attention should be given to the interactional basis of social life, if only to aid progress at other analytical levels--this because the area offers significant links across the divide between 'macro' and 'micro' levels of sociological analysis (Gal 1983)" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 3).

The following quote is very long, but I think it has some good stuff in it, so I've transcribed all of it:

"The key problem in sociolinguistics is always the origin and nature of the social valence attached to linguistic form. Some sociolinguists view this as a relatively unmediated attribution of value on the basis of the social value of the group with which the linguistic forms are associated (Labov 1972c, Trudgill 1974a). Others see the choice of form determined primarily by the social characteristics of participants and setting, and thus the form's valence derives from the way in which it encapsulates those social determinants. The form may then be used outside the social context that usually determines its use, to invoke 'metaphorical' allusions to that context (Ervin-Tripp 1972;

Reading notes Page 4

Formality ○

Presence of an audience•

Wx=D(S,H)+P(H,S)+Rx, where x is the face threatening act.

•

For Watts (2003: 96), power is underspecified in B&L. He suggests that their equation that "the weightiness/seriousness of a face-threatening act is a combination of the social distance between speaker and hearer, the power differential between the hearer and speaker, and the ranking of impositions.

E.g., asking a boss vs. a stranger vs. a friend for a cigarette. To assess the value for R, you have to know D and P. Knowing P may or may not depend on knowing the value of D.

•

See also Watts, Ide, and Ehlich (1992a: 9).•Social distance is probably not as useful as the affective relationship (Holtgraves 1986; Holtgraves and Yang 1990; Brown and Gilman 1989).

•

Watts says that people criticize B&L because they want to use this equation for measuring, but that B&L weren't really trying to do that--they were trying to suggest how different politeness strategies were distinguished. Watts' own criticism is more that the imposition (Rx) depends on the power and social distance factors.

Intimacy: A and B both use T•Social distance, non-intimacy: A and B both use V

•

Dominance: One uses T and receives V•B&L reiterate that there is "an iconic relation between asymmetrical social relations and asymmetrical usage, that alone will not explain the direction in which the particular pronouns are used, or why symmetrical T should have the value it does in contrast to V" (B&L 1987: 45). B&L are skeptical about historical conditions.

•

This notion of asymmetry is important to me. •"Symbols of intimacy (commensality, grooming, approach and propinquity) are used like the T pronoun, both as symbols of intimacy and domination. And fitting neatly into these patterns one can find the use of positive politeness and bald-on-record politeness strategies...being used both symmetrically as symbols of equality and asymmetrically (downwards, as it were) as symbols of domination" (B&L 1987: 46).

•

Building on Gilman (1960) on T/V pronouns:

allusions to that context (Ervin-Tripp 1972; Blom and Gumperz 1972). We prefer a somewhat less mechanical and less arbitrary source for the social valence of message forms. For us communicative intentions have built-in social implications, often of a threatening sort. What then becomes interesting is how such communicative intentions become constrained, for such constraints, expressed by means of the pragmatic resources of the language, show in the construction of messages. Communicative intentions, like all social goods, do not flow smoothly in all directions through a social structure; in deed part of what gives some particular social structure its form is the specific nature and distribution of such constraints, as Lévi-Strauss (1968) has argued. In language the constraints are more on form than on content (or at least form provides a more feasible area of study). The ways in which messages are hedged, hinted, made deferential, and embedded in discourse structures then become crucial areas of study. But such areas are also the concern of pragmatics, the study of the systematic relation of a language to context. The special interest of sociolinguistics in our view is in the differential use of such pragmatic resources by different categories of speakers in different situations. It is in this way that we derive our slogan 'Sociolinguistics should be applied pragmatics'" (B&L 1987: 280-281).

"If A announces the acquisition of some new furniture, and B then preempts an invitation to come and see it by requesting permission to do so, B conveys 'the essence of sociability'--a pre-emptive display of caring about what is important to the other. Thus by reporting events that make such a display possible and pertinent, A can make relevant such a preemptive self-invitation without in any way requiring it--B can quite appropriately offer congratulations or other appreciations of a lesser sort. Pre-sequences and 'fishings' thus allow the off-record negotiation of business with face implications well in advance of the possible on-record transaction" (B&L 1987: 40).

•

On "fishing"--Drew (1984) gives the following example:

Reading notes Page 5

symbols of domination" (B&L 1987: 46). "Intimate stuff used non-intimately takes on a different, but highly predictable, meaning, namely the symbolism of dominance (a prototype for which can be found, perhaps, in the relation between parent and child)" (B&L 1987: 46).

•

"Changing the value and/or structure of network links in an emergent network is thus equivalent to the exercise of power by a member of the network and is what Bourdieu meant by the term 'symbolic violence'. Participants in verbal interaction will always be involved in a struggle over the right to exercise power over others" (Watts 2003: 155).

Watts does an interesting thing combining emergent networks and theory of practice--the overlap has to do with power. This seems clear, though I would probably like to expand the notion of "power" along the lines of feminist political philosophers who consider "power to" in addition to "power over".

See also Watts (1991, 1992, 1994, 1997a).

Strategies and Gricean assumptionsGrice assumes--as do his followers and most of pragmatics--that conversation is rational and efficient. I'm not totally comfortable with this from a gut-check level, yet I don't really have a counter-proposal at the moment. I don't really want to say that emotion is irrational, which would be one place I could go. It may be, as Damasio argues, part of reasoning.

"The [Cooperative Principle] defines an 'unmarked' or socially neutral (indeed asocial) presumptive framework for communication; the essential assumption is 'no deviation from rational efficiency without a reason'" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 5).

Against the assumption of rational/efficient talk, "polite ways of talking show up as deviations, requiring rational explanations on the part of the recipient, who finds in considerations of politeness reasons for the speaker's apparent irrationality or inefficiency" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 4).

"In our model, then, it is the mutual awareness of 'face' sensitivity, and the kinds of means-ends reasoning that this induces,

Some problems with B&L"If we take some face-redressive goal like 'be pessimistic about the success of the FTA', this suggests that an utterance like 'You don't want to pass the salt' should be polite; that it is not, of course, is due to the fact that it attributes impolite desires to the addressee: in short, our system 'over-generates' and needs to be complemented with a set of 'filters' that check that a chosen utterance form has no impolite implicatures for other reasons...as in this case it does because of a rather complex reflexive reasoning that takes account of the implied presumption about the addressee's beliefs…We are thus less sanguine now than we were about the possibility of real precision in this area because of the enormous complexities of the reasoning involved" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 11).

"We underplay the influence of other factors, especially the presence of third parties, which we now know to have much more profound effects on verbal interaction than we had thought (see Bell 1984; Goffman 1981, on 'footing'; Levinson, n.d.)" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 12).

Throughout their reassessment section, B&L talk about overgenerating, for example: "the asymmetry of strategy choice between participants in asymmetrical social relationships of authority/subservience, and the exact nature of that asymmetry with more face-redressive strategies employed by the lower ranking participant" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 12).

See Bateman (1985) and Suchman (in press) on cognitivism vs. interactionalism. B&L say they also suffer from too much cognitivism.

•

"Social interaction is remarkable for its emergent properties which transcend the characteristics of the individuals that jointly produce it; this emergent character is not something for which our current empirical models are well equipped" (B&L 1987: 48).

Conversation

"Such a view, promoted in no small part by the philosophy of action and by the theory of speech acts in particular, has been ably criticized by Schegloff and Sacks (1973),

•

Around page 232, B&L acknowledge that they have treated interactions as if each utterance was its own thing, not related to each other.

Reading notes Page 6

of means-ends reasoning that this induces, that together with the CP allows the inference of implicatures of politeness" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 5-6).

See Schiffer (1972) on mutual knowledge, Sperber and Wilson (1982, 1986) on a weaker idea of mutual manifestness being sufficient.

○

But what about the infinite regress of recipients figuring out what the sender figures the recipient figures the sender etc.?

•

Is this psychologically plausible? See Clark and Carlson (1982a, b) who have "energetically defended the model," say B&L (just use simple heuristics and you don't get infinite regress).

•

"Thus, even if we had a perfect system of means-ends reasoning, it would remain a conceptual mystery how we are able to reconstruct other agents' intentions from their actions (Levinson 1985). Yet that we do so, or attempt to do so, is hardly open to question, and is presupposed by at least some uses of the term 'strategy', including ours (whatever its unclarities, see Riley 1981)" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 8).

○

But we still run up about the idea that reconstructing speakers' communicative intentions by running a logic of practical reasoning backwards. But no logical system offers a way from going from conclusions back to premises (it's not a symmetric kind of thing).

•

Ochs and Duranti and Rosaldo talk about personhood being different in non-Western situations, where intentional agent is dubious in its applicability. B&L think these points

○

Is our Gricean view of communication just our folk-theory canonized as philosophy? See Ochs (1984) and Candlin (1981).

•

"Our framework presupposes the other great contribution by Grice, namely his account of the nature of communication as a special kind of intention designed to be recognized by the recipient (1971). That account itself presupposes that what agents do is related systematically to their intents, and thus that intentions of actors are reconstructable by observers or recipients of actions. The systematic relation is presumed to be given by some rational means-ends-reasoning" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 7).

criticized by Schegloff and Sacks (1973), Turner (1975), and Schegloff (1976). They argue, essentially, that conversational location, both in terms of 'local turn-by-turn organization' (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974) and in terms of overall conversational structure (Schegloff and Sacks 1973), is a crucial determinant of how an utterance is understood" (B&L 1987: 232).Most important for me, perhaps, "The conversational organizations that these workers have discovered are extremely sensitive to violation; turn-taking violations (interrupting, ignoring selection of other speakers, not responding to prior turns) are all FTAs in themselves, as are violations of opening and closing procedures" (B&L 1987: 232-233).

•

Redefine "face threatening acts" to "face threatening intentions", which can last across turns.

○

"Plans--including conversational plans--are hierarchical, and conversational understanding is achieved by reconstruction of levels of intent beyond and above and integrative of those that lie behind particular utterances or sentences" (B&L 1987: 233).

○

"If a breach of face respect occurs, this constitutes a kind of debt that must be made up by positive reparation if the original level of face respect is to be maintained. Reparation should be of an appropriate kind and paid in a degree proportionate to the breach" (B&L's "balance principle, 1987: 236).

○

Perhaps my favorite little example is "if one spills coffee on someone else's clothes and they kindly point out how it could happen to anyone, one feels even more obligated to stress how sorry one is" (B&L 1987: 238)--I don't know how true this is, but I do like it.

○

Here are the basics of how they propose to remedy the situation:

•

Grice

Quality•Quantity•Relevance (enlarged--Sperber and Wilson 1986 and Wilson and Sperber 1981 try to drop everything down to relevance: the natural

•

See Horn (1984) for taking Grice's four maxims and the nine submaxims and reducing them to:

Reading notes Page 7

applicability. B&L think these points just need a slight shift in the relative importance of what is said vs. what is implicated/attributed. "a shift tied to the hoary sociological distinctions, variously conceived, between communities where positional status is emphasized and those where persons are treated as 'individuals'" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 9-10). B&L say that they will be disproven by places where "only high-status individuals have to take account of the perspective of lower-status individuals" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 10), but this is the nature of power relationships that the powerful have to consider the people without power (see George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant, for example). Are they really saying they'd need a society where EVERY and ONLY high-status individuals take account, though?

○

Notice that B&L's claims put intrinsic ranking to politeness strategies and does it in terms of cost/benefit analysis. (In order of face-redressiveness: Positive < Negative < Off-record.)

Here they are explicitly trying to counter an undervaluing of "the complexity of human planning" in sociological sciences, though they admit to only scratching surfaces.

•

"We wish to demonstrate the role of rationality, and its mutual assumption by participants, in the derivation of inferences beyond the initial significance of words, tone, and gesture. It is our belief that only a rational or logical use of strategies provides a unitary explanation of such diverse kinesic, prosodic, and linguistic usages" (B&L 1987: 56).

Rational decision-making also leads to an antagonistic relationship between ego and alter, says Werkhofer:

"This antagonism takes the form of a dialogue, but of a strange kind of dialogue that only takes place within the speaker's mind: s/he generates as a first turn, what s/he intends to say. This move remains tacit so that the next move is not the addressee's answer to the first one, but it is the speaker's anticipation of what the threat to her or his

everything down to relevance: the natural human propensity to maximize the informational value of environmental stimuli)Levinson's "Minimization and conversational inference" takes these perspectives to task, I believe.

•

As Watts (2003: 85) points out, B&L take up a Model Person for discussing politeness and this is in the spirit of Grice. The MP has "the ability to rationalise from communicative goals to the optimal means of achieving those goals. In doing so, the MP has to assess the dangers of threatening other participants'' (and hence her/his own) face and to choose the appropriate strategies in order to minimise any face threats that might be involved in carrying out the goal-directed activity...it is a production model" (Watts 2003: 85).

It doesn't adequately explain how addressees derive the implicatures they do

•

It doesn't account for other implicatures that might also be derived

•

It ignores the possibility than an addressee might infer more than one implicature and thus be faced with a potential dilemma in deciding which of them is most appropriate to the context of the utterance

•

Criticisms about the Gricean model of pragmatics include (Watts 2003: 111, see also his chapter 8):

Reading notes Page 8

anticipation of what the threat to her or his face would probably mean to the addressee. The polite utterance is then the third move or the speaker's second turn in this fictive dialogue" (Werkhofer 1992: 166 cited in Watts 2003: 112).

Reading notes Page 9

Mixed situations

See also Drew (1984) for notions of "up-take" and "on-the-record"-ness.

•

"A possible explanation for the positive-politeness impact of strategies like irony and understatement, for example, would lie in two characteristics of positive politeness: the reliance on mutual knowledge to decode utterances, such mutual knowledge of attitudes and values normally obtaining only between in-group members, and the fact that positive politeness uniquely allows the introduction of extraneous material (not relevant to the particular FTA in hand)" (B&L 1987: 20).

Jefferson (1980, 1984a, 1984b)•Jefferson and Lee (1981)•

How are troubles broached and received? That is, what happens when A announces a misfortune? There are interactional problems. A could be upset, not in control, not maintaining face. (Laughter is one technique for dealing with this.) And how do you ever disengage? (B&L 1987 40-41) cover this issue, but the in-depth work is:

MiscellaneousThis is a metaphor worth exploring:

"We have talked about minute adjustments of social distance, 'breaks and accelerators', as the sort of fine-grained strategic manipulation that routinely occurs in interactions" (B&L 1987: 282).

See this built out in P. Brown (1976). ○

"A strategic analysis...makes claims about the non-arbitrary nature of style. On this view [B&L's, btw] the features that co-occur in a 'style' are determined by strategic choices, and the coherence of a style lies not necessarily on the formal level but on the strategic level that underlies the selection of forms" (B&L 1987: 282).

On style:

Giddens apparently suggests (1973: 15), that interactional systematics are a retreat from central issues of sociology. B&L argue that it's a crucial way "in which abstract sociological concepts can be

References to check out

Owen (1983) covers apologies and remedial interchanges more in-depth.

•

Goffman (1967) on insisting that apologies and other repairs are interesting.

McLaughlin, Cody, and Rosenstein (1983) and McLaughlin, Cody and O'Hair (1983) on "account" sequences after initial hostilities.

Bonikowska (1985a, b) and House and Kasper (1981) on complaining.

On management of arguments: Boggs (1978), Lein and Brennis (1978), Goodwin (1980a, b, 1982, 1983), Goodwin and Goodwin (in press), Jackson and Jacobs (1980, 1981), Jacobs and Jackson (1982), Maynard (1985).

Preference for agreement in conversation: Pomerantz (1984a). But I think one should also see Sacks.

Intensifiers in AAVE: Labov (1984)•Discourse particles and evidentials: Goldberg (1982), James (1983), Gibbons (1980), Wierzbicka (ed, in prep).

•

Affect:

Dubois and Crouch (1975)•Crosby and Nyquist (1977)•Brouwer, Gerritsen and de Haan (1979)•Edelsky (1979)•Brouwer (1982)•Baroni and d'Urso (1984)•

Think about trivializing adjectives in Lakoff. See empirical results in:

Garfinkel (1972)•Heritage (1984b: Ch 4)•Gumperz•

Discover social norms by looking at their systematic violation:

If you assume contra B&L that patterns of message construction have purely rule-based origins, then you have "alternations" and "co-occurrence rules" (Ervin-Tripp 1972) or rules for

More on politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987)Friday, April 29, 20112:46 AM

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"in which abstract sociological concepts can be related in a precise way to social facts. We would like our endeavor to be seen as an attempt to build one arch in one bridge linking abstract concepts of social structure (whether these are analyst's concepts or member's concepts) to behavioual facts" (B&L 1987: 283).

This seems in keeping with folks like Paul Drew, who would like to drop talk of "meaning" and focus on "action".

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"The social value of the linguistic form of messages can only be ascertained by looking at such forms as tools for doing things, and asking what kinds of things a given form could be doing" (B&L 1987: 281, though in an endnote, they point out that Hymes has repeatedly said this (1974a, for example) and he got it from Burke, he says--it still gets ignored in research programs).

How crucial are families as a site for setting up what happens? I probably ignore this too much. See also B&L (1987: 44).

"When we first wrote, the major justification for the bifurcation of the theory of meaning into semantics and pragmatics was the basic Gricean observation that what is 'said' is typically only a part of what is 'meant', the proposition expressed by the former providing a basis for the calculation of the latter" (B&L 1987: 49).

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One view of pragmatics (Wilson and Sperber, and probably Levinson?) has pragmatics coming in to help determine what the proposition being expressed means and then again to calculate the indirect/contextual implications of that proposition (B&L 1987: 49).

If I regard something as a small request, I'll likely stress in-group membership and social similarity (B&L use the "Let's have another cookie then" and "Give us a time", though these rile me, personally).

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Bigger requests gets formal politeness ("the conventionalized indirect speech acts, hedges, apologies for intrusion, etc.").

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Requests we maybe shouldn't even be making we use indirect expressions (implicatures).

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B&L say the same thing happens with criticisms, offers, complaints, etc. All of these, they say, have a strategic orientation to participants' face.

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What do we do with these "facts" (B&L 1987: 57, but maybe they aren't facts at all):

But social conditions are supposed to determine the application of rules and don't do that all the time. Rule violations should therefore be attended to in interaction, but many rule violations don't have any such attending to.

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occurrence rules" (Ervin-Tripp 1972) or rules for speech events (Hypes 1972, articles in Bauman and Sherzer 1974).

I'm not exactly sure why, but I put a big red flag on this one. So really check it out.

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Check out Gordon (1983) in Language in Society: "Hospital slang for patients".

Grice (1973) is a conference paper on "Probability, desirability, and mood operators" that looks interesting.

See Ortner (1984) in Comparative Studies in Society and History: "Theory in anthropology since the 60s".

Sen (1979) has "Rational fools" in a book by Hahan and Hollis, but it's also findable in Philosophy and Public Affairs (1976-1977).

For a plan for more interactional sociolinguistics, see Gumperz (1982a, b).

"Deference is not encoded in language by the use of arbitrary forms, but by the use of motivatedforms" (B&L 1987: 23, see Haiman 1985: 154).

Scollon and Scollon (1981) find among Athabaskans that positive politeness is naturally escalated and hence unstable, while negative politeness doesn't escalate and so it's stable. They conclude that they can't be put on a unidimensional scale. B&L think they can be (B&L 1987: 18).

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Watts, R. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brown, P. and S. Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Often in dialogue with:

SummaryWatts (2003) comes across as fairly cranky--it's a tone that is fairly off-putting, at least to me.

Watts' aim isn't really to be a production model (what he calls a B&L goal), nor a blueprint for interpreting some-but-not-other linguistic expressions as politeness realizations. He doesn't like politeness being a "social fact"--he's trying to promote a theory that offers "ways of recognising when a linguistic utterance mightbe open to interpretation by interlocutors as '(im)polite'...It aims to provide the means of assessing how lay participants in ongoing verbal interaction assess social behaviour that they have classified as (im)polite utterances as positive or negative" (Watts 2003: 143).

Watts argues that speakers and addressees work together to create some form of common understanding among themselves, even if that means they understand they can't or won't ever agree.

"An utterance made by a speaker and directed at an addressee is a social act, and an addressee deriving a set of inferences from that utterance to enable her/him to respond in some way is carrying out another kind of social act. But both acts are essential to socio-communicative verbal interaction, and both acts are embedded in the ongoing emergent development of an interpersonal relationship. The goal of a theory of linguistic politeness which takes (im)politeness1 as its starting point should not be to explain why speakers say what they say and to predict the possible effects of utterances on addressees. It should aim to explain how all the interactants engaged in an ongoing verbal interaction negotiate the development of emergent networks and evaluate their own position and the positions of others within those

Definitions and examples

Expression of intimacy•Display of warmth and friendliness•

In definitions of politeness, Greeks stress:

Consideration towards others•Formality•A discrete maintenance of distance•A wish not to impose upon addressees•Expression of 'altruism, generosity, morality, and self-abnegation' (Sifianou 1992a: 88 summarized in Watts 2003: 14-15)

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But English concepts are broader:

Material: money, property, goods, stocks, profits (wherever goods are exchanged for goods is a material marketplace)

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Cultural: education, skills, knowledge, etc. (wherever these things are acquired is a cultural marketplace)

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Social: network of relationships, quality of those (so social marketplaces are fields where there are family, friendship groups, political organizations, clubs, etc).

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No marketplace is ever uniquely one of these things, though.

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Three kinds of capital:

Here's a claim that's probably a bit too strong:•"Most forms of social interaction have become institutionalised and...the appropriate discursive practices are known to us beforehand" (Watts 2003: 20).

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Politic behavior: "Linguistic behaviour which is perceived to be appropriate to the social constraints of the ongoing interaction, i.e., as non-salient" (Watts 2003: 19 ,see also Watts 1989c, 1992). This seems to be similar to Fraser and Nolen's Conversational Contract (though Watts says in Chapter 3 that it's different). For Watts, polite and impolite salient behavior is what goes beyond what is expected (in either a positive or a negative direction...I'm not sure how well this axis is built out).

Conversational Contract: "On entering into a given

Critiques of Brown and Levinson by Watts (2003)Wednesday, April 27, 201112:05 PM

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positions of others within those networks. (Im)politeness then becomes part of the discursive social practice through which we create, reproduce and change our social worlds." (Watts 2003: 255).

One of the things I like best in Watts is the idea of expectations and the room for differing interpretations (I'm not as sold on the economic metaphors that are so central for him, though):

"A speaker might use a linguistic expression which s/he intends to be heard as more than is necessary to uphold the levels of linguistic behaviour appropriate to the discursive situation, i.e. as polite, but the hearer may not interpret the utterance in the way it is intended to be interpreted. Alternatively, s/he may very well assign the correct interpretation but derive a set of inferences from it that display a negative evaluation. The speaker may be paying with politeness for devious reasons that give the hearer reason to doubt the sincerity of the utterance" (Watts 2003: 253).

Watts argues that speakers and addressees work together to create some form of common understanding among themselves, even if that means they understand they can't or won't ever agree.

"An utterance made by a speaker and directed at an addressee is a social act, and an addressee deriving a set of inferences from that utterance to enable her/him to respond in some way is carrying out another kind of social act. But both acts are essential to socio-communicative verbal interaction, and both acts are embedded in the ongoing emergent development of an interpersonal relationship. The goal of a theory of linguistic politeness which takes (im)politeness1 as its starting point should not be to explain why speakers say what they say and to predict the possible effects of utterances on addressees. It should aim to explain how all the interactants engaged in an ongoing verbal interaction negotiate the development of emergent networks and evaluate their own position and the positions of others within those networks. (Im)politeness then becomes part of the discursive social practice through which we create, reproduce and change our social

Conversational Contract: "On entering into a given conversation, each party brings an understanding of some initial set of rights and obligations that will determine, at least for the preliminary stages, the limits of the interaction" (Fraser and Nolen 1981: 93-94 cited in Watts 2003: 78).

Politeness2: Mutually shared forms of consideration for others. Watts wants to specify that if I'm the speaker and you're the "other", we might have different ideas about consideration involved in the same act.

Demeanour: The ceremonial way the ego presents themselves to the alter (dress, bearing, style, etc). They are a behavioral mask that the ego needs to adopt to interact successfully with alter, given an alter with higher social status. They are accoutrements, but important in conveying social skills.

Symbolic power: "Every power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force" (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990: 4 cited in Watts 2003: 151).

Habitus: A state of being; a demeanor, manner or bearing; the style of dress or toilet (in Latin). "The set of dispositions to act in certain ways, which generates cognitive and bodily practices in the individual" (Watts 2003: 149). There are two aspects in Bourdieu's idea: (i) the habitus shapes how individuals internalize social structures to use them in ongoing interactions, (ii) in instances of ongoing interaction, the habitus generates practices and actions--so it's responsible for both the reproduction and the change of social structures.

M- m- m- money changes everything

See also Werkhofer (1992) and O'Driscoll (1996) for explicit comparisons between the social power of politeness and the social power of money (discussed in Watts 2003: 111).

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One way of seeing it is to see politeness as a factor mediating between individual and the group (like money).

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"As a private good, the key to understanding the nature of money is to consider the ways in

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At the heart of Watts' work on politeness1 are notions of metaphorical goods/payment. But he is cautious to point out that these metaphors shouldn't imply harmony and equilibrium as some have taken them to be (Sifianou, for example).

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create, reproduce and change our social worlds." (Watts 2003: 255).

Rituals and probabilities

B&L would like to see interpersonal rituals as the omnipresent model for rituals of all kinds (contra Goffman who sees interpersonal ritual as a residue from an earlier ritually dominated form of public life).

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B&L "play down the importance of politeness routines by stressing the 'generative' production of linguistic politeness" (B&L 1987: 43), they acknowledge that formulae are clearly important in folk notions (and to Goffman who stresses how ritualistic politeness is--ritual being repetitive or pre-patterned behavior). We see this also in the B&L's discussion of preference organization: repetition and probabilities are clearly important. Perhaps more than they realize.

Watts is specifically pulling ideas of habitus and social practice theory from Bourdieu. And this could connect well to probabilities and distributions of experiences.

"Participants enter verbal interaction in a specific social situation with a knowledge gained from previous experiences about what forms of social behaviour are appropriate and inappropriate to that type of situation. Their knowledge is constructed through their own personal history and the way it has been linked in the past with objectified social structures" (Watts 2003: 144-145).

"Social practice is carried out within social fields, and individuals and groups are defined by their relative positions in them. Fields are thus arbitrary social organisations of space and time, and they are the sites of constant struggles over capital. Capital can thus be seen as an incorporation of resources, which become part of the individual's habitus. They can be loosely grouped into material, cultural or social 'marketplaces', in which three kinds of capital are at stake, material capital, cultural capital and social capital" (Watts 2003: 149).

"Any new occasion of social interaction enacts and therefore reproduces earlier similar forms of interaction, but is at the same time always open to discursive

nature of money is to consider the ways in which the individual maximises its utility as a symbolic resource in the exchange of goods, but as a symbolic resource it is 'a social institution and quite meaningless if restricted to one individual'" (Watts 2003: 115 quoting Simmel 1900).Like money, politeness is something socially constituted that can still "itself motivate and structure courses of action, feeding into social processes and, thus, into the very conditions of its own existence or maintenance" (Werkhofer 1992: 190 cited in Watts 2003: 115).

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Politeness, like money, is "a socially constituted medium"

i)

Politeness, like money, is "a symbolic medium in the sense that its functions originally derive from an association to something else, namely to values"

ii)

Each is "historically constituted and reconstituted; its functions and the values it is associated with are essentially changeable ones"

iii)

"During its history, the functions of politeness turn into a power of the medium in the sense that it may, rather than being only a means to the ends of an individual user, itself motivate and structure courses of action"

iv)

The chances of the user being able to "master the medium completely...will be diminished" (Werkhofer 1992: 190 cited by Watts 2003: 144--and also on page 115, wow).

v)

One starting point for a theory of ways in which people maximize politeness devices as a symbolic resource is through Werkhofer's analogy of money:

"Assertives give a value and can therefore expect the payment of some other equivalent value.

i)

"Interrogatives request a value but cannot automatically expect the payment of that value. If the value is given, however, some form of return payment can be expected by the giver.

ii)

"Imperatives request a value, which may or may not be in the form of a linguistic utterance, and generally do expect the payment of that value." (Watts 2003: 154)

iii)

Watts seems to use three sentence moods, which focus on how sentences are forms of action--or better yet interaction. There's something kind of interesting in this division, though interrogatives vs. imperatives probably need to be better defined:

This connects Watts to Relevance Theory's idea of a verbal utterance as an ostensive, informative act. "The utterer is giving something to the addressee on the

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same time always open to discursive negotiation that might help to reconstruct the interaction type...the interaction type is itself always a locus of struggle with respect to what constitutes that form of social interaction" (Watts 2003: 20-21).

The equation of social practice Watts uses is:

[(habitus)(capital)] + field = practice

What this means is that the ways people carry out social acts that make up instances of interaction depend on the prior histories of those who are engaging in the interaction. Practice is a product of the objectified social structures of the field and the habitus and forms of capital of the participants.

"Among the objectified social structures of the field are institutionalised forms of behaviour, rights and obligations of the individuals interacting within that field and the power structures that form part of the field. Practice therefore depends on the amount of knowledge about those objectified structures that the individual has internalised as part of her/his habitus. "Specific modes of behaviour have become canonical as part of the objectified structures of the field and...they represent reproductions of discursive formats that have become institutionalised as expectable behaviour for interaction" (Watts 2003: 256).

(See also Watts' discussion of Bourdieu's equation on page 150.)

"Falling out of line constitutes a break in the politic behaviour which is interpretable by the interactants as an offence and as damage to the face of one or more of the interactants including the interactant who has fallen out of line. This kind of behaviour is often evaluated as rude or impolite." (Watts 2003: 131 though he points out that facework isn't 1:1 with (im)politeness--supportive facework may have nothing to do with (im)politeness, for example.)

"In any society, whenever the physical possibility of spoken interaction arises, it seems that a system of practices, conventions, and procedural rules comes into play which functions as a means of guiding and organizing the flow of messages. An understanding will prevail as to when and where it

utterer is giving something to the addressee on the justified assumption that the addressee will give something back either in the way of a linguistic utterance or in some other way, even in a situation of conflict...thus creating and sharing a common understanding. Every verbal interaction is therefore an exchange of utterances, which the interactants can assume to be in some sense meaningful...Every utterance either expresses at least one semantic proposition or directs attention to some semantic proposition(s) or, alternatively, does both these things at the same time" (Watts 2003: 153).

More critiquesWatts argues that we have to get rid of Gricean assumptions about social interactions being geared towards cooperation (Watts 2003: 20), though I'm not sure this cooperation can't be saved.

For Watts, only Leech and B&L have positions that are firm enough to test on real data (2003: 63).

The politeness literature is all over the place with regards to what counts as a culture (languages, genders, age groups, Western Europeans, etc.). It remains undefined, usually (Watts 2003: 101).

B&L are ready, in their 1987 foreword, to add audiences in, they say.

○

What about bystanders? Is it really just the speaker and the hearer? What about the social context of the utterance?

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What's the distinction between ritualized, formulaic utterances of politeness and utterances that aren't typically interpreted as being about politeness but are interpreted as such in a particular interaction. The distinction between "a socially and historically pre-patterned, highly conventionalised utterance and an individually or even idiosyncratically generated one" (Werkhofer 1992: 168).

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What about online processing? Speakers are monitoring what is said and may go back to correct assumptions.

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Clark and Schunk (1980, 1981) give evidence that there is no connection between the weightiness of the imposition implied by the utterance and the cultural ranking of the imposition being placed on the addressee by the speaker. "Costly" favors don't always give rise to more polite utterances. It may be more about what's

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More criticism of B&L from Werkhofer (1992, summarized in Watts 2003: 113):

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understanding will prevail as to when and where it will be permissible to initiate talk, among whom, and by means of what topics of conversation" (Goffman 1955/1967: 33-34, cited in Watts 2003: 123).

ExamplesImagine someone else is in your theater seats. There's been some confusion between P51/P52 and R51/R52 or there's some other code on the tickets, easily missed. What participants would expect to happen in the situation is politic behavior (not polite).

UniversalityWatts objects to politeness being an objective concept that is universal. He dislikes the taking up of face-threat mitigation (B&L, here adopted by Blum-Kulka who discusses how it is realized differently):

"On a theoretical level this means that systems of politeness manifest a culturally filtered interpretation of the interaction between four essential parameters: social motivations, expressive modes, social differentials and social meanings...Cultural notions interfere in determining the distinctive features of each of the four parameters and as a result significantly effect the social understanding of 'politeness' across societies in the world" (Blum-Kulka 1992: 270 cited in Watts 2003: 71).

This is somewhat interesting since B&L have been criticized as having "an overly pessimistic, rather paranoid view of human social interaction" (Schmidt 1980: 104) where "social interaction becomes an activity of continuous mutual monitoring of potential threats to the faces of the interactants, and of devising strategies for maintaining the interactants' faces--a view that if always true, could rob social interaction of all elements of pleasure" (Nwoye 1992: 311).

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For him, B&L don't look at how interlocutors struggle over politeness (or whatever term they use). What is polished? What is (in)appropriate? The universal assumption for Watts is that all cultures will have forms of behavior that members classify as mutually shared consideration for others. And others which violate these principles of cooperation and consideration (Watts 2003: 14).

utterances. It may be more about what's considered just and right.

A fun example: a barrister saying to a witness: "Would you be so kind as to tell us where you were on the night of the thirteenth of January last?" isn't really showing elaborate deference to the witness. It's irony and constructs/reproduces relationships of power and authority. The witness has to answer the question. The politeness is a form of social control.

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Power and distance become reified, "taking on an existence outside the social sphere of the interactants rather than being themselves constructed and/or reproduced through and in the interaction itself. They are not adequately defined, and Brown and Levinson do not consider the function that polite behaviour itself may have in reconstructing them" (Watts 2003: 114).

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The scale of politeness strategies is questionable (but B&L do acknowledge this in their 1987 foreword).

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Watts thinks this is wrongheaded. How do you process linguistic expressions? What are the short-term effects and long-term effects? Most things labeled by researchers as polite aren't recognized as such by participants. A focus on classification that doesn't match the participants' classification is suspect.

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"In virtually all the models of linguistic politeness on the market, (im)politeness2 has become a set of strategies available to speakers to enable them to achieve certain communicative goals whilst retaining interpersonal harmony, enhancing feelings of comity and goodwill, showing the requisite levels of cooperation, etc." (Watts 2003: 254-255).

"Brown and Levinson work from the concept of wants based on what they call 'personality', which an individual has developed prior to the interaction, whereas Goffman works from a notion of the ongoing construction of the individual's self-image contingent on social factors. Brown and Levinson seem to be thinking of the self as a stable core of values lodged somewhere in the individual, whereas for Goffman self is far less 'real' and is constantly renegotiable" (Watts 2003: 105).

MiscellaneousFor Goffman, a person makes a claim for a positive social value "which is constrained by the 'line' others interpret him to be taking during the course of the

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pleasure" (Nwoye 1992: 311)."Being defined as static entities that determine polite meanings, these variables [social distance, power, rate of imposition] represent a narrow approach to social realities, an approach that neglects the dynamic aspects of social language use--aspects that may have no systematic status in the traditional view, but should be at the very heart of a modern one" (Werkhofer 1992: 176).

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All three of these cited by Watts (2003: 100).•

Watts argues also that nothing is inherently polite--not even compliments are necessarily going to be evaluated as positive, supportive behavior (see his chapter 7).

So we can see this all as an argument against the objectification of a notion of politeness. For Watts, politeness is a discursively disputed term. "Raising the term '(im)politeness' to the status of a theoretical concept in linguistic pragmatics and sociolinguistics shifts the concern with politeness phenomena away from individuals and the everyday social acts they are involved in and places it above or beyond those individuals...It places social structures beyond the individuals involved in social interaction. This, in turn, logically entails that social structures are in some sense preexistent factual entities" (Watts 2003: 254).

interpret him to be taking during the course of the interaction. That social value is dependent on the other 'members', and it can change from one moment to the next. It is an image of the self constructed in accordance with social attributes approved by others, and it may be unstable and changeable" (Watts 2003: 104).

"Just as the individual only exists by virtue of her/his own specific history, so too does society only 'exist' by virtue of the history of previous social interaction, which lends those forms of behaviour the impression of objective validity. Throughout the social history of an individual s/he constructs the idea of an objectified 'society' with objectified social structures that sanction the ways in which s/he behaves in ongoing interaction" (Watts 2003: 143).

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Contrast this with Parsons, who has society regulating individual instances of social interaction. Social structure is a set of givens (you can discover and then manipulate). So individuals are pawns in a chess game of society, says Watts. This is a top-down way of looking at things.

•

See Eelen (2001) for more on Parsons. •

"The theory of practice as practice insists, contrary to positivist materialism, that the objects of knowledge are constructed, not passively recorded, and, contrary to intellectual idealism, that the principle of this construction is the system of structured, structuring dispositions, the habitus, which is constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical functions" (Bourdieu 1990: 52 cited in Watts 2003: 148).

See Hsien Chin Hu (1944) in American Anthropologistfor the historical development of the notion of 'face' in Chinese.

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