Manifestations of politeness in Shakespeare's dramatic works

CONTENTS

1. Politeness - a fuzzy concept and its linguistic repercussions in fiction

2. Theories of politeness
2.1 Lakoff s rule-guided approach
2.2 Leech's Politeness Principle and its maxims
2.3 Brown and Levinson's constructivist theory
2.4 Projecting politeness theories onto Shakespeare's dramatic works

3. Shakespeare's use of politeness - a linguistic analysis
3.1 Bald on record and off record
3.2 Positive Politeness
3.3 Negative Politeness
3.4 Forms of address

4. Context, register and the purposes of courteous speech

5. Concluding remarks: Elizabethan vs. modern politeness

References

1. Politeness - a fuzzy concept and its linguistic repercussions in fiction

As well as being an important social and cultural phenomenon, politeness may also be regarded as a function of speech, i.e. a set of principles, rules or maxims governing a competent speaker's use of language. Although this is clearly manifested in the structure and actual use of utterances in a given conversation context, far mote than Saussure's langue and parole arc involved in that historical, sociological and psychological aspects have to be taken into account. Thus, in analysing politeness in a fictional text it is es­sential to establish the historical setting as well as to examine the social hierarchy and valid conventions; as far as psychology is concerned, a scrutiny of the characters is necessary. Moreover, the course their interaction takes is crucial: "Every choice A makes affects the force of B's options, and vice versa, so even politeness is determined jointly" (Clark 1996: 316). These methodological premises imply that, even though the emphasis in this paper is on linguistic results, external factors cannot be ignored without distorting the outcome. However, it seems legitimate to integrate these factors only to the degree to which they contribute to the linguistic enterprise undertaken here. As to the theories of politeness that are utilized, it must be noted that they all fall short of explaining the evidence satisfactorily, but they nevertheless allow for interesting inferences and are therefore useful heuristic tools.^[1]

2. Theories of politeness

Before starting the analysis proper of politeness in Shakespeare's plays, a brief sketch of the theories employed will provide the framework. As politeness is a very complex component of human interaction, it is central to look for in­dicators and strategies of it and to explain how they work.^[2] These have been systematically described by Lakoff (1973), Leech (1983) and Brown/Levin-on (1987) in particular.^[3] More recent ideas will be dealt with in the course of looking at Shakespearean drama. Since what is intended here is the appli­cation of linguistic theories to a corpus of texts, a critical estimation of these theories is not the aim of the present paper. Especially the problem of ethno-centrism cannot be discussed here, quite apart from the fact that Shakes­peare's works are firmly rooted in Western European culture and would not yield significant results in this respect anyway - despite their historical differ­ence.

2.1 Lakoff s rule-guided approach

In her slightly simplistic account of politeness, Lakoff (1973) postulates three subordinate rules for the second rule of pragmatic competence - Be polite :

(1) Do not impose. This means both preserving a minimal distance with re­gard to others and avoiding intruding into their business, as when ego asks al­ter for permission.
(2) Give options. The addressee has to be given options in order to take his or her own decisions.
These two rules can both be exemplified in Osric's utterance directed to Hamlet:"Sweet lord, if your friendship were at leisure, I should impart a thing to you from his majesty." {Hamlet 5.2.91-92) Whereas the forms of address -"sweet lord", "your friendship" and "you" rather than "thou" create distance, the conditional along with its hypothetical condition leaves several options open to Hamlet.
(3) Make alter feel good - be friendly. This is intended to produce some kind of solidarity or even rapport between speaker and addressee, as is evident in Romeo's valediction:"Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast" (Romeo and Juliet 2.1.231). The optative expresses a wish the fulfilment of which would be for Juliet's good, but the utterance makes her feel good by its own virtue, simply because Romeo has chosen to make it. It is a typical feature of polite utterances that it is crucial to make them in specific situa­tions, as when parting from a person who is close' to the speaker, no matter whether the propositional content is actually true or may become so. The only prerequisite - or, in the case of performatives, the essential felicity condition - is that the addressee be convinced of the speaker's sincerity. Un­less this is stipulated, ironic utterances or those that are not interpreted as polite although they appear to be so cannot be excluded. Whether the speaker is being genuinely honest in adhering to principles of politeness is a further question which, however, does not have any bearing on the outcome as long as it is achieved, i.e. as long as alter does feel good due to an utterance in accordance with rule 3.^[4]

2.2 Leech's Politeness Principle and its maxims

In analogy to Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP), Leech posits a Politeness Principle (PP) which can also be subsumed under the general category of Conversational Principles and which consists of six maxims:

(I) TACT M A XIM (in impositives and commissives)

(a) Minimize cost to other [ (b) Maximize benefit to other ]

(II) GENEROSITY MAXIM (in impositives and commissives)

(a) Minimize benefit to self [ (b) Maximize cost to self]

(III) APPROBATION MAXIM (in expressives and assertives)

(a) Minimize dispraise of other [(b) Maximize praise of other ](IV) MODESTY MAXIM (in expressives and assertives)

(a) Minimize praise of self [ (b) Maximize dispraise of self]

(V) AGREEMENT MAXIM (in assertives)

(a) Minimize disagreement between self and other [ (b) Maximize agree­ment between self and other ]

(VI) SYMPATHY MAXIM (in assertives)

(a) Minimize antipathy between self and other [ (b) Maximize sympathy be­tween self and other ]

(1983:132)

These maxims are based on three pragmatic scales, which will also play a major role in investigating the Shakespearean corpus for politeness: the cost-benefit scale, the optionality scale and the indirectness scale. As all of these are integrated into Brown and Levinson's approach, they will be illustrated in applying their framework (see sections 3.1 - 3.3).

2.3 Brown and Levinson's constructivist theory

This is the most elaborate coherent theory of politeness. Besides taking Lakoff’s and Leech's ideas into account, Brown and Levinson (1987:58) con­struct a model person:"All our model person (MP) consists in is a wilful fluent speaker of a natural language, further endowed with two special properties -rationality and face". 'Rationality' is to be understood as a means-ends reasoning faculty, whereas 'face' embraces two wants which correspond to 'negative' and 'positive face' - "the want to be unimpeded and the want to be approved of in certain respects". As face-threatening acts (FTAs) like commands, requests, offers or even threats cannot always be refrained from,^[5] competent speakers systematically employ face-redressive strategies to minimize the face threat. According to Schulze (1985: 74-75), it is this verbal behaviour of the interactants that is commonly termed as 'face work', in the course of which ego and alter select utterance types according to principles or rules of politeness.

A speaker has to choose between five different strategies in the context of making an FT A. The first one is called 'bald on record'; here, the FTA is done without any face redress - 'bald' - and in such a manner as to make the speaker's intention unambiguously clear - 'on record'. In most cases, how­ever, a speaker will do the FTA on record, but with redressive strategies. Ego can either use positive politeness, thus directing the redress to alter's positive face by appreciating his or her wants or by expressing similarity between the speaker's and the hearer's wants (cf. Brown/Levinson 1987:101-102), or s/he can employ negative politeness, thus acting redressively towards alter's negative face by preserving distance between ego and alter and by not intru­ding on the other's 'territory'. As Brown and Levinson state, positive and negative politeness function as a social accelerator and a social brake respectively. As a fourth option, the speaker can go 'off record' by expressing his or her intention ambiguously, which enables the hearer to ignore the suggested inferences or to pretend that s/he does not understand the illocution. Finally, if the risk of face loss is enormous, the speaker may choose not to do the FTA at all.^[6]

As for the calculation of the weightiness of an FTA, Brown and Levinson suggest the following formula (W=weightiness, D=social distance, P=relative power, R=ranking of extremity or imposition): Wx = D(S,H) + P(H,S) + Rx

The Shakespearean drama corpus will be assessed in connection with this system of strategies and the preceding formula.

2.4 Projecting politeness theories onto Shakespeare's dramatic works

Having accomplished the theoretical and methodological preliminaries, let us now turn to Shakespeare's texts. The advantage of using fictional texts for testing pragmalinguistic theories is stressed by Adams:

Linguistics misrepresents speech acts in the examples it presents because the ex­amples are given without an actual or adequate communicative context; in other words, the examples of language use are not from the use of language. The linguist's examples are hypothetical (but not fictional) [. . . ] In fictional texts, speech acts do not appear in isolation but together with other speech acts, and when we read, we understand a speech act by relating it to other speech acts in the context.

(1985: 48-49)

Not only do Shakespeare's texts to a certain degree reflect the hierarchical fabric of Elizabethan society, where rituals of politeness were required due to differences in power and rank, but they also show plenty of characters who want to achieve their ends and utilize strategies of politeness, sometimes coupled with the height of hypocrisy, to do this;^[7] Othello is a point in case. Moreover, if Brown and Gilman are correct in claiming that "dramatic texts provide the best information on colloquial speech of the period" (1989: 159), this would justify carefully drawn conclusions about the status of politeness in the Elizabethan era on the whole.^[8] This attempt will be made in section 5.

[...]

^[1] The necessity of constructing theories about politeness is elucidated by Geis, who cor­rectly claims that "there is no univocal semantic correlation between the sentence type of the ut­terance and the transactional work it does" (1995: 141). This holds for both early modern and present-day English.

^[2] This method is at the same time more modest and more realistic than attempts at pre­dicting speakers' choices and determining the total set of parameters that influence them.

^[3] The focus will be on the last model because, to a certain extent, it is a synthesis of the other two.

^[4] Hedges, tag questions and similar techniques are not mentioned in this section as they occur in Brown and Levinson's theory, which will be presented in section 2.3.

^[5] If discourse participants wish to achieve certain goals, e.g. obtaining information or making the addressee do something, there is no possibility of eschewing FTAs.

^[6] The monologues in Shakespeare's dramatic texts fortunately disclose the characters' in­tentions and make it possible to demonstrate even this evasive 'strategy', which, however, will not be further pursued here.

^[7] This is by no means designed to be a moralistic account; rather, it is meant to illustrate what divergent functions politeness may serve. A similar position is taken by Mey:"[ . . . ] cer­tainly the language user is not supposed to be virtuous in the moral sense" (1993: 67).

^[8] The methodological foundation is admittedly tenuous here, but one has to rely on dra­matic texts of the period if one wants to find out about conversational politeness in those days.