Politeness and Culture Essay

1.1 What is ingenuity?Politeness is a kind of socio- cultural phenomenon in human communion. It has been defined in diverse focuss.For Kochman (1984), civilizedness has a protective mission exercised in move things in such a way as to take account of the feelings of separatesPolite conversation is a way of showing consideration for early(a) hoi polloisfeelings, that is, non saying or doing anything that susceptibility unduly excite or arouse. The gentlemans agreement (though, hardly just confined to with child(p) males) is and was you dont do or say anything that might arouse my feelings, and I wont do or say anything that might arouse yours (1984204)Watts (1992) defines polite behaviour as socio-culturally determined appearance directed to state of wards the stopping point of establishing and/or maintaining in a state of equilibrium the personal kins between the individuals of a hearty group, whether open or closed, during the ongoing shape of moveion (199250)The refore, the term politeness may be generally defined as adequate social conduct and tactful consideration of others aiming to avoid reciprocal conflicts.Politeness mess be realized in a number of ways, among which the use of language concerns us most in the present discussion. Politeness is hence taken to be the various forms of language expression and usage which allow the members of a socio-cultural group to achieve their conflict-avoiding intentions.If politeness is seen as the adequacy of linguistic behavior, then all speakers of different languages are equally polite, since they all fetch linguistic means at their disposal, which tally to their conventionalitys of application are adequate in different situations. The idea of politeness, therefore, is ecumenicly valid.1.2 Motives of Being Polite wherefore do tidy sum apologize when they have d whiz something wrong? Why do they compliment on their friends hairstyle? In unrivalled word, why do stack behave appropriat ely, hence courteously? The explanation of such diverse communicative behaviors lies in the consideration of confront. submit is thus viewed as a positive universal ego-image that is maintaining in participation. That is, in newly formed contacts the individual engages in establishing a public image for him egotism. In continued contacts he engages in sustaining and improving the impertinence he has encourage the others to develop for him.A fundamental preoccupation of people around the world is maintaining or protecting looking. Threats to casing, whether intended, accidental, or just now imagined, are the basis of most interpersonal conflicts. They arise when people feel that their right to a positive self-importance-image being ignored. One conventional way of avioding threats to confront in all acculturations is to be lingually polite.To secure this public self-image, people engage in what Goffman calls vitrine work, performing action to break whatever they are doin g consistent with font(196712), plot trying to save their own face as well as the others. Goffman (1967) specifies deuce kinds of face-work the avoidance process (avoiding potentially face-threatening) acts and the corrective process (performing a variety of redressive acts). However, he says little about how face can be maintained linguistically while damage is occuring.As implied above, face wants are reciprocal, i.e. if one wants his face cared for, he should care for other peoples face. The reason is that, while the individual is absorbed in developing and maintaining his face, the others also have comparable considerations for themselves. It is clear that one way of ensuring the maintenance of their own face is to keep everybodys face undamaged. Normally, the participants during interaction work on the understanding that one will respect the others face as long as the other respects his. This point is best expressed by the concise rule in Scripture Do unto all men as you wou ld they should do unto you.Since face wants are reciprocal, politeness naturally concerns a relationship between two rational participants or middlemans, whom we may call self and other. In a conversation, self may be identified with speaker or addresser, and other with tender or addressee. Also it is possible thatspeakers show politeness to a third party that is related to interlocutors face.2.0 Language and Culture2.1 Defining CultureCulture is a large and evasive concept. Sapir (1921) holds that nicety may be defined as what a society does and thinks, and language is a particular way of thought. Language, in this way, is part of conclusion. Culture is also interpreted in the sense of Goodenoughs definitionAs I see it, a societys gloss consists of whatever it is one had to whop or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members Culture, being what people have to learn as distinct from their biological heritage, must consist of the end-product of learning fr iendship, in a most geneal sense of the term (Goodenough,1954167).Culture is thus whatever a person must love in order to function in a particular society, including language and conventional behavioral norms that a person must follow or that other people in the society expect you to follow, to bring down through the task of daily living.When we study a culture, it is non enough to merely learn the knowledge of a language and behavioral norms, as Steinmetz, Bush and Joseph-Goldfare (1994) point outStudying culture does not mean looking exclusively at customs, insititution, and arti facts, but also studying peoples values, beliefs, and attitudes and how they charm or are influenced by interaction among people. Culture should be studied as a process as well as a product (199412).As a combination of these views, culture consists of not only language, behavioural norms, which can be ob dole outd, but also values and beliefs underlying them. The famous fable of the culture iceberg (Hall & Hall,1990) indicates that many aspects of culture, such as certain beliefs, world views, and values, are below the clear of intendedness ( in the submerged part of the iceberg). Other aspects of culture, like language, eating habits, customs, are in the conscious area ( above the waterline). It is often the less conscious cultural aspects that influenced the way people communicate with for each one other.2.2 Language and CultureWe are now in a position to see language and culture in a dialectical relationship. Every language is part of a culture. As such, it cannot but serve and reflect cultural needs. This does not necessarily go against Saussures thesis that the signified of a language are arbitrary and hence derive their exact identity from systems of relationships. What needs to be added, however, is that this whimsey is not as absolute as he suggested, but is limited by the particular cultural setting from which a language extracts its signified. Within the broad li mits set by the specific needs of a culture, a language is free to make arbitrary selections of signifieds. This element of mischievousness is brone out by the fact that there is of a speech community and its linguistic re character references.Thus n both linguistic determinism nor cultural determinism can adequately explain why a language should select its unique system of signs, for these selections are do partly in response to cultural needs and partly owing to the inherent ( limited ) arbitrariness of the process.There is yet another sense in which language is not a passive reflector of culture. Even assuming that culture is in many cases the first cause in the language-culture relationship, language as the effect in the first link of the casual chain will in turn be the cause in the next link, reinforcing and preserving beliefs and customs and conditioning their future course.3.0 Politeness and Culture3.1 The Concept of Face In Chinese and positionThe central to B & Ls polit eness theory is the concept of face, and its two concimitant desires negative face and positive face, which are defined from the perspective of individuals wants. B & L maintain that notion of face constituted by these two basic desire is universal (198713). This section thus aims to examine whether their notion of face is applicable in Chinese culture. Since they acknowledge ancestry their formulation of face from Goffmans classic account of face and from the English folk notion of face (198761), these two sources will be dealt with first.3.1.1 The Source of B & Ls FaceThe first source is Goffmans account of face. Goffman characterizes face as the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. He sees face not as a private or an internalized flow of events, supported by other peoples thinkers, and enclosed by impersonal agencies in the situation (19677). Seen in this light, face becomes a public image that is on loan to individuals from society, and that will be withdrawn from them if they prove unworthy of it (196710).B & L say that their other sources is the English folk concept of face, which is linked to notions like being embarrassed of humiliated, or losing face (198761). But in fact, such notions of face seem to be Chinese in origin. The word face is a literal translation of the two Chinese characters and ( Hu,1944Ho,1975).Presumably informed of these two sources, B & L characterize face as image that intrinsically belongs to the individual, to the self. This seems to part with their first source considerably. Here, the public feature of speech that is essential to Goffmans analysis of face seems to become an external modifier rather than an intrinsic percentage of this image.3.1.2 Chinese FaceAs pointed out above, two Chinese characters and are used to convey the explicit meaning of the word face ( that is, the front of the head) they also encode connotative mean ings, which have to do with reputable, respectable images that individuals can claim for themselves from communities in which they interact, or to which they belong (Ho,1957).More specifically, stands for prestige or reputation, which is either achieved through getting on in life (Hu, 194445), or ascribed by other members of ones own community. refers to the respect of the group for a man with a good good reputation it embodies the corporate trust of society in the integrity of egos moral character, and it is both a social sanction for enforcing moral standards and internalized sanction (Hu, 194445). Chinese speakers, therefore, will be seen as being polite if they know how to attend to each others and and to enact speech acts appropriate to and worthy of such an image.3.2 contrast Between Chinese Face and B & Ls FaceThe first difference is interested with their overall conceptualization of face-a difference that has been briefly alluded to above. B & L focus their notion of f ace primarily upon the individual-rather than the communal-aspect of face that is, the self is the principal constituent that contextualizes the concept of face. The self is public only to the extent that it depends on others face being manifested (B & L, 198761). The self depends on the public only to preserve its own interests. In short, the overall composition of this self-image, with its negative and positive aspects, only concerns the individuals wants and desires.In contrast, Chinese face encodes a reputable image that individuals can claim for themselves as they interact with others in a given community it is intimately linked to the views of the community and to the communitys judgment and perception of the individuals character and behaviour. Chinese face emphasizes not the accommodation of individual wants or desires but the musical harmony of individual conduct with the views and judgment of the community. Chinese face, to quote Goffman again, is on loanfrom society (196 710) it belongs to the individual or to the self only to the extentthat the individual acts in full compliance with that face.The fleck difference is related to the content of face. B & L conceive of face as consisting of negative face and positive face. Their negative face refers to, and values, an individuals need to be free of external impositions, a desire to be left alone to enjoy a sense of ones territorial integrity. Privacy is a particular term used to describe this typical value, which is much more than treasured in English culture than in Chinese whereas Chinese face emphasizes ones dependence on societys recognition of ones social standing and of ones reputableexistence, and subsequently, on societys endorsement of ones attending to it. relatively speaking, Chinese face does not comprise the element of what B & L term negative face.3.3 Cultural AssumptionIn this section, the differences of politeness in English and Chinese will be expatiate in terms of the different historicity that the concept of politeness can be traced back to, and of the fundamental cultural assumptions underlying the two different notions of English and Chinese face.3.3.1 A Historical suss outAs we have known, privacy is a value derived from B & Ls notion of face. It is a notion embracing at once the freedom, rights, and the independence of action of man. Such a value is closely associated with the independence of man from the yokes of the church on the European continent, and with the opening up of the New World on the other side of the Atlantic-North America. Consequently, showing respct to an individuals liberty, his rights, his independence in Anglo-American culture, will be considered polite lack of it will be improper, hence impolite.On the contrary, Chinese culture has had a 2000-year-long history of feudalism. Chinese civilization has been established on agriculture, and Generations of peasants were tied to the land on which they lives and worked. Except in times of war and famine, there was little mobility, either socially and geographically (Hu & Grove,19911). From this historicity resulted the collective (group-oriented) nature of Chinese value, which was rein burdend ideologically in the Confucian tradition, a tradition that advocates subordinating the individual to the group or the community, and maintains that the ultimate goal of human behavior is to achieve harmony, which leads the Chinese to pursue a conflict-free and group-oriented system of an ever-expanding circle of human-relatedness (Chen, 1993). Namely, an individual is presumed not to satisfy the desire for freedom, but to gain self-esteem in harmony with group. Just as English culture values privacy, Chinese culture values harmony.In modern Chinese, the equivalent of politeness is believed to have evolved in history from the notion of Li . The ancient philosopher and thinker Confucius (551479 B.C.), in order to restore the harmony of society when there were constant wars be tween feudal states, advocated restoring Li. Derived from this book are cardinal basic elements of politeness, or what count as polite behaviors respectfulness, modesty, attitudinal heating system, and refinement. Respectfulness is the selfs positive appreciation of admiration of the other concerning the latters face, largely identical with the need to maintain the hearers positive face. coyness can be seen as another way of saying self-denigration though modesty varies in the richness attached to it in different cultures, it is to a large extent universal, her to interpret it as self-denigration is uniquely Chinese. Attitudinal warmth is the selfs demonstration of kindness, consideration, and hospitality, the speaker runs the risk of infringing on the hearers personal freedom, namely privacy, thus threatening his negative face. Finally, refinement refers to the selfs behavior to the other which meets certain moral standards laid by society it represents the normative character o f politeness in addition to the instrumental aspect. These four essential elements of politeness are believed to manifest themselves in many Chinese speech events.3.3.2 Two Construals of the self Interdependent and IndependentIf we examine the deep structure from which the two different notions of English and Chinese face can possibly be derived, them they can be said to have been informed metarphorically by two divergent underlying forces (Mao,1994) the centripetal force, which leads Chinese face to gravitate toward social recognition and hierarchical interdependence, and the outward-moving force, which enables English face to spiral outward from individual desires or wants with the self as the initiating agent. The centripetal force and centrifugal force represent two different face orientations, which correspond to two distinct construals of the self an interdependent construal of the self and an independent construal of the self respectively(Markus and Kitayama, 1991).The inde pendent construal of the self, endorsed by English culture and most Hesperian countries, builds on a faith in the inherent separateness of distinct persons . The normative imperative of this culture is to become independent of others and to discover and express ones unique attributes (Miller, 1988).Thus achieving the cultural goal of independent requires construing oneself as an individual whose behavior is made meaningful primarily by reference to ones own internal thoughts, feelings, and actions, rather than by reference to those of others whereas the interdependent construal of the self, favoured by Chinese culture and most East Asian countries, insists on the fundamental connectedness of human beings to each other(Markus and Kitayama, 1991227). A normative imperative of this culture is to maintain this interdependence, therefore, entails seeing oneself as part of an encompassing social relationship and recongnizing that ones behavior is organized by what the self perceives to be the thoughts, feeling, and actions of others in the relationship, so that the self within such a construal becomes most meaningful and complete.BIBLIOGRAPHYBlum-Kulka, S. et al. 1984. Requests and apologies A cross-cultural study of speech acts actualisation patterns (CCSARP). Applied Linguistics 5(3)192-212Brown, R. & S. Levinson. 1987. Politeness Some Universals in Language Usage. CambridgeCUP.Chen, Guoming. 1993. A Chinese perspective of communication competence. Paper presented at the annual convention of the speech communication association, Miami Beach, FL.Goffman, E. 1967. Interactional Ritual Essays on opposite Behavior. New York Doubleday Anchor Books.Goffman, E. 1972. Interactional Ritual. LondonPenguin.Goffman, E. 1971. 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