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This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

Mitigating Disagreements in Second-Language
Computer—Mediated Discourse:
Applying and Revising Brown and Levinson's
Theories of Face

presented by

Tehsuan Liou

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph.D. degree in English

 

 

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Major professor

Date August 14, 1995

 

MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0 - 12771

 

 

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MIchIgan State
University

 

 

 

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MITIGATING DISAGREEMENTS IN SECOND-LANGUAGE
COMPUTER-MEDIATED DISCOURSE:
APPLYING AND REVISING BROWN AND LEVINSON'S THEORIES OF FACE
BY

Tehsuan Liou

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1995

ABSTRACT

MITIGATING DISAGREEMENTS IN SECOND—LANGUAGE
COMPUTER-MEDIATED DISCOURSE:
APPLYING AND REVISING BROWN AND LEVINSON'S THEORIES OF FACE

BY

Tehsuan Liou

In this dissertation I examine situated language use by
English as a Second Language (ESL) students in class
discussions through electronic mail (e-mail). There were
three purposes in this study: (1) to understand from an
ethnographic standpoint how linguistic usages are linked
with social relationships in an emerging speech event, (2)
to examine the politeness strategies used by ESL students to
mitigate their disagreements in e—mail discussion, and (3)
to evaluate the applicability of Brown and Levinson's (1987)
theory of politeness to these e-mail data.

The e-mail discussions and interviews of fifteen ESL
students from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds
were collected and analyzed for the ways politeness
strategies were employed to mitigate disagreements.
Definitions of politeness strategies were drawn from Brown
and Levinson's influential theories regarding "negative

face" and "positive face."

Tehsuan Liou

The participants' e—mail discourse was characterized by
conversational strategies; there was an abundance of data
on disagreement and associated ways of mitigating the
disagreement. Of special interest were mitigation
strategies which arose from the character of the event. For
instance, the multiparty format and pre—determined turn—
taking system in e—mail allowed the participants to
manipulate both participant frameworks and participation
frameworks to provide mitigation of disagreement.

Brown and Levinson's concept of "face" as dichotomous—-
either "positive" or "negative"——caused problems in
interpreting many of the politeness acts in the data. I
argue that, instead of a dichotomy, there is a continuum
between positive and negative face and the associated
politeness strategies.

This study provides unique data on an important speech
event, electronic mail, which has emerged with great
rapidity in recent years as the potential of computer—
mediated communication has been recognized. The analysis
documents politeness strategies of a particularly important
nature: those used to mitigate disagreement. Such
discourse strategies are essential to successful use of a
second language. Finally, this study suggests the necessity
for significant modification of Brown and Levinson's

influential theories of politeness and face.

 

 

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I extend my deepest gratitude to Dr. Nancy Ainsworth-Vaughn,
adviser and chairperson of my committee during the
completion of doctoral course work, comprehensive
examinations, and the writing of this dissertation, for her

constant support, encouragement, and guidance.

I express great appreciation to my committee members,
Dr. Susan Mary Gass, Dr. Marilyn Wilson, and Dr. Kathleen

Geissler, for their instruction and valuable suggestions.

A special note of thanks goes to the instructor and the

participants of this study. They made this study possible.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents, my parents-in-
law, my wife, Hui-ling, and my son, Franklin, whose love
inspired and sustained me throughout my study at Michigan

State University.

Page
List of Tables ............................................. x
List of Figures ........................................... xi
CHAPTER ONE: Discourse Analysis of
An Emerging Speech Event ................... 1
1.1 Introduction ...................................... 1
1.2 Computer-Mediated Discourse
as Emerging Speech Events ......................... 2
1.3 Effects of Communication Media
on Linguistic Behaviors ........................... 4
1.3.1 Modes of Computer-Mediated Communication .......... 6
1.3.2 Communication Modalities and Linguistic Changes... 7
1.3.3 Interpersonal Relationships
in Computer—Mediated Communication ................ 8
1.4 Previous Research on Politeness in Written
Interaction and Computer-Mediated Communication...10
1.5 Politeness and Interaction Friction ............... 12
1.6 Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory ............ 13
1.6.1 The Concepts of Politeness and Face ............... 13
1.6.2 Face-threatening Act (FTA) ........................ 16
1.6.3 Strategies for Doing FTAs ......................... 17
1.6.4 Hierarchical Structures of Politeness Strategies..23
1.7 Criticisms of Face Theory ......................... 25
1.7.1 Functional and Instrumental View of Politeness....25
vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Multifunctionality and Ambiguity of Politeness
Strategy .......................................... 3o

Politeness and Mitigation ......................... 35

Ethnographic Study of the Emerging Speech Event...39

TWO: Methodology ................................ 45
Data Collection ................................... 45
E-mail Discussion and the Class ................... 45
The Participants .................................. 47
Authorization for the Study ....................... 48
Formation of the E-mail Groups .................... 48

Interview as One Basis for

Interpretation of Data ............................ 55
THREE: Overall View of the Language Event ......... 59
Overall View about the Language Activity .......... 59
Defining Disagreement ............................. 60
Speech Act Theory and Disagreement ................ 62
Disagreement as an Expressed Belief ............... 64
Identifying Disagreements in Interview ............ 65
The Language Event under Inquiry .................. 67
The Evolution of a New Language Event

in a Discourse Community .......................... 68
Discourse Types in the Language Event ............. 72
B-mail Message Structures ......................... 77
Mitigating Strategies in the Data ................. 78
Clarification of Mitigating Strategies ............ 89

CHAPTER

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FOUR: Participant and Participation Frameworks
For Mitigation ............................. 91

Global Politeness Strategies
in a New Language Event ........................... 91

Participation Framework
and Participant Framework ......................... 92

Constructing Participant Frameworks
as a Way to Be Polite ............................. 95

Avoiding Explicit Identification
of Addressee in Disagreements .................... 100

Incorporating the Intended Recipient
into the General Audience ........................ 101

Disagreeing with the Intended Addressee

by Agreeing with Others .......................... 104
Explicitly Locating Participants

for Politeness Purpose ........................... 107
Participant Framework Shift ...................... 110
Participation Framework .......................... 114

Hypothetical Participants

in Participation Framework... ................... 118
Participation Framework Shift .................... 120
Flexibility of E-mail in Multiparty

Participant Framework and Politeness ............. 124
FIVE: Ambiguity of Politeness Strategies ........ 130
Introduction ..................................... 130

Brown and Levinson's Dichotomous View of

Face and Politeness .............................. 132
Mutual Exclusiveness of Politeness Strategies ...137
Fuzziness and Ambiguity

of Politeness Strategies ......................... 137
Avoid Disagreement ............................... 138
Minimize Disagreement ............................ 147

viii

Page

5.4.3 Impersonalize S and H in Disagreement ............ 150
5.4.4 Hedges in Disagreement ........................... 154
5.4.5 Apology in Disagreement .......................... 159
CHAPTER SIX: Alternative Politeness Theory ............. 170
6.1 Alternative Politeness Theory .................... 170
6.1.1 Basic Assumptions of the Alternative Theory ...... 170
6.1.2 Alternative Face Wants and Politeness ............ 176
6.1.3 The Continuum of Politeness ...................... 183
6.2 Conclusion ....................................... 187
CHAPTER SEVEN: Conclusions ............................... 188
7.1 Summary .......................................... 188
7.2 Implications and Conclusion ...................... 196
APPENDICES .............................................. 203
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................. 208
ix

LIST OF TABLES

Page
Table 1 Positive politeness, negative politeness,
and off record strategies ........................ 26
Table 2 Background information on participants ........... 50
Table 3 Partial list of motives compiled by
Henry Murray .................................... 173
Table 4 Alternative view of face and politeness ......... 178

Figure
Figure

Figure

Figure

LIST OF FIGURES

Page
Possible Strategies for Doing FTAs .............. 18
Brown and Levinson's View of Face Wants ........ 134
Brown and Levinson's Concept of Face
and on-Record Politeness ....................... 136
Relationships of Politeness in
the Alternative Model .......................... 184

xi

 

CHAPTER ONE

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF AN EMERGING SPEECH EVENT

1+1__In§Ian§Li9n

This study investigates certain crucial aspects of
politeness in a speech event of very recent invention, class
discussions through electronic mail (e—mail). There are
three purposes in this study: (1) to understand from an
ethnographic standpoint how linguistic usages are linked
with social relationships in an emerging speech event, (2)
to examine the politeness strategies used by English as a
Second Language students to mitigate their disagreements in
e—mail discussion, and (3) to evaluate the applicability of
Brown and Levinson's (1987) theory of politeness to these
e-mail data.

Brown and Levinson point out that patterns of message
construction are "part of the very stuff that social
relationships are made of" (1987:55). The study of language
usage in e-mail, a particular form of computer-mediated
communication (Kiesler et a1. 1984), can provide us with a
crucial direction leading to the understanding of how the
principles of social relationships are realized in a new

.
form of language. Computer—mediated communication is an

electronic world in which participants lack the full range

2
of paralinguistic cues and have to develop new approaches to
serve the same purposes. Computer—mediated communication
has with great rapidity become an inseparable part of both
intranational and international communication. Naturally,
there is a need for analysis of this important new form of
language and understanding of its relationships to

previously-existing forms of written and oral language.

2 : _ 3' i . . E l E

In pre-literate societies, human linguistic interaction
is solely limited to communication based on physical
contact. The communication of any individual with others is
constrained to those who are visually and/or aurally
reachable. The invention and use of writing systems
liberates people from the limitations of aural contact when
communicating. New language events, such as letter
writing/reading, then emerge as the result of this
innovative technology.

In modern industrial societies a complex array of
language events serve as resources for the writer. However,
the asynchronous nature of written language in communication
minimizes the possibilities of immediate and efficient
feedback, as can be seen in letters and books. When used
for communication demanding immediacy, written language
turns out to be quite inefficient and insufficient. Oral
exchanges still remain as the most practical and popular way

of conducting human linguistic interaction in every literate

3
society, in part because oral language allows spontaneous
creation and immediate feedback from the other parties
involved. For example, personal and business letter-writing
have given way to long-distance telephone calls as telephone
service has become affordable and convenient.

While the telephone solves the problem of overcoming
distance and provides immediate feedback capabilities, it
ties the people communicating with one another to the
present time and space. The most recent invention of e-mail
and networked communication systems not only overcomes
distance but also provides flexibility of timing. E-mail
also is particularly efficient and effective for new
language events in which indefinite numbers of participants
communicate, emancipated from previous physical constraints.
It is no wonder that computer—mediated communication has
rapidly grown in popularity, especially among people in the
scholarly and business communities. As the result of the
availability and popularity of computer-mediated
communication, written interactions among people have
dramatically increased since this technology came to life.
New language varieties, such as Interactive Written
Discourse (IWD) (Ferrara et al. 1991), are being addressed,
and new language events are emerging. We begin to see
class-based electronic conferences, discussions via e—mail
in an academic setting, and even conversations and chats via
Internet Relay Chat involving numerous students, professors,

language teachers, businessmen, professionals, computer

 

4
programmers, and others, known or unknown to one another.
As various types of delayed or simultaneous linguistic
exchanges via computers among users are emerging, the need

to study these new speech events has also begun to emerge.

ll3i Effects of Communication Media on Linguistic Behaviors

My interest in studying language usage in computer-
mediated communication is based on speculation about the
possible influences of the communication medium on
linguistic choices in a communicational interchange. Will
computers as the new communication medium affect the
linguistic selections of the users in terms of the
strategies used for establishing and maintaining social
relationships? How can one express polite behavior in an
environment where meaning transmission depends primarily on
texts? Since e—mail communication, for example, is mostly
asynchronous and exclusively text—based, we might assume
that the ways to achieve politeness in a language activity
will be different from those in face-to-face communication
because none or a minimum of prosody, paralinguistic
vocalizations, and kinesics are available in e—mail. How
the specific nature of e—mail as a medium of communication
affects the ways people establish and maintain relationships
with others is just beginning to be studied.

The understanding of the influences of this
communication medium on language use is a question worthy of

scholarly investigation.

 

5

There are special communication problems for second
language speakers as they try to apply their previous
knowledge and experiences concerning an intended language
act in their native language to a target language situation.
L6rscher and Schulze (1988) demonstrate that little
attention to politeness is paid in foreign language
classrooms, which is often dominated by discourse that
primarily focuses on transmission of information. The focus
on transactional discourse (Brown and Yule 1983; Lakoff
1989) in second or foreign language classroom communication
offers little help to students in terms of politeness when
they attempt to communicate with the native speakers of the
target languages. Studies of oral politeness strategies
across cultures and languages, such as apologies (Cohen and
Olshtain 1981, 1985; Olshtain and Cohen 1983; Garcia 1989a),
and responding to compliments (Chen 1993), show the
deviation or inadequacy of speech acts of second language
learners. This lack of sociocultural rules of
appropriateness of the target language, combined with the
demands of newly—emerging language events in computer—
mediated communication, may cause an even greater problem
for_second language speakers. These issues not only attract
scholarly interest but are also very important to the study
of pedagogical aspects of language use. For second language
speakers to be able to really achieve "communicative
competence" (Hymes 1964), learning how to achieve

sociocultural as well as linguistic appropriateness

 

6

in a situation in which situated language use is carried out

through computers has become compelling.

E H i E 3 _” i' i 1 . .
Computer-mediated communication actually includes
various modes, such as chat, computer messages, electronic
mail, computer conferencing, forums, and bulletin boards.
These modes have different degrees of potential for
immediate interaction. Chat is a multi-user communication
facility that transmits one's typing directly to the monitor
of another person or group of people. Because of its
capability of fast transmission of messages among multiple
users who log on to the system simultaneously, chat, as
suggested by its name, is often used for casual talks.
Murray gives clear explanation to the other modes. She
defines computer messages as the interchanges of "one-line
messages between two or more participants simultaneously
logged on to computer terminals" (Murray 1991:18). The
length of a computer message is limited to two lines of
text. Electronic mail refers to "extended text that is sent
and received via the computer" (Murray 1991:26). E-mail
messages are stored in each user's file for later access, so
e-mail requires no simultaneous log—on. Computer
conferencing refers to "a facility in which more than two
people can communicate with E-messages, E-mail and
documents, usually for a specific purpose" (Murray 1991:28).

Users of computer conferencing are usually required to log

 

7
on to the facility simultaneously. Forums refer to "E—mail-
type files (usually on one technical topic) with a wide
distribution list to which a recipient can append another
piece of information" (Murray 1991:28). They are very
similar to computer conferencing, except users are not
required to log on simultaneously. Bulletin boards are
"similar to fora except that the topics under discussion are
often more general and the organization less structured"
(Murray 1991:28).

Some communication modes, such as chat, computer
conferencing and computer messages, allow people to interact
in real time, while others are more static in terms of the
response time. The present study will focus on the situated
uses of language in e—mail messages by English as a Second
Language (ESL) students in an academic discussion setting.
Although e-mail may be comparatively more static in nature
than such modes of computer communication as chats, and
therefore less like oral conversation than they are,
politeness was a significant factor influencing the

construction of the participants' e-mail discourse.

J 3 2 : . . H i J' . i I' . . 3

During the late 19705 and early 19808 the first studies
concerning the effects on language and social behavior
changes brought about by the use of different human
communication modalities were conducted. Face-to—face talk

was compared to telephone communication (Reid 1977), and to

8
computer conferencing (Hiltz and Turoff 1978; Hiltz et al.
1980; Hiltz 1984). These studies did find significant
differences in participants' linguistic, attitudinal, and
social behavior. For example, computer conferencing is
believed to be able to nourish the use of a more organized
and homogeneous conversational style (Hiltz and Turoff
1978). It also produces a great number of arguments and
"flaming," a language use with a lot of profanity and
insults, possibly in part due to the reduction or
elimination of the influence of the concern for face (Hiltz
and Turoff 1978; Hiltz et al. 1980; Hiltz 1984). In her
studies of the use of the computer as a linguistic medium,
Baron predicts the possibility of linguistic and social
change driven by technology as well as cross—modal
linguistic influences. She claims that "norms characteristic
of computer mediated communication may change generally
accepted standards for spoken or traditional written
language" (Baron 1984:123). Therefore, the study of a
particular linguistic modality "becomes important not only
in its own right, but with regard to the influence it can

have on the language more generally" (Baron 1984:123).

J 3 3 I I J E J . l' . : _“ i' i
C . I'

Despite the significance of linguistic change in
computer-mediated communication, research on this linguistic

interaction has received little attention. As Baron points

 

9

out, "most analyses of linguistic interaction are based on
the paradigm of two people speaking with one another face-
to—face" (1984:120). Especially, very little research has
been done on the written interaction, either in computer-
mediated communication in general or e—mail in particular,
in terms of how politeness phenomena may apply in a non—
face—to-face environment where participants actively
interact with one another through written texts. Part of
the reason for the lack of research on politeness phenomena
in computer-mediated communication may be due to the basic
assumption that computer-mediated communication may, as
described by Rice and Love, "transmit less of natural
richness and interaction of interpersonal communication than
face-to-face interaction"(l987:87). Therefore, fewer
"natural" (i.e., oral—like) communication behaviors are
exhibited. The typical conclusion from studies comparing
various media with face-to—face interaction (Fowler and
Wackerbarth 1980; Hiltz and Turoff 1978) is that as
available channels decrease from face-to—face to computer
conference interaction, "the media are seen to be
satisfactory for more simple communication tasks, such as
information exchange, but less satisfactory for more
complex, more interpersonally involving communication tasks,
such as getting to know someone or managing conflict"
(Hiemstra 1982:880).

However, the view of computer-mediated communication

lacking appropriate capability for interpersonal

 

10

relationships has been challenged by other researchers who
suggest that computer—mediated communication is not
necessarily completely unemotional (Chesebro 1985; Hiemstra
1982; Meyers 1985; Philips 1982; Reid 1993). For example,
Hiemstra's study (1982) shows that computer—mediated
communication shares much of the same "face—saving" content
with face-to-face communication although there is a shift in
politeness strategies. Reid (1993) also asserts that
Internet Relay Chat, a multi—user synchronous communication
facility that transmits one's typing directly to the monitor
of another person or group of people, has significant
potential for social interaction.

The present study will contribute to this debate by
examining politeness strategies in computer-mediated
communication as compared with those used in oral language

(Brown and Levinson 1987).

J l E . E l E J' . l . I .
i 2 _” i' i 3 . .

We know that language users attempt to establish and
maintain harmony in social relationships in face-to-face
synchronous situations. This study assumes that they will
do the same in an e-mail environment in which full ranges of
paralinguistic and extralinguistic cues as well as
synchronous interactions are not readily available. To meet
the need for harmonious social relationships, the language

users will have to either borrow linguistic strategies used

11

in other communication modes, such as face—to-face
conversations, or design their own innovative strategies in
their e—mail texts. That is, polite behaviors are expected
to be displayed in the interactions among e—mail users in a
way that shows both similarity and individuality of this
unique communication medium in relation to the politeness
strategies found in other communication modes.

As mentioned above, research on linguistic interaction
in written language concerning politeness phenomena has been
very rare. Most of the studies on politeness have concerned
oral conversations. Myers (1989) points out that a decade
after the publication of Brown and Levinson's classic essay
on the pragmatics of politeness (1978), none of the many
studies on the topic of politeness mentioned in the
introduction of the new edition of their book (Brown and
Levinson 1987) deals with written texts. However, the few
researchers who studied linguistic interaction in written
language did find politeness phenomena in their studies.
Analyzing scientific articles, Myers (1989) argues that the
framework of Brown and Levinson's politeness (1978) can be
extended to written texts. For instance, the use of "we" as
a positive politeness strategy to indicate the discipline as
a whole in scientific articles is found to achieve
solidarity while personal attribution can be used as a hedge
on one's claims (Myers 1989). Hagge and Kostelnick's (1989)
study of professional writing shows negative politeness

strategies were used by auditors to meet the complex demands

12

of potentially threatening interactional situations.
Studying 51 peer—review texts written in an academic
setting, Johnson finds that "writers use complimenting
discourse strategies to establish and maintain rapport and
to mitigate both global and specific face-threatening acts"
(1992:51). Hiemstra's study (1982) of politeness strategies
in teleconferencing indicates that concern for face, "the
kernel element in folk notions of politeness" (Brown and
Levinson 1987:62), was strongly evident in the language of
conference although there was a shift to negative politeness
and "bold on record" in computer—mediated communication.
These studies give either quantitative or qualitative
data supporting Brown and Levinson's claim that politeness
is universal. Whether Brown and Levinson's (1987) "face"
concept is satisfactory for the explanation of the polite
behaviors found in this study is one of the main focuses of

the study.

1 5 E J' i I . E . .
Kasper (1990) argues that people need to maintain
relationships and avoid conflicts. People attempt to
maintain "face" in nearly all interactions (Wilson, Kim, and
Meischke 1992). Lakoff (1973), Brown and Levinson (1987),
and Leech (1983) suggest that the maintenance of
interpersonal relationships and harmony can be achieved by

the use of rule-governed and rational politeness strategies.

13

"Politeness" has been conceptualized as strategic
avoidance of social interaction friction (Brown and Levinson
1987; Lakoff 1973; Leech 1983). For example, Lakoff sees
politeness as something "developed in societies in order to
reduce friction in personal interaction" (1975:64). Brown
and Levinson assert that "politeness, like formal diplomatic
protocol, presupposes that potential for aggression as it
seeks to disarm it, and makes possible communication between
potentially aggressive parties" (1987zl). Leech also points
out that politeness is required to "mitigate the intrinsic
discourtesy"(1983:105) of some acts as ordering, asking,

demanding, and begging, etc.

W
W

A crucial concept in the study of politeness is "face."
The most influential attempt to develop this concept appears
in the work of Brown and Levinson (1987). They claim that
the concept of face is derived from Goffman's (1967)
"facework" - tactics designed to avoid embarrassment or
humiliation that may be caused by communicative acts.

Goffman defines face as "the positive social value a
person effectively claims for himself by the line others
assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an
image of self delineated in terms of approved social
attributes" (1967:5). He claims that people have "self—

respect" and "just as the member of any group is expected to

 

14

have self-respect, so also he is expected to sustain a
standard of considerateness: he is expected to go to
certain lengths to save the feelings and the face of others
present..." (Goffman 1967:10). As a result of this
considerateness, he further claims, "the person tends to
conduct himself during an encounter so as to maintain both
his own face and the face of other participants" (Goffman
1967:11).

Building on a Model Person (MP) who is assumed to
possess rationality and face, Brown and Levinson (1987)
construct a pan-cultural politeness theory that is claimed
to derive from Goffman's (1967) concept of "face" and from
the English folk term. They assume that all competent adult
members of a society have "face," the public self—image one
wants to claim for himself, and are mutually aware of
others' similar face wants. This public self-image has two
related aspects of "face" that are desired by every
competent adult: negative face and positive face.

(a) negative face: the basic claim to

territories, personal preserves, rights to non-

distraction - i.e. to freedom of action and

freedom from imposition

(b) 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

(Brown and Levinson 1987:61)

Brown and Levinson (1987) assert that face requires

constant attention in interaction because it is "something

that is emotionally invested, and that can be lost,

 

15
maintained, or enhanced" (1987:61). Since face is
vulnerable and easily subject to loss and damage and
everyone has mutual knowledge of each other's face wants, it
is in everyone's best interest to cooperate in order to
mutually maintain each other's faces. For instance, if
one's face is threatened, one will be expected to defend
one's own face and this defense will in turn threaten the
face of others. In other words, every member of a society
understands the desirability and vulnerability of face and
wants to attend to and maintain others' face wants in order
to maintain his or her own.

Furthermore, every competent adult human being of a
society is assumed to be a rational agent, who is capable of
applying a specific mode of reasoning, "which guarantees
inferences from ends or goals to means that will satisfy
those ends"(1987:64). Hence, linguistic or non-linguistic
devices will normally be warranted in a communicative
interaction where there is a face want needed to be taken
care of. Basically "face" is conceptualized as basic human
wants, which are known to every other member and are
satisfied by others' rational acts. In short, the two
aspects of face are characterized as (1) negative face: a
person's want of actions being unimpeded by others and (2)
positive face: a person's want of being desirable to at

least some others.

 

 

16

WW

Brown and Levinson (1987) claim that there are certain
kinds of communicative acts that intrinsically threaten
face, "namely those acts that by their nature run contrary
to the face wants of the addressee and/or of the
speaker"(1987:65). Almost all acts are seen as "face—
threatening acts" (FTAs) that may either threaten the
positive or negative face wants of the addressees or
speakers. Some apparently innocuous communicative acts are
viewed as face-threatening. For instance, offers, promises,
compliments, and expressions of admiration are seen as acts
that threaten the addressee's (H's) negative-face want while
criticism, disagreements, insults, and challenges threaten I
the positive—face want of H. Expressions of thanks,
acceptance of H's thanks or apologies are seen as acts that
threaten the negative face of speaker while apologies, or
acceptance of a compliment may damage S's positive face.

Brown and Levinson assume that there are three
sociological variables that affect the assessment of the
seriousness of an FTA in many and perhaps all cultures: the
social distance (D) of speaker and addressee, the relative
power (P) of speaker and addressee, and the absolute ranking
(R) of impositions in the particular culture. The actors in
a society have mutual knowledge of the assumed values of
these variables. Actor will draw upon mutual understanding

of the sociological variables to assess the seriousness of

an FTA. In general, the face threat of a communicative act

 

17
becomes greater in situations where (1) there is greater
social distance between a speaker and an addressee, (2)
greater power or status of the addressee relative to the
speaker, and (3) greater imposition posed. These three
variables are context—dependent and have to be allowed for
contextual reclassification to adjust th: assignments in
certain circumstance (1987:78). The weightiness of an FTA
can be calculated by summing up these three variables
regardless of whether it is the speaker's or addressee's

face that is threatened.

1 i 3 S . E E . EIE

Because of the vulnerability of face, "any rational
agent will seek to avoid these face—threatening acts, or
will employ certain strategies to minimize the threat"(Brown
and Levinson 1987:68). In doing an act, a person will have
to consider the weightings of three wants:

(a) the want to communicate the content of FTA.x,

(b) the want to be efficient or urgent, and (c)

the want to maintain H's face to any degree.

Unless (b) is greater than (c), S will want to

minimize the threat of his FTA (1987:68).

There are several possible strategies for doing FTAs
(see Figure 1). There are five sets of strategies for doing
FTAs, whose seriousness determines the choice of strategies.
The uses of higher—numbered strategies will generally be
associated with FTAs that are more serious in nature. Brown

and Levinson further assert that the assumptions described

above are mutually known to all MP5. MP9 "will not choose a

h

18

Circumstances determining
choice of strategy:

lesser

A

1. without redressive action, baldly

/

////on record 2.positive politeness

Do the FTA with redressive action '
4.off record \\\\3.negative politeness

5. Don't do the FTA

Estimation of risk
of face loss

 

‘7

Greater

Figure 1: Possible strategies for doing FTAs
.(Brown and Levinson 1987:60)

 

19
strategy less risky than necessary, as this may be seen as
an indication that the FTA is more threatening than it
actually is" (Brown and Levinson 1987260). In other words,
people will not use a mitigation appropriate for a higher-
numbered strategy for an FTA of lesser face risk so that the
FTA will not be misunderstood as more threatening than it
actually is. Hence a speaker may use a bald on-record
strategy for an FTA of minimum face risk, a positive
politeness for a small FTA, a negative politeness for an FTA
of a higher face risk, and an off-record strategy for one
that is even higher in face risk. Finally, if an act
seriously threatens the face of H, a speaker may decide not
to do the FTA at all.

To be more specific, a speaker can choose to do an FTA
baldly without any redressive action if the speaker does not
fear retribution from the addressee when doing an FTA. For
example, a speaker who wants someone to close the window may
simply give that addressee a directive: "Close the window!".

Although bald on record leads to communicative
efficiency, politeness is assumed to be the major source of
deviation from such rational efficiency (Brown and Levinson
1987). They point out that bald on record strategies are in
conformity with Grice's Maxims (Grice 1975). Grice has
noticed that conversation is based on assumptions, or
maxims, about the willingness of cooperation and rationality

of others in conversation. These Maxims are conversational

20
principles serving for guidelines for achieving maximally
efficient communication. They can be outlined as follow:

Maxim of Quality: Be non—spurious (speak the

truth, be sincere).
Maxims of Quantity: (a) Don't say less than is
required.
(b) Don't say more than is
required.
Maxim of Relevance: Be relevant.
Maxim of Manner: Be perspicuous; avoid ambiguity
and obscurity.

These Maxims together constitute the "co—operative
principle," which underlines every conversational exchange.
Interactants will depend on the maxims to convey and infer
each other's communicative intents. In daily conversation,
interactants routinely violate the maxims and yet are able
to communicate successfully. When a violation of a specific
maxim occurs, their assumption of others' co-operative
intents leads them to search for meaning that is beyond what
is said and hence extra meaning can be derived from that
violation. The attention to the facework by the
interactants is believed to be the major source of the
violation of Grice's Maxims (Brown and Levinson 1987).
People will often sacrifice communication efficiency in
order to maintain each other's "face."

To be polite, a speaker may want to employ extra

efforts for any communicative acts that threaten H's face.

2 1
He can select to do an FTA with redressive actions, which
attend to the two aspects of face wants of the addressee.
Redressive action, by Brown and Levinson, means the action
that :

attempts to counteract the potential face damage

of the FTA by doing it in such a way, or with such

modifications or additions, that indicate clearly

that no such face threat is intended or desired,

and that S in general recognizes H's face wants

and himself wants them to be achieved." (1987:69-

70).

There are two forms of redressive actions: those stress
positive or negative face wants. Brown and Levinson define
that "positive politeness is oriented toward the positive
face of H, the positive self-image that he claims for
himself," and "negative politeness, on the other hand, is
oriented mainly toward partially satisfying (redressing) H's
negative face, his basic want to maintain claims of
territory and self-determination" (1987:70). In other
words, positive politeness is the redressive action that
satisfies H's want of his want being "ratified, understood,
approved of, liked or admired" (1987:62) and negative
politeness is one that satisfies H's want of his freedom of
action being unimpeded. Negative politeness is, as Brown
and Levinson point out:

essentially avoidance-based, and realizations of

negative-politeness strategies consist in

assurances that the speaker recognizes and

respects the addressee's negative—face wants and

will not ... interfere with the addressee's
freedom of action (1987:70).

22

The linguistic or non-linguistic strategies constructed
to satisfy H's positive face want are therefore termed as
positive politeness strategies and those for H's negative
face want negative politeness strategies. A speaker may use
positive politeness strategies that display familiarity,
attentiveness, or affiliation to satisfy the positive-face
wants of H in order to either soften an FTA or to simply
show friendliness and warmth to H. A speaker may also
choose to use negative politeness strategies that display
respect, distance, self—effacement, formality and restraint
to satisfy the negative-face wants of H in order to reduce
the illocutionary force of an FTA. Therefore, a speaker who
wants the window closed may choose to satisfy H's positive-
face want by saying: "Hey buddy, shut the window for me,
will ya?" or turn to H's negative—face want by saying: "Will
it be possible to trouble you to close the window for me?
Thank you!"

A speaker can further go "off record" when doing an FTA
of very high face risk. Doing an FTA off record is to do it
in such a way that more than one single unambiguous
intention can be attributed to the act so that the actor of
that act can't be held responsible to one particular intent.
For example, a speaker who wants the addressee sitting
beside the window to close it may choose to give the
addressee a hint rather than an on-record request in order
not to be seen too imposing. Therefore, utterance like

"It's kind of chilly here, isn't it?" will serve the goal.

 

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23
By leaving the freedom of the interpretation of the
utterance to the addressee, the speaker will not be held
responsible for the imposition and may at the same time
lessen the risk to damage the faces of both interlocutors.
If the off—record request is picked up and granted by the
addressee, he will be given credit for being generous or
helpful. It may serve as a safety device to save the
positive face of the speaker if the addressee chooses to
ignore the request.

Finally if an FTA is too strong, a speaker may choose
not to do it at all to avoid the face risk. Thus a speaker
who wants the window shut may choose to say nothing to the
addressee or he may chooses to close it by himself.

In short, the choice of a particular strategy is
determined by the seriousness of an FTA, whose assessment is
closely related to the three sociological variables: D, P,
and R. A simple request to have a window shut may be done
by a positive politeness strategy between friends because
the face risk is considered to be small. The same request
may be regarded as more threatening and hence is delivered
off-record when the two interactants have great social
distance or there is greater power or status of the

addressee relative to the speaker.

I 5 l H' 1. J E E J' i .
In their framework of politeness, Brown and Levinson

construct hierarchies of strategies with the highest level

A.

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24
of strategies representing the wants or ends of a speaker,
the lower level strategies as the more specific wants and
the lowest level strategies the means that would achieve the
ends. Those strategies at the highest level were referred
to as "super—strategies" (bald on record, positive
politeness, negative politeness, off record, and avoid doing
FTA) and the linguistic means to realize the highest ends as
"output strategies."

The politeness strategies are hierarchically
constructed and demonstrated with the relational reasoning
and detailed examples of "output strategies" elaborated by
Brown and Levinson (1987). Positive politeness output
strategies can be realized, for example, by S's notice,
attention to H (e.g., "Goodness, you cut your hair!"); S's
use of in-group identity markers ("Come here, buddy.");

being optimistic ("You'll loan me 20 bucks for the movie,

won't you?"); including both 8 and H in the activity ("Let's
turn on the TV, eh?"), and giving or asking for reasons
("Why don't we go to the seashore!"). The negative

politeness strategies are realized, for instance, by being
conventionally indirect (e.g., "Can you please pass the
salt?"); hedges ("I guess that Harry is coming."); being
pessimistic ("You wouldn't by any chance be able to do that
for me, would you?"); minimizing the imposition ("I just
want to ask you if I can borrow a little paper."); giving
deference ("Excuse me, sir, but would you mind if I close

the window?"); apologizing ("I'm sorry to bother you."); or

 

VD?
..u

 

Q
It”

a...

 

"

Q‘.‘

‘0. ~

25

impersonalizing S and H ("It is regretted that it
happened."). Off record strategies may be realized, for
example, by giving hint (e.g., "It's cold in here.");
understatement ("That's somewhat amazing."); overstatement
("You never do the washing up."); using rhetorical questions
("How was I to know?"), or being vague ("Looks like someone
may have had too much to drink.").

Table 1 lists all the output strategies mentioned by
Brown and Levinson (1987) with constructed examples (see

Table 1).

l 1 : . .. E l
l 2 l E . J i J l' E E 1'

As described above, it is very clear that Brown and
Levinson's politeness theory is centered around the concept
of desire to protect and enhance face and actions that
satisfy those wants. In other words, "face" want is the
most fundamental element of their theory. Since "face want"
implies some needs to meet, being polite is to be able to
meet the face want of the addressee. Such a view of face
and politeness is basically functional and instrumental, as
Gu (1990) argues, because it holds a means—to—end relation
between face and politeness strategy. It is understandable
that most of Brown and Levinson's discussion of politeness
is about politeness being realized by the construction of
linguistic strategies as means to satisfy the desire to

enhance face.

26

Table 1: Positive Politeness, Negative Politeness, and Off
Record Strategies

 

Positive politeness strategies

1. Notice, attend to H: "What a beautiful dress you have!"

2. Exaggerate: "Is this your drawing? How absolutely marvelous!"
3. Intensify interest to H: Use vivid present tense or exaggerate
4. Use in-group identity markers: "There you go, honey."

5. Seek agreement: Talk about safe topics

6. Avoid disagreement: "I agree with you, but I also think ..."
7 Presuppose/raise/assert common ground, gossip, small talk: "I
have been struggling with this problem for a while, you know."
8. Joke: "My doctor told me to avoid cakes unless they are
delicious." (S is on a diet.)

9. Assert or presuppose S's knowledge of and concern for H's
wants: "I know you don't care for comedies, but this one is
different."

10. Offer, promise: "I'll stop by soon, I promise."

11. Be optimistic: "You'll call us, won't you?"

12. Include both S and H in the activity (inclusive we): "Let's
begin the demonstration."

13. Give (or ask for) reasons: "Why don't we do it now?"

14. Assume or assert reciprocity: "I will wash the dishes if you
take the garbage out for me."

15. Give gifts to H (goods, sympathy, understanding, cooperation)

Negative politeness strategies

1. Be conventionally indirect: "Can you pass the salad, please?"
2. Question (tag), hedge: "I think the store's closed."

3. Be pessimistic: "I don't suppose there'd be any chance you
have $50 with you now."

4. Minimize the imposition: "Can I borrow your pen for a minute?"
5. Give deference: "I am a little slow. Can you show me how to do
that again?

6. Apologize: "I'm sorry to bother you with this."

7. Impersonalize S and H: "It would be appreciated if the seat
belt is fastened at this moment."

8. State the FTA as a general rule: "Drinking alcohol beyond this
line is prohibited."

9. Nominalize: "It is our regret that we cannot permit your
application this time."

10.Go on record as incurring a debt, or as not indebting H: "I'd
be eternally grateful if you would help me with this."

 

27

Table 1 (cont'd)

Off record strategies

1. Give hints: "Kind of chilly here, isn't it?" (Close the
window!)

2. Give association clues: "Are you going home now?" (Give me a
ride?)

3. Presuppose: "I mowed the lawn again today." (You were supposed
to do it this time.)

4. Understate: "It looks quite interesting." (It's nothing
special.)

5. Overstate: "There are hundreds of traffic lights." (Sorry for
being late.)

6. Use tautologies: "Business is business." (Can't give you
discount.)

7. Use contradictions: "I'm OK and not OK." (I'm not quite all
right in some way.)

8. Be ironic: "He's a real smart guy." (He's so stupid.)

9. Use metaphors: "He's a real fish." (He swims like a fish.)
10. Use rhetorical questions: "What can I say?" (Nothing to say.)

11. Be ambiguous: "He's a giant." (He's tall and fat.)

12. Be vague: "Someone is hungry." (The little kid is hungry.)
13. Over-generalize: "Men sometimes cook." (I cook.)

14. Displace H: S talks as if H is not the target for his FTA.
15. Be incomplete, use ellipsis: "Well, if you insist..." (I will

do it if you insist.)

 

Note: Strategies derived from Brown and Levinson (1987) with
constructed examples

28

However, such a goal—oriented politeness concept has
been under serious challenge and criticism from scholars of
the non-western world. Gu (1990) argues that Brown and
Levinson's politeness theory fails to explain why inviting,
offering, and promising in Chinese, "under ordinary
circumstances, will not be considered as threatening H's
negative face, i.e. impeding H's freedom" (1990:242). The
failure to see the normative aspect of politeness, Gu points
out, will be a serious oversight for Brown and Levinson's
construction of politeness theory because "politeness is a
phenomenon belonging to the level of society, which endorses
its normative constraints on each individual" (1990:242).
Gu further argues that "in Chinese context, politeness
exercises its normative function in constraining individual
speech acts as well as the sequence of talk exchanges"
(1990:242). It is clear that politeness is conceptualized
differently by people from different cultures.

Brown and Levinson's notion of politeness as face
maintenance is also under criticism from Japanese scholars
such as Ide (1989) and Matsumoto (1989), who suggest the
need to incorporate 'discernment'(Hill et al. 1986), "the
speaker's use of polite expressions according to social
conventions rather than interactional strategy" (Ide,
1989:223), in the attempt to establish a politeness theory.
These views of politeness as a concept beyond the level of
individual face want by the non-western scholars provide

alternatives to Brown and Levinson's theory as the universal

29
framework for politeness phenomena. For example, honorifics
in Japanese are used where no face want is involved. The
use of honorifics "can be simply socio—pragmatic concord,
which operates just as automatically as grammatical concord,
independent of the speaker's rational intention" (Matsumoto,
1989:242). Matsumoto further emphasizes that "no utterance
in Japanese can be neutral with respect to the social
context" (1989:208). Unless every single utterance is
counted as intrinsically face—threatening, Brown and
Levinson's theory can't explain, Matsumoto argues, why
honorifics are required to be used by strangers in a simple
utterance like "Today is Saturday" in Japanese. Politeness
in Japanese is rooted in the understanding of "the situation
and of the relation among the conversational participants
and must indicate that understanding by the choice of
appropriate honorifics and speech level" (1989:218).

These Chinese and Japanese scholars provide another
angle viewing politeness phenomena. I believe that the
politeness phenomena observed by Gu (1990), Ide (1989),
Matsumoto (1989), and Hill et al. (1986) in Asian societies
would not be completely exclusive to prevent the people in
those society from the use of face—based politeness
strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987). Although
the normative aspects of politeness were observed in the
study, Gu's critique will only be used to differentiate the
instrumental mitigating strategies from the normative

application of politeness. This study will focus on the

30
so-called functional and instrumental aspects of politeness

phenomena.

1 1 2 H JI'E . 1. l E l' . E E J'
SLIBLSQY

Brown and Levinson's dichotomous construction of
politeness also raises some doubts from Craig, Tracy, and
Spisak (1986), who found that the identification of
politeness strategies in messages was extremely difficult.
Not only can different strategies co-occur in the same
message, but they also can be realized simultaneously in the
same language. The potential for multifunctionality and the
ambiguity of output strategies contribute to both the
richness of discourse and possibilities for
misunderstanding. Craig et al. (1986) demonstrated that no
strict classificatory system can be established for output
strategies by an analysis because the output strategies "are
not mutually exclusive and exhaustive, but instead are
open-ended lists with considerable overlap in meaning among
the members of each list and even to some extent, between
list" (1986:446). For example, "I was wondering" can be
counted as verbal hedge (negative politeness strategy 2), as
conventional indirectness (negative politeness strategy 1),
as point-of—view distancing (negative politeness
strategy 7), and perhaps as hedging of opinions (positive
politeness strategy 6). The phrase "do me a favor" further

provides another vivid illustration of multifunctionality in

31

requests. While "do me a favor" suggests the use of
negative politeness strategy 6 (to apologize by admitting
the impingement), it may also function as positive
politeness, to suggest a friendly relationship between S and
H such that reciprocal favors might be expected. Therefore,
friends may use "do me a favor" as a kind of apology that is
appropriate to their symmetrical relationships, which are
characterized by the reciprocal doing of favors.

Brown and Levinson make two kinds of distinction of
FTAs. They first make a distinction "between acts that

threaten negative face and those that threaten positive

face....Secondly, we may distinguish between acts that
primarily threaten H's face ... and those that threaten
primarily S's face" (1987:65). Although Brown and Levinson

(1987) did realize their ways of classifying FTAs "give rise
to a four-way grid which offers the possibility of cross—
classifying" at least some of the FTAs they mentioned
(1987:68), their focus is mainly on the dichotomous aspect
of politeness. Other than saying "such a cross—
clarification has a complex relation to the ways in which
FTAs are handled" (1987:68) and that "many FTAs fit into
more than one category, so that redressive action may be
addressed to any potential aspect of the face threat, not
necessarily just the most relevant one(s)" (1987:286), Brown
and Levinson did not elaborate on the cross—classification
phenomena of politeness. Brown and Levinson's (1987) focus

On the dichotomous perspectives of politeness seems to be

 

32

responsible for their failure to give enough emphasis on and
satisfactory explanation of the cross—classification and
ambiguity of politeness observed by Craig et al. (1986).

Brown and Levinson (1987) assert that the overlap in
the classification of FTAs occurs because some FTAs
intrinsically threaten both negative and positive face
(e.g., complaints, interruptions, threats, requests for
personal information, etc.). Actually many, perhaps most,
FTAs can threaten both face wants. For instance, directives
are found to threaten both the positive and negative face
wants of the addressee (Baxter 1984; Wilson et al. 1991).
Many of the FTAs found in my study can be categorized to
more than one single classification. The following two
excerpts will illustrate this point.

Excerpt 1 (Kenji disagreed with the rest of the group
on Prohibition) [Emphasis is indicated by underlining]

First of all, let's talk_frankly_ngt those "too mush
drinking would cause bad effect to all of us," nor
"Alocoholic is major problem among teens." Let's stop

' ' ' ' . Sure I'm doing
this, of course, to get a good grade, but using this
opportunity, I believe, we can talk something more
serious or fun.

Here, Kenji is the only one in his group who is against
Prohibition while the rest agree on it. After receiving
several related e-mail discussions on this issue, Kenji gave
a pretty sharp criticism to what he perceived as
hypocritical arguments from his teammates. The FTAs "talk
frankly not..." and "stop those bullshit superficial

conversation" threaten both the "negative" face and the

33

"positive" face of his teammates simultaneously because they
were displayed both as directives and criticisms. While
directives primarily threaten the negative face of H,
criticisms would threaten the positive face.

Excerpt 2 (Kenji, complaining about his make-up
assignment)

This time I'll respond to the topic for this week, and
also I'd like to introduce myself. I kniow that it must

be boring to you, but Wham. I've

gotta do this to make up my E- mail conversation I
missed before mid-term exam. Thank you!

In Excerpt 2, Kenji's apology carried an overtone of
indirect complaint/criticism to the instructor's insistence
on Kenji's doing make-up assignment. According to Brown and
Levinson (1987), this apology would be an act that
threatened Kenji's own "positive" face if it was a genuine
one. However, Kenji's skillful manipulation of a redressive
action (apology) as an FTA (complaint/criticism) has made it
an act threatening both the instructor's "positive" face and
his teammates' "negative" face while he at the same time
appeared to have threatened his own "positive" face. This
kind of FTA threatens both "positive" and "negative" face of
all three different parties.

As demonstrated above, many FTAs in the data in this
study intrinsically threaten both negative and positive
face. Not only may an FTA threaten both faces, a linguistic
realization of politeness may also often be oriented toward

more than one type of face want. Brown and Levinson (1987)

34

talked very little about this complicated cross-
classification politeness phenomena. For example, their
illustrative examples and systematic introduction of their
hierarchical structures are devoted to the verification of
the dichotomous view of politeness rather than the cross—
classifying nature of politeness.

At the end of their introduction of various politeness
strategies, Brown and Levinson (1987) did admit that there
is a hybrid strategy somewhere in between positive and
negative politeness, which is produced as the mixture of
elements from both strategies in a given utterance; however,
they gave very few examples and no accounts at all of why
the hybrid strategy may exist in contrast to their
dichotomized conceptualization of politeness. They claim:

The mixture of elements deriving from positive-

and negative-politeness strategies in a given

utterance may simply produce a kind of hybrid

strategy somewhere in between the two. When token
tag questions are tacked on to a presumptuous
positively polite request, for example, or when
hedges (e.g. like, sort of) are used to render

more vague the expression of an extreme positive—

politeness opinion, the results are basically

still positive-politeness strategies, even though

they make use of essentially negative—politeness

techniques to soften the presumption. (1987:230)

As can be seen, Brown and Levinson give no explanation
of why a token tag question or hedge has to be regarded as
negative-politeness techniques even though they are viewed

basically as positive-politeness strategies. Brown and

Levinson's basic assumption of the dichotomous nature of

35

politeness as redressive actions giving "face" to the

addressees still remains (cf. Section 5.2 for details).

IEEJ' iII"'

Since the publication of Brown and Levinson's (1978)
formulation of their theory of politeness, we begin to see
an increasing interest in the study of politeness phenomena
or strategies in relation to the inquiry of politeness
universals (Ide 1989; Janney and Arndt 1993; Matsumoto 1989;
Nwoye 1992), medical encounters (Aronsson and
Sétterlund-Larsson 1987), cross-cultural contrast (Chen
1993; Garcia 1989a, 1989b; Nash 1983; Sifianou 1993), gender
issues (Holmes 1989; Johnstone and Katheleen 1992), second
language discourse (Johnson 1989; Scarcella and Brunak
1989), cultures other than Western ones (Gu 1990; Mills
1992), written text (Johnson 1989; 1992; Johnstone and
Katheleen 1992; Maier 1992; Myers 1989), and religion
(Pearson 1987; 1988).

Politeness phenomena have often been studied with a
focus on mitigation. However, these studies have not
distinguished between politeness and mitigation (Aronsson
and Satterlund-Larsson 1987; Brown 1993; Pearson 1987;
Johnstone 1992; House and Kasper 1981; Craig et al. 1986).
These researchers appear to regard the concept of politeness
as the same as or similar to the strategic linguistic usages
for the purpose of reducing interaction friction. They do

not distinguish between a cultural phenomenon (politeness)

36

and an intentional and functional construction (mitigation).
I suggest that the reason for this lack of differentiation
is closely related to the basic "face" notion proposed by
Goffman (1967), and Brown and Levinson (1987). Since
"face," the basic human wants, is vulnerable to almost all
communicative acts, any attempt to reduce the potential
damage to "face" is considered as polite. The conception of
"face" as wants, "which every member knows every other
member desires, and which in general it is in the interests
of every member to partially satisfy" (Brown and Levinson
1987:62) suggests that politeness contains optional
individual values that may or may not be subscribed to by
members of a society, according to their individual goals in
the interactions. In other words, whether one is polite or
not depends mostly on whether one intends to satisfy the
"face" wants of the addressee in an FTA rather than to
follow a particular social norm. For example, in American
society whether and how someone would address a new
acquaintance with a polite address term in an ordinary
encounter depends on his discourse goal at the moment of
interaction. The availability of options in address terms
provides a speaker with strategic linguistic resources to
satisfy the "face" wants of the addressee in any potentially
face-threatening interaction. If the speaker wants to be
polite in order to soften an FTA, he may select a particular
address term (e.g., first name or respectful address term)

to satisfy either the positive or negative "face" wants of

37

the addressee. In Chinese society, the address term to
others is more or less pre-determined as a social norm and
hence loses its strategic power. The view of individual
"face" as basic human wants needed to be satisfied in a
communicative interaction would naturally follow that
politeness is mostly acts that mitigate the threats to
"face."

When Brown and Levinson's framework of politeness is
applied to the data collected from non-western societies,
where society members' behaviors are heavily constrained and
regulated by the societal norms, their theory may fail to
entirely interpret the polite behaviors exhibited. In non-
western societies the role of societal constraints and
optional individual values may differ from their role in
western societies. As Gu (1990) suggests, politeness
phenomena can consist of societally-prescribed behavior
which is not the same as an individual's attempts at
mitigation.

Mitigation, Fraser (1980) indicates, can't be treated
conceptually the same as politeness. He argues:

While mitigation involves a reduction in the

unwelcome effect of what is done, politeness, on

the other hand, depends on the extent to which the

speaker has acted appropriately in that context

(1980:343).

Mitigation involves the use of intentional linguistic
or non—linguistic actions for the purpose of reducing or

softening the unwelcome effects caused by the speaker in

order to achieve a certain goal (e.g., expressing

38

disagreements, or asking for a loan). It is goal—oriented
because the use of mitigation depends on an individual's
intentional designs of an action for a particular purpose.
It is also hearer-oriented since there would be no need for
the speaker to mitigate his or her own actions to achieve a
goal when the speaker is the only participant in the event.

Mitigation differs from politeness in that the former
can often be conceptualized as goal-oriented and functional
while the latter often incorporates the functional, or
instrumental, dimensions with its normative ones. On the
one hand, being polite is not equal to simply mitigating a
speech act. On the other hand, mitigating a speech act
usually involves the expression of being polite. Since all
FTAs threaten the face of the participants and cause
unwelcome effects in a face-oriented culture, it is only
natural for many scholars from such a culture to perceive
mitigating strategies as politeness strategies and see
mitigation as politeness.

One goal of the present study is to examine how
participants establish and maintain their social
relationships with politeness in an electronic environment
where they can't face one another and yet often become
involved in arguments and disagreements. In Brown and
Levinson's (1987) theory, disagreement is counted as an
intrinsic face-threatening act that threaten the addressee's
positive face want because the speaker indicates that he

thinks hearer is "wrong or misguided or unreasonable about

39

some issue, such wrongness being associated with
disapproval" (1987:66). The use of linguistic devices for
the establishment and maintenance of social relationships
among participants when disagreeing seems to inevitably fall
into Brown and Levinson's category of politeness principles.
However, mitigation on disagreement can't be regarded as
exactly equivalent to being polite because there may be
societal groups, or situated uses of language, in which
disagreement is expected and is not perceived as an FTA. It
would be quite possible for a speaker, then, to disagree
with others and still be perceived as being polite.
Researchers investigating politeness in disagreement may
need to go beyond the face-want scope of Brown and
Levinson's theory and carefully distinguish what may count
as mitigating strategies--the intentional, means-to-end
linguistic constructions--from what may count as polite

behaviors.

J 5 El] 1' SI 3 E l E . S l E I
Although tens of thousands of people use e-mail for
their daily communication, surprisingly there has not been
any study of written interactions in e—mail concerning the
polite behaviors of the users. While there may be
differences between the ways people interact with one
another using different linguistic channels, the
interactions in written languages are no less complicated

than those in the oral language. For example, in the speech

40

event this study investigates, language participants need to
analyze the limitations of computers as the medium of
communication. They further need to analyze, even when
being unable to see their co-participants face-to-face, the
social order, the sequence of speaking turn, and the
backgrounds of the interlocutors before interactions, speech
activities, or genres can be constructed appropriately in
the speech event. Participants in written interactions will
have to assess what the conversational analysts describe as
the orderliness of talk displayed in the sequential
conversational organization. For the interactions, whether
in face-to—face situations or not, to be successfully
coordinated in a way that is meaningful to the participants,
language users have to go beyond the isolated linguistic
sentences to make sense from the continuous sequences of
talk embedded within a context. In other words, the
successful linguistic interactions, whether oral or written,
suggest the recognition and understanding of the
"orderliness" in the sequential organization of a discourse
(Schegloff 1973). How participants interpret the prior talk
can be scrutinized in their subsequent utterances because
the sequential organization of conversation "is a systematic
consequence of the turn-taking organization of conversation
that it obliges its participants to display to each other,
in a turn's talk, their understanding of other turns' talk"

(Sacks et al. 1974:728).

41

Other than the sequential organization of the
discourse, the participant will have to consider language
use within a specific context in reaching an interpretation
of the speech event. As Heritage points out:

A speaker's action is context-shaped in that its

contribution to an on-going sequence of actions

cannot adequately be understood except by

reference to the context--including, especially,

the immediately preceding configuration of

actions--in which it participates. This

contextualization of utterances is a major, and

unavoidable, procedure which hearers use and rely

on to interpret conversational contributions and

it is also something which speakers pervasively

attend to in the design of what they say

(1984:242).

The written interactions of the e-mail users are also
subject to these dynamic contextual changes, even though the
immediacy in the preceding configuration of actions is not
readily available. However, the exclusion of other
important contextual factors, such as role relationships,
social group membership, formality of the situation, and the
like, is where the criticism arises (Pearson 1987).

Duranti argues that language users "display a concern
for constructing a universe of discourse that would be
linked to other domains of interaction, through other media
(e.g., face-to-face interaction), and to other aspects of
the social identity of the parties involved" (1986:64). If
we give exclusive attention to the sequential organization
of the discourse, we cannot explain how language users

achieve their "discourse continuity," which very often

involves the domain of social relationships as well as that

42

of the informational exchanges. The situated language use
among participants in e-mail discussions needs to be
investigated in a broad context, in which the immediate
prior and subsequent talks of a particular interaction, the
sequential relationships between successive e-mails among
participants and by one particular person, the role
relationships in the speech event, group organization,
familiarity among the participants, and formality of the
situation are all significant factors for scrutiny.
Therefore, there is a need for an ethnographic study of the
speech event under inquiry because such a standpoint would
provide richness of analytic context.

It is a fundamental end of ethnographic methodology
that the data should be naturally occurring. The data
collected in the present study occurred naturally; they were
part of students' assignment in their ESL reading class.
Students would have generated the e-mail communications
whether or not the research took place. These data
contribute to the study of the situated uses of language in
discussions among students. With the help of actual
observations of classroom activities and the interviews of
the participants, as detailed in chapter two and three, this
study will be able to examine the various small language
activities as part of a larger one of disagreement.

This study in general investigates the emerging speech
event of students' discussion through electronic mail and in

particular examines the linguistic devices peOple employ to

43

maintain their relationships when arguments and
disagreements are exhibited. In particular, the present
study examines the unique realization of mitigation in
computer-mediated communication. These analyses are
conducted within a theory of politeness that is informed by
cross-cultural sociolinguistic study.

In this chapter, I have introduced the purposes and
reasons for studying politeness in e-mail discourse as an
emerging language event. Communication media are believed
to have effects on people's linguistic behaviors. As
computer-mediated communication becomes popular, written
interactions have rapidly increased. Studying politeness in
written language becomes feasible. Some researchers argue
that computer—mediated communication is capable of carrying
interpersonal relationships while others hold the
contradictory claims. The present study will examine
politeness strategies in e-mail discourse and contribute to
this debate.

This chapter further discussed Brown and Levinson's
(1987) politeness theory and the criticisms to their theory.
Distinction between politeness and mitigation was made in
order to interpret some of the politeness phenomena
occurring in the data. This study will analyze politeness
in e-mail discourse employing Brown and Levinson's
politeness theory and framework as the basis to verify and
challenge their work. Finally the significance of

ethnographic methodology in the study was pointed out.

 

44
Chapter two will discuss research methodology, the
backgrounds of the participants, and the procedures of data

collection.

CHAPTER TWO

METHODOLOGY

2.._1_Dat.a_(:o.llec.tion

Chapter two specifies the participant structure of the
group discussions. It also explains how interviews and
tape-recordings were used to help interpret the data. The
data collected for this study include 186 e-mail messages,
42 hours of participant observation and 32 audio tape-
recorded interviews with participants. All data were
collected at the campus of a large Midwestern university in

the United States.

2 J J E- 'J E' . l I] :1
In the Spring of 1994, I attended an English as a
Second Language (Reading 400A) class as a participant
observer at a large Midwestern university in the United
States. One of the primary goals of Reading 400A was to
enhance and develop students' comprehension ability by
small-group discussions in which the course materials,
students' own understanding of the materials, and their
interactions with other group members were integrated and
presented in written language. Small group discussions took

place both in classroom and, through e-mail, outside of the

45

46

classroom. While students were randomly grouped for in-
classroom discussions, they were assigned to a particular
group of students for the out-of-classroom discussions. The
basic purpose of choosing e-mail as the medium for group
discussions outside the classroom was to provide students
with maximum opportunities to actually read. Students had
to read both the assigned reading materials, and also every
message from members of their group in order to be able to
fully participate in the e-mail discussions. In other
words, this class aimed to improve the reading ability of
the students by assigning tasks that depended on actual
reading.

This class met for 80 minutes, twice weekly, for 16
weeks. Outside of class, each student was required to
contribute to the e-mail discussion by writing down his/her
own thoughts, the understanding of the reading materials and
other group members' responses to the discussion at least
once each week using e-mail as the medium. Each student was
assigned a particular day of the week.

The assigned readings and most of the discussion topics
were determined and scheduled by the instructor. However,
in some weeks students were given options to decide the
topics that were most desirable for their own interest in
their group discussion. Usually the discussion topics were
closely related to the students' current reading schedules.
Those topics varied, ranging from highly controversial ones,

such as abortion and euthanasia, to less controversial ones,

47

such as recycling problems or ways to improve reading

ability.

2 I 2 I] E . . I

Fifteen international students from six different
countries or areas participated in the study. Six of the
participants were female and nine of them were male; four
were graduate students and eleven were undergraduates.
Students' ages ranged from late teens to late twenties at
the time the study was conducted. Many of the students were
taking one or more additional English for Academic Purposes
(EAP) courses in speaking, listening, writing, or grammar.
Some students were acquainted with one another before
entering Reading 400A. According to the instructor of the
course, students' TOEFL score equivalents ranged from 515 to
550. The majors of the participants cover several fields of
study: business, social science, medicine, food science,
computer science, mechanical engineering, mathematics,
nursing, and English. Most of the students were also taking
one or more academic courses concurrently with Reading 400A.

While most of the participants (73% or 11 out of 15)
had used a computer before the study, only one third (5) of
the participants had the experience of using e-mail. These
five students had used computers for a short period (three
to five months) before the study. 80, the participant body
of the study as a whole was relatively inexperienced in

e-mail as a medium for communication.

48

2 I E E I] . I. E I] S! 3

Since my study involved human subjects, I filed an
application for approval of my project to the University
Committee on Research Involving Human Subjects (UCRIHS)
several weeks before the study began. The project was
proposed with attachment of a copy of consent form (see
Appendix A) and forms detailing how the rights and welfare
of the participants in the study would be protected. The
consent form was signed and dated by each participant and
the approval of my study was obtained from UCRIHS (IRB#: 94-
006) before the study was conducted.

The participation in this study was entirely voluntary.
The participants were fully aware that their e-mails and
responses would be used for presentations and educational
publications. Confidentiality was promised and therefore
pseudonyms were used throughout the study to protect the
confidentiality of the participants and the institutions
involved. Each participant was also adequately informed of
the types of activities (e.g., tape-recorded classroom
discussions, and interviews), and the approximate time
involved in each activity in the study at the beginning of
and during the project. The project was finished within the

time limit approved by UCRIHS.

2 l I E I. E l E- .1 3
At the beginning of the term, the participants were

assigned to three small e-mail discussion groups with each

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49

group having 5 student members as the main body of
discussion. Students were assigned to a group in such a way
as to provide diversity of cultural backgrounds, languages,
and gender. Table 2 provides the background information of
the participants (see Table 2).

In the beginning of the study, each participant was
designated as either a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
or Friday person. A discussion topic was assigned to the
group each week. The e-mail discussion procedures were
well-organized, providing structure that required reading
and writing.

The Monday person was required to use e-mail to write
his/her thoughts or comments on the assigned topic and to
post the comments to the whole group, using a mailing list
with the five group members' e—mail addressees on it for
simultaneous transmission of the same text to many
addressees. The Tuesday person would then have to read and
respond to the writing of the Monday person, together with
providing his/her own response to the assigned topic. The
Wednesday person would have to read and respond to the
writing of Monday and Tuesday persons and make his/her own
response to the assigned topic. The Thursday person would
have to read and respond to the writing of Monday, Tuesday
and Wednesday persons and make his/her own response to the

assigned topic. Friday person would have to read and

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Table 2: Background Information on Participants

Group Date Name‘ Country Language Gender

Group 1 Monday Yenmin Taiwan Mandarin female
Tuesday Adil Kuwait Arabic male
Wednesday David Hong Kong Cantonese male
Thursday Kenji Japan Japanese male
Friday Lim Korea Korean male

Group 2 Monday John Taiwan Mandarin male
Tuesday Mitsuha Japan Japanese male
Wednesday Cindy Hong Kong Cantonese female
Thursday Tatyana Russia Russian female
Friday Wang Taiwan Mandarin female

Group 3 Monday Fang-chih Taiwan Mandarin female
Tuesday Akira Japan Japanese male
Wednesday Li-yuh Taiwan Mandarin female
Thursday Dong Korea Korean male
Friday Eddie Hong Kong Cantonese male

* Pseudonyms are used to protect the confidentiality of the
participants.

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respond to the writing of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and
Thursday persons and make his/her own response to the
assigned topic. On the next Monday, Monday person would
have to read and comment on the writing of Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday persons of the previous
week, and would initiate a new response to the assigned
topic of the new week.

Since the participants had heard discussion of the
research and had signed consent forms, they were aware that
their e-mail would be read by the researcher. The
instructor and I did not participate in the e—mail group
discussion; however we did receive a copy of each e-mail
message. While the instructor occasionally gave guidelines
for the assigned discussions to the groups or asked for
clarifications of the e—mail writings of individual students
through e-mail, the researcher did not intervene in any way
in the discussion. The purpose was to keep the potential
intrusion and influence of the researcher from the e-mail
exchanges of the students to a minimum degree.

The validity of the data of this study was established
by the efforts from the researcher to exclude the
participants' involvement in setting up the group lists
where the researcher's e-mail address was included. Each
participant was given a group e-mail address which would
distribute any e-mail sent by a participant of a particular
group to everyone that was listed in the same group. The

data collection was performed with the help of the mailing

 

 

“'1 Q 7‘" I 1r.

52

system that operated behind the scenes. Since the data of
the study were collected without the presence of the
researcher or some visible recording devices, the way the
data were collected was less intrusive than other
traditional devices such as audio or video tape-recorders.

The participants were able to choose to write and send
their e-mails at home or in a computer lab, early in the
morning or late in the night on the assigned day. The
flexibility of the physical aspect of composing e-mails
helped reduce participants' sensibility of the researcher as
an outside reader monitoring their composition of e-mails.
Although I was in the class as a researcher, I was as
unobtrusive as anyone possible could be at the moment of
composition. The presence of the researcher at the time the
text was composed was completely invisible. When asked
about the feelings of his e-mails being read by the
researcher, Mitsuha, the Tuesday person in his group,
answered "No difference. I don't care. I am just talking
to my group and I want to finish it as soon as possible."
Such a statement indicated that Mitsuha did not feel he was
being observed when writing e-mails. In addition, the fact
that the data collection and participant observation were
conducted over a long period of time may help de-sensitize
the participants' feelings of being monitored or studied.
Therefore, the intrusion of the researcher was not made to a
great degree in the compositions and exchanges of the

participants' e-mail messages.

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53

The e-mail transmissions within groups were collected
and became the primary data for this study. Since this
structure of e-mail discussion was modeled upon one in use
in a large lower-division undergraduate class at the same
university primarily involving native language students, the
data so gathered may thus be seen as "materials collected
from naturally occurring occasions of everyday interaction"
(Atkinson and Heritage 1984:2). The data are transcribed by
reproducing students' own words and spellings with
supplementary underscorings and typefaces from me for
particular meanings (cf. Section 3.4).

In a period of fourteen weeks, I gathered 186 e-mail
messages. Excluding the introductory and test part of the
e-mail messages during the first two weeks, there were a
total of 162 messages that focused on the discussions that
were related to the students' assigned reading. The e-mail
messages total over 300 pages of data ranging from one to
four pages per message in length. These are the primary
corpus of the data of this study.

In order for me to be able to grasp the contexts of the
study, I did participant observation in every class
throughout the term, field trip and library trips. There
were 28 classes I sat in on, one field trip (searching for
extensive outside reading materials in a large local
bookstore), and two library trips (searching for assigned
discussion materials). I observed and audio and video tape-

recorded as feasible a sample of the classes and conducted

 

54

tape-recorded interviews with each student at least once.
For tape-recording the group discussions in classroom I used
one camcorder and two tape recorders. Students were
informed of the tape-recording one week before the actual
recording and permissions were granted by the instructor and
the students. The camcorder was set up in the left front
corner of the classroom in order to be able to tape the
whole class. The audio recorders were put close to the
student groups when the class was divided in several small
discussion groups. This proved adequate because the video
tape helped to identify the speakers who participated in the
small group discussions. A small audio tape recorder was
used when interviews were conducted. The first-stage
interviews were finished near the end of the semester. In
these interviews the participants' country of origin,
previous experience with computer, possibility of future use
of e-mail, and English language proficiency, and especially
the portions of the e-mail messages that caused confusion
and questions were discussed (See Appendix B). I selected
those students whose works were particularly interesting for
further tape-recorded interviews. A total of 20 hours of
audio tapes and 6 hours of video tapes was collected. The
major interest of the interviews was focused on the
understanding of the intentions of the participants and the

contexts for using a particular strategy.

55

22“. :E'EI! . E1:

The interviews became very important and helpful in
understanding the contexts of the interactions and
supporting or disconfirming my hypotheses about particular
strategies since the data collected were completely textual
transmission in a non-face-to-face situation.

Paralinguistic and/or extralinguistic features were not
available for interpreting a particular interaction. For
example, sometimes it was difficult to tell whether a
question in e-mail was intended to be a real question or
just a rhetorical question, since e-mail is composed as a
whole chunk of message in which a question is easily buried
or minimized, by the number of following propositions.
Because the question is followed by more utterances, the
question looks like a question without the intention to wait
for an answer, i.e., not necessarily a true question. By
contrast, in oral language a pause, together with other
paralinguistic features such as intonation, following an
interrogative usually indicates to the interlocutors that it
is intended as a real question. The following excerpts
illustrate such a difficulty.

Excerpt 3 (Mitsuha's argument on conviction record)
[Emphasis is indicated by underlining.]

... Ten or twenty decades ago, most criminals had to
die. They had no choice. But+_what_abgnt_ngu1 They
should be happy because they can return and get usual
life again. I really want to say to criminals who are

still complaining even though they got life, "Shut up!"
' 9n

56

Anyway, I believe that person's conviction and arrest
records should be kept..."
[Ellipsis (...) indicates my omission of text.]

In discussing whether a conviction record should
be destroyed after a person is out of jail, Mitsuha tried to
compare the ways criminals were treated a couple of hundred
years ago and the way they are treated now, in order to make
his point that conviction records should be kept and the
criminals should feel lucky about being able to leave the
jail alive. The two questions asked by Mitsuha are
ambiguous because it is almost equally possible to interpret
them as real or rhetorical questions if no clarification
from the speaker himself can be obtained. As Ilie argues,
the pragmatic constraints are the fundamental factors that
determine the rhetorical nature of a question: "the
rhetorical interpretation of questions is based on
idiosyncratic characteristics, depending to a large extent
on the addresser and the addressee's cognitive background,
as well as on the addresser's intentions and the addressee's
expectations" (1994:7). While part of the pragmatic factors
in this case are clear, such as the overall contextual
configuration, other factors are not known to the addressee.
For example, the addressees may not know whether Mitsuha
tends to be cautious in using emotional criticisms or what
his discourse goal of the moment is. One way of assessing

the intention of the addresser is to ask about it in an

interview. The fact that Mitsuha indicated that he did not

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57

think what he said was too much and strong in the interview
proved that they were actually rhetorical questions.

Another example appears in Kenji's discussion in the
following excerpt.

Excerpt 4 (Kenji's argument for abortion)

Pretend, you conceive a baby. What_wguld_ygu_dg1 It is

not just "I'll have a baby, because I think abortion is

wrong " Wm. M
gQing_LQ_pay_and_fieed_ygnr_haby3 There are lots of
problem around.

In arguing for the abortion right, Kenji requested the
readers in his group to pretend that they were the ones who
were facing the unwanted pregnancy. He then proceeded to
ask three questions that were ambiguous in intention. These
questions were ambiguous in discourse function, in that they
could be interpreted either as real questions whose answers
were expected for further arguments or as rhetorical
questions whose answers were implied in the contexts. Due
to the structure of e-mail discourse, a question often seems
to function as a rhetorical question since no immediate
answer can be expected. The three questions Kenji asked
turned out to be real questions as he admitted in the
interview that they were actually directed toward Yenmin,
who was the only person who disagreed with abortion in the
group. Those questions were not functioning as rhetorical
questions, whose answers were implied and expected in the

contexts. Instead, they served as leading questions to

provide Kenji with progressive argumentation points to

58

challenge Yenmin to provide answers to the problems one
might face in real life if there is no choice for abortion.

As can be seen, Excerpts 3 and 4 illustrate the
importance of interviews, which will be heavily used to
provide the basis for the understanding of particular
politeness strategies.

In this chapter I have briefly described the
participant structure of the group discussions and how data
were collected. I further emphasized the importance of
interviews as the basis for interpreting the data. The next
chapter will give the readers an overall sense of the
language event under inquiry. Part of the data collected

and the mitigating strategies used will be presented.

CHAPTER THREE

OVERALL VIEW OF THE LANGUAGE EVENT

Chapter three will give an overall sense of the
language event in the study. Basically, there will be two
major goals: (1) to discuss the language event as a whole,
and (2) to present the mitigating strategies I want to point

out later.

3 J D J] M' J l I] I E I' .

The participants were interviewed for their overall
View about using e-mail for academic discussions. Most of
them (12 out of 15 or 80%) think e-mail is a congenial and
effective medium for communication. The reasons included
faster transmitting speed, easiness in usage or file
management, convenience, economy, and multiple transmission
capability. For those who held opposite views, language
barrier was the most serious factor. Most of the
participants (14 out of 15) expressed that they would
continue to use e-mail as the medium for communication in
activities other than course requirement even if other
options of communication media, such as telephones, were
available. In general, the students either liked or thought

e-mail acceptable as the medium for class discussions, but

59

 

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60

most of those who approved the use of e—mail for discussions
preferred to use e—mail for non-serious or informal
discussions. The easiness of topics affected the acceptance
of e-mail for academic discussions. As one of the
participants, John, indicated, "I think it's not bad to use
e-mail for discussion. However, I think the topics we used
in class were too difficult. Some of the topics were not
suitable for e-mail discussions. It's a little bit boring.
I think e-mail should be used for interesting topics, not so
formal. We don't necessarily need to discuss such serious
topics by e-mail." John's attitude towards e-mail for
academic discussions represented those of most of the
participants in the study. It might be that the lack of
immediate feedback from other interactants was attributed to
the lack of enthusiasm using e—mail for discussing serious

topics in this study.

32EE"E'

Since this study focuses on the ways disagreement gets
mitigated, the delimitation of disagreement needs
clarification in the first place. What counts as
disagreement? According to Brown and Levinson (1987),
disagreement is a face-threatening act (FTA) that threatens
the positive face want of the addressee because it shows
that the addresser does not care for the addressee's
feelings and wants. When disagreeing, the addresser

indicates that the addressee is wrong, or misguided or

61

unreasonable about some issue. Therefore, the addressee's
beliefs, values, or opinions are not valued by the addresser
and the addressee's positive face is damaged.

While disagreement is seen as a threat to the positive
face want of the addressee, the conception of disagreement
as an act may cause confusion. Disagreement is not always
presented as a direct single act as the following excerpt.

Excerpt 5 (Adil, disagreeing with Yenmin on the issue

of conviction record) [Emphasis is indicated by
underlining.]

OK, Yenmin, I dg_ngt_agzee with you here for the
following reasons.

Very often disagreements were displayed not as a
separate act but as contrasting beliefs that may be spread
over several utterances without even displaying direct
conflict words. For example:

Excerpt 6 (Yenmin, disagreeing with Adil on his
complaint)

Hi! I can tell your anger about EL. In fact, a lot of
international students complain its policies and exam,
but most people seem just endure this situation because
it's no use to argue with the EL staffs. Singe_it;s_gne

W
W. .
55W» J J . . .

After showing her understanding and sympathy toward
Adil's complaint to EL, Yenmin disagreed with Adil on that
his English ability was proficient enough for him to stay
out of EL. Her disagreement with Adil on the English
proficiency issue resulted from the open criticism on

Yenmin's grammatical and spelling mistakes by Adil in his

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62

previous e-mail. There were no noticeable words or acts
indicating direct disagreement in Yenmin's utterances. Her
disagreement with Adil's complaint was shown in her account
of why they need to stay in EL to improve their English and
her confirmation of the improvement in her own writing.
Disagreements can't always be identified by simply looking
for actual disagreeing words. The way Selfe and Meyer
(1991) coded agreement or disagreement in their study of
gender and power relationships on on-line conferences would
not be applicable for my study. For example, they asserted
that:

Statements in which participants explicitly

indicated agreement or disagreement with what

someone had said on the conference (for example,

“I agree with what - said yesterday" or "I would

like to argue against the idea that...") were

coded accordingly as agreement or disagreement

statements (Selfe and Meyer 1991:174-5).

Using Selfe and Meyer's definition of agreement and
disagreement to find an easy identification and coding for

analysis would probably result in misleading or incomplete

findings.

LLLSpemAcLJheomnmisagmement

Speech act theory is not able to offer much help in
locating disagreements. Austin (1962) attempted to
categorize disagreeing but was not able to decide the exact
nature of it. Of Austin's (1962) five categories of
illocutionary acts, "commissives" and "expositives" are

somehow related to disagreements. He states that "the

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63

commissive is an assuming of an obligation or declaring of
an intention" (1962:163) and that expositives "are used in
acts of exposition involving the expounding of views, the
conducting of arguments and the clarifying of usages and
references" (1962:161). In the comparison of commissives
with expositives, Austin further gives examples to explain
that "calling, defining, analyzing, and assuming form one
group, and supporting, agreeing, disagreeing, maintaining,
and defending form another group of illocutions which seem
to be both expositive and commissive" (1962:160). Others
view disagreements as part of a larger class, such as
"representative" (Searle 1976; Fraser 1983) or "constatives"
(Bach and Harnish 1984). As Searle indicates, "the point or
purpose of the members of the representative class is to
commit the speaker (in varying degrees) to something's being
the case, to the truth of the expressed proposition"
(1976:10). Bach and Harnish explain that "constatives
express the speaker's belief and his intention or desire
that the hearer have or form a like belief" (1984:41). The
purpose of disagreements in this study is to display the
belief of the speaker and at the same time to try to
‘persuade the hearer to accept his/her arguments. According
tzo the definitions of "representatives" and "constatives,"
disagreements can loosely fit into these two illocutionary
Classes. However, they are not readily viewed as a separate

Class of illocutionary act.

64
. i i E J' E

During the interview, I found that many disagreements
in the study were not expressed due to time constraints, the
personality of the speaker, language barriers, and other
factors. Although an intention to disagree by the speaker
may or may not be recognized by other interactants, it is
impossible to talk with every possible recipient of an
utterance to check for the recognition of a disagreement.
Disagreements can be directed either toward the content of
the talk (e.g., "I don't agree with your viewpoints.") or
the talk itself as a speech act or activity (e.g., "You
don't need to apologize to him." or "I don't think what you
said is relevant to our discussion.") This study will hence
regard disagreement as a belief expressed in opposition to
others' (1) belief on a certain proposition, or (2) speech
acts or activities. In other words, a disagreement will be
defined as an expressed commitment to the truth of the
speaker's proposition or belief opposing other individuals'
beliefs on the same proposition (e.g., "I don't agree with
you on what you said.") It will also be defined as
rejecting other individuals' speech acts or activities
(e.g., "I don't agree with you on what you did.") Other
:Lndividuals may include other interlocutors, a third party
that is not within the immediate interaction, or a
hypothetical person. As long as the intention to disagree
is expressed through a stretch of talk or text, it will be

Counted as a disagreement, whether it is recognized by the

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65

intended recipient of the talk, the researcher, or any other
person at the moment of interaction or later. A
disagreement may be realized linguistically (e.g., "You
shouldn't have done that!"), or meta-linguistically (e.g.,
“I disagree with you on this issue."); with or without
explicit contradictory texts (e.g., "You shouldn't support
abortion." vs. "I think we have to respect each new life -
born or unborn"); within a short utterance or over long
stretches of talk (e.g., "You shouldn't give up recycling."
vs. "I can tell you seem not to be confident about improving
the earth's recycling problems. In fact, it is really hard
to do it perfect. However, if we don't try our best to keep
going. Can you imagine the environment our new generations
are going to have?"); and by a variety of linguistic
structures (e.g., "I don't think abortion is fair to the
baby."; "Is abortion fair to the baby?"; "If you think
abortion is the answer to the problem of overpopulation, you
are wrong." etc.) It can't be given a specific definition

in terms of morphemic, syntactic, semantic constructions.

323Iil'E' E' 'I .

As discussed above, disagreement is seen as a
cieclaration of intention or belief rather than an act. The
declaration of intention or belief may be done either
eXplicitly or implicitly. When possible, the best way to
identify a disagreement is to actually confirm it with the

Speaker through an interview. For instance:

66

Excerpt 7 (Li—yuh, responding to Fang-chih on how to
learn to read) [Relevant previous e-mail message is
italicized.]

Fang-chih (Monday person):

In my opinion, first of all, the attitude is one of
the concerns that show hOW concentrated you are. so, a
good attitude is to read carefully and grasp the main
idea of the aritcle you read. Secondly, it_wguld_take

H- O ' - - -2... '. '. - - ‘ - ‘2.

I I . E . i l I E
different_pungsel Fbr example, first time for general

idea; second time for finding out the vocaburaly, then
connect those key words to its belonging sentences more
carefully in order to get familar to their useages, and
what the meanings indicate.
Li-yuh (Wednesday person):
2) More reading practice-

The more you read, the better you do.

Try to find some articles attracting and not too
difficult or too easy to you. Then fellow the way you

have learned and keep going. And probably you can
follow whate Fang-chih said.

WWW

' ' ' 9

[Ellipsis (...) indicates my omission of text.]

Here, Li-yuh, the Wednesday person in her group, was in
the middle of her discussion of the good ways to improve
reading ability. Li-yuh's advice on more reading practice
was related to Fang-chih, the Monday person, whose ideas
about how to learn to read were similar to what was taught
in the class they took. There is no obvious disagreement
with Fang—chih or anyone else on the issue since Li-yuh's
advice seemed to help her group members to follow Fang-
chih's suggestion. However, the word "probably" also gives

a hint of the possibility that she finds Fang-chih's

suggestion impractical. There would be uncertainty in the

67

determination of the real intention of Li-yuh if the e-mail
message provided the only source of data.

In the same message, there is another ambiguity in
determining whether what Li-yuh expressed was a
disagreement. Li-yuh's underlined utterance was constructed
as a statement with a question mark. Actually, Li-yuh
indicated it was meant to be a question. However, the
interrogative used by Li-yuh was ambiguous because the
context surrounding it was not clear enough to determine the
nature of it. It could either be seen as a rhetorical or
true question. In the interview, Li-yuh clearly indicated
she didn't believe that what was recommended by Fang-chih
and the instructor was good for every kind of reading. The
utterance turned out to be, then, actually a disagreement on
the ways suggested for improving reading ability. Li-yuh's
advice for selecting an interesting and suitable book for
reading before following the ways one learns in class and
Fang-chih's suggestion functioned as part of a developing

disagreement.

1.3—1W

This study examines the situated language use in
relation to politeness in an emerging language event, class
discussions via computers. The data collected actually
include speech activities other than "discussion." Because
of the seamless nature of the e-mail discourse event, very

often several speech activities, such as chats, and

68

clarifications, were integrated into a larger language
activity termed "discussion." Some of the most intriguing
politeness phenomena were displayed in these speech
activities. A general term "discussion" will be used to
cover all the speech activities that occurred in this study
without further distinction.

The following section will discuss how the language
event under inquiry was formatted in a new discourse
community in order to give an overall sense of the language

event .

.- o 'o. o . \-. ,.._..- -. '. . I" o,

Community

"A speech event is a recognized activity centered in
discourse, which is known to and often labeled by members of
a speech community" (Ferrara 1994). Is there a speech
community in the classroom under study? The participants in
this study are like most other people who "do not receive
either formal or informal instruction in an etiquette of
electronic communication" (Kiesler et al. 1984). However,
the data indicate that they did develop a sense of a
"discourse community" (Bizzell 1982) in the very early stage
of the study. I suggest that this discourse community was
constituted not just by participants who happened to attend
the class and were randomly assigned to a particular
discussion group but by their construction and recognition

of the appropriate norms for the emerging language event and

69

their willingness and capability to follow them and perform
their linguistic behaviors accordingly. In addition to
other norms of a discourse community, successful
participation in the language event under inquiry, class
discussions via computers, requires the participants to be
able at least to (1) display sustained arguments, (2) on
relevant topics, (3) in a pre—determined order, (4) via a
computer. A deviation from these aspects might be rejected
as an inappropriate language activity by members of the
discourse community.

Among the discourse community under study, the
instructor is probably the most influential single speech
community member that regulates the linguistic behaviors of
the other members, since the performances of the student
participants in such a language event were directly related
to their grades. However, other group members would be
equally significant in the establishment of this discourse
community. The following excerpt shows an example of a
rejection of a language activity which deviated from the
norms of the new language event:

Excerpt 8 (Yenmin, disagreeing with Adil's previous
language activity)

... Except this, I'm curious about the messages from
Adil AWE:
Wm You just talked about

your personal opinions. but W
W Thus I

concern if you have any misunderstanding or not. I
think you can talk about your ideas in the beginning.
After that W I hope
you can understand what I'm talking...

70

In the prior week, "matter recycling" was the topic
assigned for the participants to discuss. Everyone in
Yenmin's group expressed some opinions on the recycling
situations in his/her own countries, except for Adil, who
chose a different topic to discuss and sent a message
criticizing the spelling and grammatical errors of Yenmin
instead. Here, Yenmin acknowledges the receipt of Adil's
e-mail but rejects his discussion of grammatical and
Spelling errors. Yenmin implies that to be a legitimate
example of the new language activity, a response must not
only be on e-mail, but also must argue about something
relevant to the topic previously assigned by the instructor
or decided and agreed on by the whole group.

While any violation of the four norms mentioned above
may pose a threat to the validity of the language activity
under inquiry, topic relevance was the only item that really
caused problems. Other deviations from the norms of the
language event that often occurred include the failure of
students to respond to the current topics within the
expected time frame; responses in an unscheduled order; and
insufficient length of the argumentation. Usually a casual
violation of the speech norms, such as delay in response by
a particular person, would not pose serious problems for the
proceeding of the language event. However, such violations
were often recognized and acknowledged by the speakers
themselves. Apologies or excuses usually accompanied the

acknowledgement. For example:

71

Excerpt 9 (David, apologizing for his lateness on
assignment.)

Groupl members,
Hello, How was everyone ?

It is because the computer is not working before I
finish the discussion.

Excerpt 10 (Lim, making an excuse for his shortened
argument on euthanasia)

This is my opinion about Involuntory euthanosian

and mercy killing and voluntory. Eyen_thgugh_this

WWW);
WW 1' E- .1 . 1 i' 1 E . .

Thanks,
Lim

Excerpt ll (Akira, explaining his unscheduled
response.)

' Hello, I'm supossed to write this on Tuesday but

I . | 1 1 I i J' J 1'

earlier...

As can be seen above, the violation of the norms of the
language event is usually self-conscious. In Excerpt 9,
David apologized for his delayed response to the topic with
an excuse and in Excerpt 10, Lim argued for his shortened
discussion with an emphasis on the quality of his
discussion. Excerpt 11 illustrates the awareness of a pre-
determined order as part of the language event.

These excerpts are evidence for the existence of a
"discourse community" in the classroom under study, whose
constitution is established through the recognition of the

language event by all the community members. The norms of

the language event are under construction and at the same

72

time are often monitored and enforced by those who

participate in the language event.

3 3 2 E' I . I] I E !
There are two distinguishable types of discourse in the
present study. As Kasper (1990) points out, discourse types
can vary on a continuum of politeness investment ranging
from lack of politeness in transactional discourse, as
illustrated by Holmqvist and Andersen's (1987) study of
linguistic interactions in a car repair shop, to total
domination of politeness in the prototypically interactional
discourse. The interactional type of discourse is defined
here as the discourse in which interlocutors are engaged in
speech acts that mainly lead to the establishment and
maintenance of social relationships. By contrast,
transactional mode of discourse is defined as one in which
participants are primarily engaged in optimally efficient
exchanges of information (Brown and Yule 1983; Lakoff 1989).
In transactional discourse, the Cooperative Principle (of.
Section 1.6.3 in Chapter One) will be closely observed,
while in interactional discourse, "the Cooperative Principle
is regularly overridden by the Politeness Principle in order
to ensure that participants' face-wants are taken care of"
(Kasper 1990). In the present study, these two types of
discourse, though distinguishable, are mixed together most
of the time. Since most participants responded not only to

the assigned topic but to their group members' discussions

73

and participation in the language event as well, it is not
easy to separate interactional from transactional discourse.
More often, the transactional and interactional discourse
types are mixed and constantly changing in a single e-mail
message.

While most students displayed maximally transactional
exchanges in the first week of their e-mails, most of them
began to demonstrate interactional interests in others'
participation and the use of politeness formulae and
strategies noticeably increased in later weeks' assignments.
The following excerpts show the shift from a predominantly
transactional response to an interactional one.

Excerpt 12 (Yenmin's second e-mail assignment)

Answer to question 1

I agree conviction records should be destroyed
after a person is released from jail. When a person is
convicted of a crime, he will be punished by his
society...

Answer to question 2

I disagree that arrest records are kept because
people sometimes are arrested on suspicion or for

investigation...

Excerpt 13 (Yenmin's third e-mail assignment)

74

Excerpt 12 and 13 demonstrate the contrasting discourse
types of the same person. Excerpt 12 is an example of the
transactional discourse, which represents the typical style
in most of the e-mails in the first couple of weeks of e-
mail discussion. The reason why transactional discourse
predominated in Yenmin's e—mail message in the initial stage
of the language event could be that there was nothing to
respond to by Yenmin in the beginning since she was the
Monday person. However, most of the participants who were
assigned to other days of the week did not display
interactional discourse, even when they had some e-mail
messages to respond to. For example:

Excerpt 14 (Cindy after receiving Mitsuha's message)

From cindy@machine.school.edu Sun Feb 27 18:13:15 1994
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 1994 13:33:37 -0500 (EST)

From: Cindy <cindy@machine.school.edu>

To: group2@machine.college.school.edu

Subject: #1 homework assignment

I think it is really difficult to say that the
conviction should/should not be distroyed after a
person is released from jail because I think it is
depend on what they do. I also believe that the society
should give a chance to people if they change. I think
the police shouldn't keep the conviction records till
the person die.

In my opinion, I think the if the convictor did
something by accident, then the conviction record
should only keep 2 years after the person get out from
jail...

. . ' o -

personally don't agree that keep the records of the
convictor or arrestor forever. I don't believe the
police should see their records see what they did
before and judge them this time. Base on the negative
effect theorm, bad thing always weighted heavier than
goop thing, so if the police see the records of the
person, they will more like to think that person

I

75

convict in the crime more than he/ she is a good

person.

Well that's all I can say about conviction and
arrest records.

Cindy

In Excerpt 14, Cindy, the Wednesday person of group
two, was discussing her viewpoints about whether conviction
and arrest records should be destroyed after someone is
released from a jail. Notice that her subject line of the
e-mail headings suggested a transactional prediction in her
coming message. There were no personal interactions
involved with any of her group members throughout her e-mail
Even when Cindy explicitly indicated that she was going to
respond to Mitsuha, the Tuesday person in the group, there
were no explicit comments from her to Mitsuha's viewpoints
on the issue. Basically, her response was done in a
transactional mode rather than a person-to-person
interaction. Her last utterance ("Well that's all I can
say about conviction and arrest records."), though
displaying oral language features, focused more on her own
isolated comment than interaction.

A possible explanation is that the participants in this
study were new to this language event and communication
medium and had not established among themselves the "rules"
for what could be counted as proper in terms of genres.
They were testing and exploring different discourse styles
and tried to develop and reach a consensus in discourse

types as they moved forward. The want for establishing and

maintaining social relationships eventually prevailed even

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76

in a non-face-to-face interaction in e-mail as the
communication moved on. The students in the same group
began to use a discourse type that involved more personal
interactions and abandoned the more transactional discourse.
The concerns for face in the interactions began to emerge
and various politeness strategies were developed as the
interactions increased and social relationships established
in e-mails and other contexts (e.g., weekly meetings or
private encounters).

As seen above, the participants of the study were very
sensitive to the need for constructing a "discourse
universe" in which meaningfulness is achieved by the
incorporation of social relationships, emotions as well as
the exchanges of information (Duranti 1986). The majority
of the students in e-mail discussions were actively engaged
in the construction of their social world with this new
medium by the third week of the 15-week semester of their
communication. There is only one exception (1 in 15), who
displayed a consistent tendency toward transactional
preference in e-mails throughout the whole study. This
person used no first names, or pre-determined address terms
(e.g., Tuesday person) to address her teammates in her e-
mail. Once in a while when she responded to the viewpoints
of her teammates, she would take the whole group as the
addressees to avoid direct one-to-one interaction. Most of
the time she would simply concentrate on developing her own

arguments rather than showing approval of or disagreement

77

with the writings of her group. When it came to politeness,
her writings were characterized by avoidance or distance to
the arguments of her teammates. When asked about her lack
of interaction with her group in the interview, she
indicated that it was her personality style to interact with
others that way. Even when there were disagreements between
her and the other group members, she would deliberately
avoid direct or open disagreements with others and would not
want too much involvement in group events. This attitude
toward the social relationships did show up in her
participation in the language event in the study. Even so,
there still were traces of awareness of and sensitivity to
demands of establishment and maintenance of social
relationships in her basically transactional discourse, such
as "good luck" in her advice of how to improve reading, and

"I'm sorry" for a geography mistake she made.

MW

As described above, several language activities were
integrated into a larger language event in the study. Those
speech activities are often framed and organized by the uses
with several linguistic devices. A typical e-mail message
of this study usually contains three distinguishable
structures: (1) opening, (2) body of main language activity,
and (3) ending. The openings and the endings are optional
and often constitute the interactional discourse in the

messages and the body of the main language activity usually

78

mixes up the transactional discourse with interactional one.
The openings of the e-mails contain the subject lines, and
optional greetings, opening address forms, or chats. The
main body of discussion could often be distinguished by some

discourse markers, such as okay., now, right now, here, etc.

The endings may contain brief greetings (e.g., "Thank you
all and have a good day"), slogans (e.g., "LIFE IS REALLY
VALUABLE!!!"), or chats (e.g., "Guys, let's go to warm area
in this spring break and have fun...."). The following

section will give part of the data to illustrate the e-mail
discourse structure and the main mitigating strategies used.
In order to include all the important mitigating strategies
discussed in the latter chapters, the data displayed here

will include (1) a portion of topic two, and (2) a two-week
consecutive discussion of abortion (topic 4 and 5) from the

same group.

3 I H'l' I. 5! . . I] E I
The data here will be highlighted with five different

type faces to indicate disagreements and four strategies

used to mitigate disagreement. These strategies will be

discussed in a subsequent chapter.

 
 
 
 

  
   

  

   

* PseudonymsareusedfitOprotecttheconfidentiality of the
institutions and the participants.

79

TOPIC 2 (SCHOOL a good place for winter?)

From Yenmin@machine.school.edu Sun Feb 27 18:10:48 1994
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 1994 17:31:56 -0500 (EST)

From: Yenmin <Yenmin@machine.school.edu>

To: group1@machine.college.school.edu

Subject: Response to the preceding topic & initiate the new
topic

Happy Valentine's Day! I'm the monday person--Yenmin. Today
I opened my E-Mail and found I've only got one response from
David. I know there are four persons in our group. I wonder
if the other three persons have responsed to me or not. At
the same time, would you please tell me if you received my
response?

Response to the preceding topic

My response is to David whom is the only person I got the
response from.
o, o .2 ‘ o a Q°_ ‘ ‘0 o'o.'o° .' o u‘ 0‘ - “
You agree
conviction records and arrest records should be kept for a
period of time after a person is released or aquitted.1;ll
' ' Basically,
keeping all the criminals' records are to protect the people
in the society and to help the police detect some new crimes
when they find a new crime is related to an ex-criminal. In
fact, most of the country keep people's conviction and
arrest records. However, as the result of keeping their
records, it causes a lot of tragedies. For example, a person
has to endure some other people's judge or insult because of
his preceding fault. Since most people look down at him, he
probably hates this society and changes his personality to
be more cold and cruel. To make his life, he just can return
to crime because nobody want to hire him. In your response,
you talked about " After a person is released from jail,
some police agencies should observe their behavior before
they destroy their records.

   

an¥m923_aiifir_lalli wé shouldrespect his basic right and

give him an opportunity to face his new life. Welcome to
discuss more with me. Thank you!

Initiate this week's topic

"Is (SCHOOL) a good place for international students to
spent the winter?"

Have you ever thought about this question? If you have
a car, you have to scrape your windows and endure the frozen
weather which is below 20 degrees. Or you have to get up
early for eight o'clock class under snow storm or blizzard.

 

~\~

80

Your answer is probably "NO!" For me, I have both negative
and positive answers.

When the temperature is below 10 degrees, the wind
chill is below 20 degrees or the ground is icy, I hate to be
here because I must wear a lot of heavy clothes and cover
all my face and body that make me have restricted movement.
I probably slide down on the icy ground and break my arms or
legs. Therefore, sometimes it's kind of dangerous to stay
here. However, I feel (SCHOOL's) winter is beautiful.

When the snow covers on the trees, on the houses, on
the roof and on the ground, the earth becomes a silver
world. It seems to be pure and peaceful. If I look at the
snow which covers on the tree, I can see many special
patterns shining under the sun. Sometimes I can see some
icicles hanging from the roof. They just look like colorful
crystals. If it's sunny and not very cold, I enjoy walking
in the snow. It's romantic for me.

(SCHOOL's) winter is also interesting because of winter
sports and activities. They include hockey, ice skating,
skiing, sledding, snow mobiling, broom ball and ice fishing.
Actually, two weeks ago, I just went sledding. I enjoyed
sliding down the hill and let the snow fly on my face. It
was so fun that I couldn't forget it. Right now, I'm
thinking about learning ice skating even though I'm a little
scared.

In conclusion, I feel more fun than bored to spend the
winter at (SCHOOL). Except its frozen weather and icy
ground, I think it's not bad to spend the winter here. Enjoy
your winter at (SCHOOL).

Yenmin

Topic 4 (Abortion #1)

From Yenmin@machine.school.edu Thu Mar 24 16:07:30 1994
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 1994 18:07:33 -0500 (EST)

From: Yenmin <Yenmin@machine.school.edu>

To: group1@machine.college.school.edu

Subject: Recycling / Abortion

Hi! How is everybody? Spring break is coming. Are you
excited? Nice to talk to you again! This week, I've received
the discussions of "matter recycling" from David & Lim, a
warning message and a response from Adil, but no response
from Eddie. I concerned if Eddie had any difficulties, so
you couldn't join our discussion. Except this, I'm curious
about the messages from Adil. Althgngh_1;1e_regeiyed_ygur
WYW
just talked about your personal opinions, bnt_ygu_didn;t
‘:oopo "u- - - .90" ,g g I. o ._: ...: .:‘og‘o o :
Thus I concern if you have any misunderstanding or not. I
think you can talk about your ideas in the beginning. After
that, you still need to discuss our topic. I hope you can

81

understand what I'm talking. If you have any problems,
please talk to me in class. Thank you very much!

O.K. Right now I'd like to respond to last week's topic
about "matter recycling." I appreciate that David talked
about the recycling problems in Hong Kong and Lim talked
about those in Korea. I've learned a lot. Thank you! It
seems both of you agree that Americans do much more matter
recycling than your own countries. I've already said, last
week, that my country has done less about that, compared to
the US. From the discussion of David, I can tell you seem
not to be cofident about improving the earth's recycling
problems. In fact, it is really hard to do it perfect.
Howeyer1_if_na_dQnlt_trz_Qur_hest_t2_ke:n_gningl_9an_¥9u

nuao‘ - .90 o ‘0 .0011‘0 .‘ ' "' o o 1‘.
generations; More and more people have already had some
recycling notions, they're just lacking in acting. If we can
ask ourselves to do first, and then try to influence the
other people, I think our enviroment won't be worse and
worse. We're lucky to be here because we've learned some new
recycling notions from Americans. Since we all agree the US
has done much better, we should learn his merits and bring
them back to our countries, especially for some specific
methods in matter recycling. If all the countries in the
world try their best to improve the environment and save &
reuse the resources, we still can help not only ourselves
but also our new generations have a high quality life.
Therefore, don't discourage and keep going in matter
recycling!

After finishing last week's topic, I'd like to initiate this
week's new topic "Are you for or against abortion? Why or
why not?" since_we_all_agreed_this_tgnicl_we_wonlt_arsne
' ' ' 7 O.K.

Come back to our new topic. If you want me to say just "for"
or "against" abortion, it's really hard for me to answer.
Basically, I disagree abortion, but I agree it under some
certain cases. For example, if a woman is pregnant because
of being raped. Or when a mother borns a baby and that will
threaten the mother's life. I agree they should abort.
4 O. .0 =OI!‘ 0‘00 ‘ 3- 02 ..II‘O 3.. C o- ‘ 1‘ ... 0
sh9Qse_abQrtiQns_or_nQt1_I_thint_that_had_hetter_under

' ' Anyway, abortion
is relates to kill a life, we should not make it become a
very easy thing to do, especially for teenager girls. If we
regard abortion as a normal operation, it maybe will
encourage more and more people to indulge themselves in
having sex and not care about the result. I think people
have the responsibility to behave themselves. If they are
pregnant under this situation, compared to kill a life, they
had better face the fact and keep the babies. Even though
more and more people stand by "pro choice", I still believe
that each life is potential and precious and we should

82

respect each new life. However, since everything in this
world is not perfect, we should permit some certain abortion
cases but not completely. Those are my opinions. How about
yours? I expect to share your opinions. Thank you very much!
Yenmin

From david@machine.school.edu Thu Mar 24 16:07:35 1994
Date: Wed, 2 Mar 1994 16:35:21 -0500 (EST)

From: David <david@machine.school.edu>

To: group1@machine.college.school.edu

Subject: weeks discussion

Group one members,
How is everyone today?? Are you all ready for spring
break?
This week question is " Are you for or against abortion?
Why? or Why not? "

First, I would like to respone monday person answer.
She is one the For side of the abortion from what she
write. She said that people should have their responsible
for the unborn baby and their behavior in sex. ant_1;;h1n&

Co. 0‘ .H‘. :0. 0 9'. ‘ 9‘ Q. ‘ 0 0.0“ ‘0'. 0

If the abortion is illegal, the affect of the new born
baby will be greater. It is becasue Right now in our
society, the scientist or inventor try to produce a lot of

different product to prevent the pegeance. But_how_many_of_
them_are_safe_tQ_the_user_and_HQw_dc_we_know_there_ma¥_or

For an
example, the pills that prevent pegenance, these pills may
work for some women, so some many still being pegena after

use it.
:00 00' o- ‘ =‘. a ° 0‘ .oo .- 0... 79 o 0o. . 0

. . . . . .
mf_RQ1n§1TLhain1l1a_1f_1§T1a_Effking_b?§_dQT¥Q%EknfflTfhfi
baby: Like some people was saying some chemical with cause

different diseases or some other things. you may find out
after baby is born. '

the abortion , I think , is the parent choice. Reigning

o o . 000. g- - . .,00 o‘ ‘ q o : .10 o o

83

on. 0‘ 0‘ =oo'= ‘- 'o- o- . ‘ 0'9. .2 .' '00 0‘
' They never think of the
thing that could happen after. Like what I said about, Who
is going to take care the child after they are born. Nobody!
they migth put the baby into some voluteer organization or
institution. They could affect more to the baby. So, I
think that to deteriment the abortion legeal or not. It
should not be deteriment by those people. And If the
abortion is legeal that could also help the growth
population. So that, Legeal abortion should help to solve a
lot of problem on the parents and the population!
That is!
Wish you all have a nice spring break!!have funl!
From David

From Kenji@machine.school.edu Thu Mar 24 16:07:42 1994
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 1994 12:37:22 -0500 (EST)

From: Kenji <Kenji@machine.school.edu>

To: group1@machine.college.school.edu

Subject: abortion

What's going on fellows? Sorry I missed this, last week.

I was kind of surprised that everybody is , seemed like,
so serious about the topic and creating such a nice
arguments here on E-mail. Today, I will respond to the topic
and Monday-person, and also David,s idea about "abortion."

First of all, I was so impressed on how everyone is
conscious about abortion. WM
Wm

,0. o ‘Q-o.-o - {.0 0‘ ‘

In philisophical and moral
point, it is obviously a killing. Although, I believe it is
impossible to judge. In fact, when you really think about
abortion, and face the reality, it is not just what is right
or wrong, I strongly beleive. We all have to have a
responsibility for the baby and think about the baby's
future and also our's.

l O I
0'9 " o 00 -00 : .0. ‘90 a go .0

tQ_pa¥_and_feed_ygpnx_bahy3 There are lots of problem

around.

Nowadays, students' abortion is not just a problem that
we think we would never ever experience. It actually happens
around us so often. Last year, a freiend of mine, who is 20
years old and go to college, just had a miscarriage. Her boy
friend was and still is one of my best friend too. They once
told me that they thought about getting marriage because of
the pregnancy. In this case it ended as miscarriage.

84

Fortunately she was physically fine and he also was working
and had enough money to manage the case. My roommate's best
friend just had an abortion too. It just is hard to realize
how serious and related to us.

On the other hand, we often are so careless about
contraception. We all should be more responsible for
whatever we do. That is only thing I really can say, I
guess.

If I or my girl friend conceive a baby, I'll have an
abortion even though I beleive it is not a right thing to
do. I will of course talk about it with my girl friend and
decide it together. I won't be able to ignore our relatives
also. I will think of it as taking my responsibility,
feeling guilty.

That is basically why I support pro-choice. It is
impossible that somebody's right to live belonging to
someone else, but if we decide it unreasonably, it would
belong to his/her parents. Because this is not just abortion
is right or wrong.

I hope you can see what I'm saying here. The issue is
also full of conflict just like it is in life, I believe.
Here is one thing we can do, wherever you go you'ld have
fantastic time during spring break, bring your condomes too!

At least we can do .....

You all have a great one!

Kenji,

From Lim@machine.school.edu Thu Mar 24 16:07:54 1994
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 1994 14:43:43 -0500 (EST)

From: Lim <Lim@machine.school.edu>

To: group1@machine.college.school.edu

Subject: Abortion discussion

Hi, how was everything going guys?

I am sorry about replying about this topic, but I left
very early to New York City at the spring break. How was you
guys break? you had great fun? I know some of you went to
other state and visit friends. I went New York, and had a
great fun. I met my friend and visited a lot of places. If
you have not been there, I strongly recommend you to visit.
There are absolutely different from (CITY).

Any heaths week's discussion topic is about "abortion".
I already read you guys opinion and they were very
interesting. ' '
o , :- Q... o, ,0. '0. .: ‘g ‘ a «l. . H,

O O 0
.0 ....‘g o - ‘ 000 ,o,‘ ‘ Q‘ 290 0! ‘. ‘ Q 0‘

11 ill 1] . . i I'E' 1

 

I

’5.

-.

m: . ‘

 

85

Some people think that the cristians are the people who
strongly insist to disagree about abortion. Even though I am
cristian, I am con about abotion. I also understand why they
do not want abortion and I agree with them. Life is given by
God, so it is very important and people can not take out the

life by their wish WWW.

0- ‘0 ' .1 9‘ o- ‘0 = .2. o 2.00 o- 9..- 7 =‘ -. --

o- oo o- ...o 0‘“ o =‘ e -. ‘v. 00 .1 o -. e ‘. ‘u
'u00 1. o 0‘" =0 0‘ .' p- 020- an! .e. 0 e.-
. “009- o . - 9‘ 0-0 00 .7 01-- no ,qo .-

The abortion is not other people's problem, but the
parents themselves. Again, abortion is not good act, so we
must be careful not to make a mistake..

kim

Topic 5 (Abortion #2)

From Yenmin@machine.school.edu Thu Mar 24 16:07:48 1994
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 1994 13:21:29 -0500 (EST)

From: Yenmin <Yenmin@machine.school.edu>

To: group1@machine.college.school.edu

Subject: Abortion(2)

Welcome back! I had a wonderful time in San Francisco during
spring break. How about you? Did you also have an
unforgettable vacation? Break is over. We have to study hard
again. Anyway, nice to talk to you in the computer.

This week, we will continue last week's topic and expand it.
Since we read two more articles which were found from the
main library, we should have more thinking about abortion.
One article talks about some anti—abortion groups block
access to abortion clinics because a Supreme Court decision
allowed the Federal racketeering law to be used. The other
article talks about "when a federal appeals a court ruled
that a Pennsylvania law restricting abortions could take
effect without further hearings on its impact on women,
abortion rights advocates received a major setback." From

86

these two articles, we can see anti-abortion groups fight
with pro- -choice groups. Both of them have strong opinions to
support. Abortion is really a conflict topic to discuss.

; ‘-o..o o ‘:0..:‘: :“n‘ no 0 o, -0 ‘-
uo ‘ 2.. no ‘ 920‘ 9‘ q. ‘ 9‘09 ‘ a ‘ 00 n. o 2". '1"2'
0"¢-'= n“o= "00 ‘ 1 ‘, = .2 ‘ a o o ‘. .“‘ .0‘0 0‘

0‘ 0‘0‘ v... 0‘ ”Q .0. ‘ ..II‘
other_1nnosent_th1ngs_9rllifesl For example. when peOple
shoot animals for sports, they think it's not only a fun
thing to do but also a wonderful exercise. If you blame them
for killing animals, they will argue with you,"these
specices of animals are too many, we kill them is to control
their quantities. Howexer1_nQwada¥s_there_are_a_lot_of

i i . J I . J . I .
quantities and kill them for food or for fun. Even though
our natural science is predominant, nobody can promise any
kind of animals won't disappeare in the world.

dQn't. think JOE'S a right thing IQ dQ b1]: 59mg ngDJQ Still

:. : ‘0 o I. o. loo' 0 o o. .2 00 Co OH‘
.H 0". 7': :7 -..-‘7? O"... ‘0 . g,‘ .. :‘II- .7... -
0'1. ° " a .2 o o: o o‘ w- o 000. 2 '09 '0 ‘ .‘

.1 ‘ =ou‘ o 0‘ .2 a 0 Q. 01 q ‘9 '09 .9 Q0 .‘ 000.‘

ahQrtion_to_kill_an_1nnocent_and_notent1al_lifel Actually.

most of you don't think abortion is a right thing to do,
just because people need it, so we should allow it to be

legal I_th1nk_th1s_not1Qn_w1ll_cause_more_disasters_for

When we
achive our purpose, we probably will ask for more desires.
.‘ :00 oo' 2 1 ‘ .00, 0‘00 ": 0“ “ ‘:0‘ q

I

think we should ask ourselves to discipline our sexual life
and try our best to do contraception. Right here, I'd like
to say that I'm pro-life except when the life of the mother
is threatened or when there has been rape or incest. I want
to emphasize that I'm not totally anti-abortion, but I_;h1nk

We had better control it under some specific laws. By this
way, our world won't be more and more chaos.
Yenmin

From david@machine.school.edu Thu Mar 24 16:08:00 1994
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 1994 16:02:41 -0500 (EST)

From: David <david@machine.school.edu>

To: group1@machine.college.school.edu

Subject: question about topic

Dear group members,
Hello everyone ! Is everyone have a nice spring break!

87

Today, I'm not going to write the disscusion because
we already talk about that and I couldn't think of anythink
else to write.

WW
I . I J] I I . . J

David

From Kenji@machine.school.edu Thu Mar 24 16:08:04 1994
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 1994 15:46:56 -0500 (EST)

From: Kenji <Kenji@machine.school.edu>

To: group1@machine.college.school.edu

Subject: abortion dicussion

Hey, Sorry to be late.

I,m here. I'm glad that everyone sound like you guys had
pretty good spring break. I ,of course, had a great one. I
went to Toront, Niagla, N.Y. passing through Buffalo, &
Washington D.C. It was fantastic! I've always been
interested in American history, and D.C. was one of my dream
city to visit. There are a lot to see there and things that
we should know as international student studying in the
U.S.A. Hope you get to go sometime.

Anyway, I was surprised that half our group members are
christian, whom we always see in social protests. I am
christian too, I would say. In the article, the
anti-abortion leaders are all Christians, saying "this is an
effort to intimidate the rank and file so they won't
associate with us. And for some people, that may work. But
we're going to see who's brave and who listens to God, not
to man."

Social protest and religion are almost always related
somehow. That was my first impression after reading the
article. And anti-abortion side people, unfortunately,
lauded Wm Because. to peeple
who doesn't have religion knows nothing like religious
philosophy, knowledge, or belief. Perhaps they know things
bad doesn't have faith in it.

'3 I I . I '1] I I I I I 1'

As Yenmin said, most of pro-side people knows that
abortion is not things that we should always do or support.
This is something that we sometimes have to do, knowing and
feeling guilty somehow.

I agree with Yenmin and Lim, this is something that we
suold be more careful in everyday life.

88

Because, afterall, this is so complexed and
controversial issue, which also is full of conflict.

See you in class,
Kenji.

From Lim@machine.school.edu Thu Mar 24 16:08:09 1994
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 1994 16:41:59 -0500 (EST)

From: Lim <Lim@machine.school.edu>

To: group1@machine.college.school.edu

Subject: abortion

Hi, guys. How was weedend going with you guys?

Last night, I and friends of mine went out of (CITY).
After I came to (STATE), I did not go out from (CITY) very
often. But in this week, I got a great fun with friends.

Any way, we have to talk about abortion again. 1_am_ngt
Q 0. Q. , A 3. O. 7 ‘0 o O. _
WW I alSo got the massages from
Yenmin and Canjo ( sorry I am not sure your name. I promise
that I will check your name after this massage.)

Like I wote down last time, I am for about abortion. And
I knew that some of you guys agree with me. Once again, the
abrtion is importane problem today.

Although I agree with abrtion, I insist that the people
who want to abort must think that many times before doing
that. Life is one of the most important things in the world.

Have a nice weekend and see you guys in the class.

Lim

From Adil@machine.school.edu Tue Mar 29 10:49:06 1994
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 1994 20:23:15 -0500 (EST)

From: Adil <Adil@machine.school.edu>

To: group1@machine.college.school.edu

Subject: ABORTION

ABORTION
From: Adil
To: group 1.

Abortion is one of the hottest topic discussed in the
United States. It is really important to have a low to
control abortion not only in such big country like the
United States but also in the rest of the world. However,
some countries may reject abortion for religion reasons. For
example, Islamic-world nations agree that abortion is
against Islam. Women can't get red of their unborn babes

89

unless they form a serious risk on the mothers' life.
Although abortion is forbidden in Islamic nations, some
doctors do abortion operations secretively to women who have
become pregnant. Such operation like that can be found in
Egypt a lot where women pay hundreds of dollars to those
doctors who became really rich of doing something like that.
Before I say my opinion in abortion, I would like to explain
the Islamic point of view in inhibiting abortion.

It is mentioned in the Holy Quern that children and
money are the most interesting things in our life. As a
result, Moslem do respect unborn babes.

However, country like Egypt which has a large numbers
of population deals with controlling the problem by teaching
people how to control their sexual activities. The
government there often offer TV. programs, special
discourses in public areas and classes in high schools and
universities. They also provide people with low price
condoms, anti-pregnant peals and tablets and certain
operation for either men or women. Nevertheless, whenever
women get pregnant, they have to give born to their babies.

On the other hand, abortion is something should not
exist in those nations because they have a strike society
where unmarried relation ships between men and women are
forbidden. Moreover, If a women became pregnant by accident,
and she isn't marred that would be completely undercover
until she gives born.

Issue like abortion
effect women body, so they are the only one's who decide to

have the baby or not.
Thank you for your reading. This is Adil.

35 :J 'E' I. E!!'!' I. SI I.

As argued in Chapter One, there is a distinction
between politeness and mitigation. The latter can often be
conceptualized as goal-oriented and functional while the
former often incorporates the functional, or instrumental,
dimensions with its normative ones. However, the use of
Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness framework as the
basis for the analysis of this study would inevitably
involve the use of their terms, such as positive or negative

politeness strategies. In order not to confuse the readers,

90

I would use "politeness strategies" to indicate strategies
whose functions are actually to mitigate face-threatening
acts (FTAs). That is, all the politeness strategies
mentioned in the chapters are mitigating strategies, which
are goal~oriented and functional in nature.

In this chapter, I described the overall view of the
participants about the language event. I further attempted
to delimit disagreement by a definition that is based on
speech theory. An example of interview on disagreement was
given to show how disagreement could be determined. I also
discussed the evolution of a discourse community, discourse
types, and e-mail message structures to give the readers an
overall sense of the language event under inquiry. Finally,
part of the e-mail data was quoted with different type faces
indicating disagreement and particular mitigating strategies
for later discussion.

As these examples make clear, the e-mail generated by
the ESL students is rich in data on disagreement and
associated mitigation strategies. Before considering issues
related to these strategies, in the next chapter we will
examine the role of larger-order discourse structures--
participation frameworks and participant frameworks--in

mitigating disagreement.

CHAPTER FOUR

PARTICIPANT AND PARTICIPATION FRAMEWORKS FOR MITIGATION

This chapter will be devoted to the role of participant
frameworks and participation frameworks in constructing

mitigation and disagreement.

oo- 'o ' ‘¢‘== e ‘e"‘ '0 ! \‘. 2.. 20‘ ‘0

As described in Chapter Two, the e-mail discussions
proceeded in a multiparty situation where five students
participated as the major interlocutors on assigned topics
in a pre-determined turn in each group. The multiparty
discussions together with the pre-determined turn—taking
system of the language event under inquiry provided the
students with an environment in which participation
frameworks (Goffman 1974) were often exploited for their
communicative goals at the moment. The exploitation of
participation frameworks was closely related to redressive
actions to face threatening acts, i.e. politeness. The
following section will describe the ways multiparty

participation framework was employed to achieve politeness.

91

O O I I I
'- o- 0: -.u‘.o . «on .. 9... -.u‘ o .

There are two slightly different and yet intertwined
phenomena: participant framework and participation
framework. The former describes the positions of the
participants aligned toward one another by activities and
the latter emphasizes the positions taken by the depiction
or animation of the participants as figures or characters
within talk. Goodwin (1990) used the term "participant
framework" as a gloss to cover both types of processes. I
will make a distinction between these two processes, since
each has its own role in the construction of the social
world in which politeness is addressed.

Goffman mentions that "when a word is spoken, all those
who happen to be in perceptual range of the event will have
some sort of participation status relative to it" (1981:3).
Several different participation statuses are created as the
result of the utterance in relation to those who perceive
it. For example, in a talk, there will be an "animator,"
who "is a talking machine, a body engaged in acoustic
activity, or... an individual active in the role of
utterance production" (Goffman 1981:144). Whoever does the
physical production of the utterance is the "animator" of
it. In the present study, this "animator" was the person
who sat in front of a terminal and did the actual typing of
the e-mail messages. There will also be an "author," "who
has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the

words in which they are encoded" (Goffman 1981:144).

93

An "author" is responsible for the content of talk while an
"animator" is responsible for the production of it. In some
cases, the author and the animator may not necessarily be
the same. Authors may create the content of talk and ask
others as animators to utter or type it for them. A
"figure" is "that aspect of self displayed through talk"
(Schiffrin 1990:242). In many utterances, Goffman
indicates, a speaker represents himself or herself as a
figure, who

serves as the agent, a protagonist in a described

scene, a 'character' in an anecdote, someone,

after all, who belongs to the world that is spoken

about, not the world in which the speaking occurs

(1981:147).
That is, a "figure" is the character depicted by a speaker
with a particular image through talk. Finally, there will
be a "principal" involved in a talk. A principal is
"someone whose position is established by the words that are
spoken, someone whose beliefs have been told, someone who is
committed to what the words say" (Goffman 1981:144). In
general, the "animator" produces the actual talk, the
"author" creates the content of the talk, the "figure" is
created through talk, and the "principal" tells his
commitments in the talk. A participant may occupy several
different positions (Goffman 1974, 1981) in any utterance.

On the one hand, a participation framework is
"comprised of a set of positions which individuals within

perceptual range of an utterance may take in relation to

what is said" (Schiffrin 1990:241). On the other hand, a

94

participant framework is comprised of a set of positions
which align individuals toward one another within an
activity. It refers to the framework that positions each
participant in an utterance. That is, participation
framework emphasizes the relations between talk and people
and participant framework emphasizes the relations created
by talk among people.

Both frameworks were employed in e-mail messages by
participants to create particular politeness strategies that
are characteristic to the language event and electronic
medium in inquiry. For discussion's sake, these two
frameworks are separated in the analysis. Actually they are
mutually intertwined and not easily separable.

Politeness was achieved by the manipulation of both the
participant framework and participation framework in the
e-mail discourse by many of the participants in the present
study. The participants were skillfully manipulating the
frames in the e-mail messages as a global politeness
strategy although most of them were new to the language
event and the medium.

The manipulation includes (1) constructing frameworks
in a particular way to address the face wants of the
addressees, and (2) switching frameworks to attend to the

face wants of the addressees.

There has been little analysis of politeness in
multiparty participant frameworks. In a group discussion
situation, a speaker may have various options to construct
the participant framework according to his discourse goal.
He can construct a participant framework based on various
combinations of the people involved in the talk. If he
wants to get involved in close interaction with his
addressees, he may choose a direct one-to-one interaction
for such a goal. If he intends not to get too close to his
addressees or tries to be formal, he may choose to address
his addressees by a one-to-many interaction. He can even
create and incorporate hypothetical persons in the frames
for certain purposes. The flexibility to select particular
addressees in a multiparty communication provides speakers
with strategic resources that they can employ in a variety
of ways.

For example, if a speaker wants to deliver some private
information to a particular person in a multiparty
conversation, he or she may whisper in the ear of that
person and exclude the rest of the parties from the
participant framework. In other words, the private chat
between two people in a multiparty situation would align
them as the addresser and addressee and put them in frame
while the rest of the group would be out of frame in regard

to the possibility to hear the talk. The manipulation of

LII

In

1'1.

96

participant framework could be used for a particular
discourse goal of the moment in terms of social
relationships. If a speaker intends to embarrass someone in
public and attempts to avoid being accused of doing so, he
may so construct his participant framework that he positions
himself as the speaker addressing something embarrassing to
a particular person as the focal addresser while implicitly
inviting the rest of parties as overhearers in the frame.

By doing so, the speaker may argue for his innocence when
accused of trying to embarrass the addressee in public. In
other words, the participant framework and the participation
framework can be used as strategic resources to serve the
discourse goal for a speaker.

Disagreements or criticisms, the acts threatening the
addressee's modesty face wants, were often avoided or
softened by the use of strategic construction of multiparty
participant frameworks. As I will argue in Chapter Six, the
strategies oriented toward addressee's want of his self-
image, values, and opinions not being rejected or disagreed
with are "modesty politeness" strategies. One of these
modesty politeness strategies was realized through the
global construction of participant framework. It is
basically done by intentionally avoiding construction of a
participant framework that positions a particular person as
the focal recipient of the face threatening act (FTA) in a
multiparty communication. Exposing the addressee as the

focal recipient of the disagreement in a multiparty

97

communication would put forward the addressee and damage his
modesty face. Therefore, strategic avoidance of allocating
the addressee as the focal recipient of the disagreement may
satisfy the modesty face want of the addressee to some
degree and hence becomes polite. There are two ways to
manipulate a participant framework for such a purpose: (1)
avoid publicly disagreeing with a particular party, (2)
avoid explicit identification of the party being disagreed
with as the focal recipient of the FTA while addressing the
disagreement or criticism to the whole group. The former
involves the actual change of the size of participant body
and the latter appeals to the participants' positions
aligned by the linguistic activity.

The first method to manipulate participant frameworks
is to avoid doing FTAs in front of the whole group by
directing the disagreements/criticisms only to the
addressees that are directly related to the FTAs. Such is
the strategy often used by the instructor asking for
clarifications from the students. Since asking a particular
student in public for clarifications indicates the points
that student was trying to make were not clear enough to be
understood and hence implies that his abilities to express
himself in English were not as good as those of other group
members who didn't need to clarify themselves, it may damage
the face of the student. Therefore, it would be more polite
to ask for a clarification by sending a private e-mail to

the particular student rather than a public one to the whole

98

group. Basically it is an excluding strategy that is used
to exclude the irrelevant participants from the interaction
framework so that the damage to the addressee's face may be
minimized. Since students were required to send their
e-mail discussions to the whole group, it is a strategy not
used as often by students as by the instructor. However,
the participants did realize the polite aspect of
participant framework in face threatening acts. For
example:

Excerpt 15 (Yenmin to Adil in a private e-mail

concerning his criticism of her grammatical and

spelling errors.) [Emphasis is indicated by

underlining.]

Hi, Adil! Thank you for caring about our grammar and

Spelling mistakes W

this_mgre_glear1 I think that the function of E—Mail is
a bridge for communication. We should care more about
our ideas but not grammar or mechanical errors. Yenmin
Here, Yenmin was responding to Adil's criticism about
her grammatical and spelling mistakes with mitigated
disagreement. This disagreement is displayed by what
Pomerantz (1975, 1984) calls "repair initiators/insertion"
and a challenge. Pomerantz points out that "in the course
of producing a disagreement, a recipient may request
clarification with 'what?‘ 'Hm?‘ questioning repeats, and
the like" (1984:71). According to Pomerantz, Yenmin's
request for clarification is counted as a disagreement,

since "absences of forthcoming agreements or disagreements

by recipients with gaps, requests for clarification, and the

99

like are interpretable as instances of unstated, or as-yet-
unstated, disagreements" (1984:65). However, the
confirmation of Yenmin's disagreement in this instance does
not just come from the data itself. In the interview,
Yenmin explicitly expressed her disagreement with Adil's
implied accusation of her making many mistakes. She didn't
think she made more grammatical or spelling mistakes than
any of her group members and thought Adil was only trying to
be picky.

Yenmin's mitigation of her disagreement (i.e., repair
initiator/insertion) and challenge (request for further
clarification from Adil) was performed globally as well as
locally. Her global politeness strategy was done through
the manipulation of participant framework, in which everyone
in the group except Adil was excluded in the frame. In
other words, Yenmin intentionally avoided embarrassing Adil
by sending him her locally mitigated disagreement and
challenge in private rather than to the whole group. By so
doing, Yenmin was attending Adil's modesty face want and
displaying her disagreement at the same time.

While avoiding doing FTAs before the whole group is in
some way polite, the violation of it is often clearly aware
and regarded as impolite. It often causes resentment from
the relevant addressee. For instance, in the same
incidence, Yenmin indicated that she was upset by Adil's
lack of sensitivity and doubted his intention in criticizing

her English ability in public when he, she emphasized, could

100

have done it through private e-mail with her. The damage of
Yenmin's modesty face came not just from Adil's criticisms
of her mistakes, but also from his unwelcome way of

constructing his participant framework in the discourse.

4 000- .10 " 9‘0 ' ' v. 00 o :0... ‘..“‘ i!

Disagreements

The second way to manipulate participant frameworks in
disagreement is to avoid explicitly identifying the
particular party being disagreed with in a multiparty
communication. By avoiding an explicit identification of
the addressee in a disagreement, the speaker indicates that
he or she acknowledges and cares about the addressee's
modesty face want to such a degree that he or she would
rather sacrifice communicative clarity than damage the
modesty face want. It is a distancing strategy that keeps
the addressee from being related to the FTAs, so that the
criticism or disagreement is not seen as something directly
pointing to the addressee.

As the following examples show, this type of strategy
can be employed in two ways: (1) incorporating the intended
recipient of FTAs into the general audience, and (2)
disagreeing with the intended addressee by agreeing with

others.

101

Generamdience

A speaker may address his/her disagreement to the whole
group without explicit identification of the intended party
being disagreed with so that FTAs can be minimized and the
modesty face want of the party may be preserved. For
example:

Excerpt 16 (Kenji, arguing for abortion)

What's going on fellows? Sorry I missed this, last
week.

I was kind of surprised that everybody is, seemed
like , so serious about the topic and creating such a

nice arguments here on E— mail. Today, I_will_respgnd_tg
I i i J I '3 .I

ll ' II

First of all, I was so impressed on how everyone is
conscious about abortion. To tell the truth, I didn't
think you have definite opinion to the topic, abortion.

. . . . . .

I am also on the pro-choice side. In

philisophical and moral point, it is obviously a
killing. Although, I believe it is impossible to judge.
In fact, when you really think about abortion, and face
the reality, it is not just what is right or wrong, I
strongly beleive. We all have to have a responsibility
for the baby and think about the baby's future and also
our's.

Pretend, you conceive a baby. What_would_you_dgz_lt
is HQ: just "I ll] halle a bah}: begallfig I think

? There
are lots of problem around.

Here, Kenji disagrees with Yenmin's pro-life position
in the abortion issue without explicitly identifying her as
the focal recipient of his disagreement. Since Yenmin was
the only person in the group who argued against abortion
from a moral standpoint, it is a reasonable assumption that

Kenji's hypothetical narrative and the questions were

102

actually directed towards Yenmin to indicate his
disagreement with Yenmin's position in the abortion issue.
When asked if Yenmin was the person Kenji had in mind for
the narrative and questions, he replied, "Yes, I was
thinking about Yenmin's idea. Not because exactly Yenmin
said uh abortion is something that we shouldn't do. Not
just because of that. Because last semester I was in same
class with Yenmin and we discussed about abortion? And in
my mind strongly I have an impression Yenmin, uh, not
because she is a Christian but her position and idea to the
topic of abortion so it's, you can't just say I will have a
baby because it's wrong." When asked to confirm if he
didn't agree with Yenmin's moral appeal on the issue, Kenji
answered rapidly without hesitation: "No, I don't, no, I
don't." Kenji further confirmed that he pretended to be
Yenmin uttering the constructed speech ("I'll have a baby,
because I think abortion is wrong") although he was trying
to explain that the constructed speech was not meant to be
serious. The interview proved that Yenmin was really the
person Kenji disagreed with and the narrative and questions
were indeed directed to Yenmin as disagreements. By re-
addressing the similar arguments and questions in the old
issue, Kenji believed that the paraphrases were obvious
enough for Yenmin to realize that his disagreement was
actually directed toward her. There were two positions
created by Kenji: himself as the addresser, and the rest of

his group as the ratified participants (Goffman 1981).

103

A ratified participant is regarded as someone who officially
and jointly engages in talk in a social encounter (Goffman
1981). Since the participants were positioned in this way,
Yenmin was in a sense blended into the group as one of the
general recipients of Kenji's message rather than being
someone who was picked up from the group to be explicitly
disagreed with. In other words, the participant framework
in this message was so constructed by Kenji that Yenmin was
not particularly identified as the focal recipient of the
disagreeing message so that her modesty face was saved.

In contrast to Excerpt 16, the following excerpt
displays a participant framework that has less polite force
as discussed in the above.

Excerpt 17 (John disagreeing with two of his group

members on euthanasia issue.)

After read your e-mail of euthanasia, I have one
openion different from yours.

Here, John's response on the issue of euthanasia was
mailed to the whole group with his disagreement directed to
two group members clearly identified. By arranging his
response this way, John was able to, at the moment of
interaction, create three distinguishable positions in the
participant framework: himself as the addresser, the two
identified group members as the focal addressees of his
message, and the rest of the group as the unaddressed
participants (Goffman 1981). While John's identification of

the two group members may help clarify his arguments, it may

104

be considered less polite to construct a participant
framework in which specific individuals are explicitly
identified as the intended recipients rather than general

audiences of disagreements.

Another way to issue a disagreement with redressive
action in a multiparty communication is to align the
participants in such a way that the person being disagreed
with is explicitly located and implicitly substantiated by
the comparison with others. Usually the strategy to avoid
displaying explicit or direct disagreement toward a person
with one particular opinion is done by nominating several
people with opposing opinions and showing agreement with
them. In such a case, the participant framework is composed
of positions taken as addresser, ratified addressee, and
cited addressee. A ratified addressee is someone who is
given an official status as the recipient of talk in a
social encounter. I define a cited addressee as a ratified
addressee who, due to particular causes, receives special
attention by being explicitly referred to by the speaker in
the frame. Those recipients who are mentioned in particular
in an utterance become cited addressees while the others
stay as ratified addressees. I make a distinction between a
cited addressee and a focal addressee. The creation of a

focal addressee in a multiparty communication makes the rest

105

of the parties unaddressed participants while the creation
of a cited addressee treats every party as a ratified
participant. In a multiparty communication, two or more
participants are sometimes differentiated from the rest of
the participants to serve special discourse goals.

In the present study, the cited addressees were often
used for the implication of disagreement. In other words,
the addresser's indirect disagreement with a cited addressee
is implied by his agreement with other cited addressees who
hold contrary viewpoints to those of that particular
addressee. By doing so, the speaker violates Grice's Maxim
of quantity ("Don't say more than you need to") and thus
"conversational implicature" can be incurred. The
implication is arrived at by saying what is beyond the
necessary "conversational contribution such as is required"
(Grice 1975:45). For example:

Excerpt 18 (Dong, disagreeing with Fang-chih on
euthanasia.)

. _ . . _ . . I 1] I
Wf brain died ,
euthanasia is admitted. ...

Here, Dong's disagreement with Fang-chih's position on
the issue of euthanasia was implied in his agreement with
Akira's viewpoints. Since Akira held contrary viewpoints to
those of Fang-chih on the issue, agreeing with Akira may
imply disagreement with Fang-chih.

One might argue that Dong's utterance may also be

explained as agreeing with Akira without the intention to

106

disagree with Fang-chih, or as letting the instructor know
he had been, as a diligent student, reading everybody's
e-mail messages as required. However, the implication of
disagreement with Fang-chih was made stronger when the two
parties holding contrary positions were clearly identified
and mentioned together for comparison. Dong could have
simply indicated his agreement with Akira without mentioning
Fang-chih at all if he had no intention to imply more than
his agreement with Akira. In that case he would not have
violated Grice's Maxim of quantity. If we assume that Dong
follows the Gricean maxim, we will infer that Dong is
implying disagreement with Fang-chih in his utterance.

When asked in the interview why he constructed his
utterance this way in this excerpt, Dong replied, "I think
Akira is right. I agree with him. Brain is the most
important to our life. If brain is dead, we are dead. Then
we can use euthanasia....Her idea is strange. I don't think
she make sense but I don't want to say it so clearly. It's
too much if I say so." Dong's statement first indicated his
agreement with Akira but then exhibited his reluctance to
openly oppose Fang-chih. It seems there were multiple
discourse goals co-existing in Dong's utterance: arguing his
own viewpoints on the issue, agreeing with Akira, and
disagreeing with Fang-chih. Dong's utterance may probably
best be read as "I read Akira and Fang-chih's e-mail.
actually, I agree with Akira (and I don't agree with

Fang-chih)." By not commenting on Fang-chih, Dong in effect

107

displayed his disagreement with her viewpoint. The purpose
for the implication in this utterance was not to achieve
communicative clarity but to attend to the modesty face want
of Fang-chih.

Another example is seen in the above—mentioned Excerpt
16 where Kenji used the same strategy to avoid explicit
disagreement with Yenmin. Although Kenji mentioned that he
would respond to the "monday person" (Yenmin) in the
beginning of his e-mail, he never explicitly responded to
her in any way. What could be accounted for as his
responses to Yenmin would be those contrasting viewpoints
implicitly directed toward her. His response to Yenmin was
made so implicit that his care for Yenmin's modesty face
want could not have been easily identified if he had not
been questioned on the relevant issues in the interview. In
other words, Kenji's politeness was achieved at the expense

of communicative clarity.

W

One the one hand, politeness was achieved by avoiding
explicitly locating the cited addressee in
disagreement/criticism. On the other hand, politeness was
facilitated by explicitly locating a particular participant
in acts that are oriented toward the face wants of the

addressee. For example:

108

Excerpt 19 (Yenmin)

I appreciate that Dayid talked about the recycling

problems in Hong Kong and Lim talked about those in

Korea. I've learned a lot. Thank you!

In this excerpt, two of Yenmin's group members were
explicitly identified for compliments. While the lack of
paralinguistic and extralinguistic features in discourse
using e-mail as medium usually put extra demands on the
speaker to clarify the context by explicit identification of
the interactants, the explicitness in identifying
interactants is actually optional. There are other ways to
indicate the compliments in this case. For example, the
speaker may say: "two people in our group talked about
recycling problems in Hong Kong and Korea. I've learned a
lot." Or "the recycling problems in Hong Kong and Korea
were discussed. I've learned a lot." Instead Yenmin
manipulated the participant framework in such a way to align
David and Lim as the addressed recipients and others in the
group as unaddressed recipients of the compliment,
increasing the satisfaction of the solidarity face want of
the addressees.

Such is also the case in Excerpt 20, in which each
individual fellow group member was incorporated, one by one,
into a participant framework that provided a direct and
close interactional relationship between the addresser and
each addressee. The construction of frame in this way helps

increase the solidarity between the interactants. It is

obviously more polite to construct consecutive small

109

one-to-one participant frameworks for appreciation (i.e.,
"Thank you, Adil, Lim, David and Kenji.") than to construct
a generic one that would not explicitly identify each
participant (e.g., "Thank you all!").

Excerpt 20 (Yenmin in the last e-mail assignment of the
course at the very end of the term.)

During this semester, I really enjoy discussing with
you guys... Right here, I would like to give my thanks

to you again. Thank you, Ad111_L1m1_Day1d_and_Kenl1.

The same strategy could be used in situations where
FTAs occur and the addressee's modesty face wants need to be
satisfied. For example:

Excerpt 21 (David, apologizing to Yenmin for potential
offense.)

one of the point that monday person point out, Her

mother have cancer and she was dead later, I feel sorry

for you and if i say some offensive, please forgive

TEllipsis (...) indicates my omission of text.]

In Excerpt 21, David's apology to the potential damage
to Yenmin's face was carried out in a participant framework
that particularly aligned Yenmin as the addressed recipient
so that his apology would be seen as sincere. The strength
of David's apology came not just from his words, but also
from the way he constructed the frame at the moment of
interaction with Yenmin.

As well as using construction of participant framework
as a strategy for being polite, speakers also switched

participant framework from one particular frame to another

as an attempt to address the hearers' face wants.

110

E E I. . E I SJ'E

The participant frameworks in an e-mail message are
usually dynamic and exist only in the moment of an action.
Very often, a single e-mail message may contain various
participant frameworks, which are in constant shift to meet
the discourse goals of the speaker at the moment. Excerpt
22 demonstrates such participant framework shifts.

Excerpt 22 (Yenmin's e-mail)

Hi! This is Yenmin. I'm so happy this week because
everyone in our group seems know how to use E—MAIL.
I've already received a lot of response from David,
Adil, Lim and Eddie. Thank you, everybody! I called
this topic to be "Happy Union" because we're just like
a family to learn and communicate together. Even though
we don't have too many opportunities to talk in class,
we can understand each other by the computer.

Right now, I'd like to discuss about last week's topic.
First, I want to talk about (STATE'S) winter. It was
the topic I chose last week and I've got response from
my group members except Adil who chose another topic,"
Is ESL a good place to learn English?" I think it's
maybe a little confused to Adil. Nevertheless, I'm glad
to response both questions.

It seems most of you think (SCHOOL) is too cold to
stay. One of you think it depends individually...

Response to Adil:

Hi! I can tell your anger about EL. In fact, a lot of
international students complain its policies and exam,
but most people seem just endure this situation because
it's no use to argue with the ESL staffs. Since it's
one of school policy for people who fail the exam must
take English classes, we just can recognize that our
English really needs to improve. Actually, after
studying in EL, I can feel my progress in English,
especially in writing. However, what I can't understand
is I can't show it on the test. I think it was unfair
to caculate our score by 20% & 80% when I studied at
300 level. The score of the final exam is 80% and the
score of the teachers is only 20%. That means most of
our scores are depended on the final exam. If you have
a bad grades on the final, you will fail even though
your teachers have given you a very high grades. In 400

111

level, I think it seems to be more fair because the
score caculating is 50% to 50%. Therefore, 1_hgpe

i] IJiEJ'll'J' 1'!
Wm After all, we're not

native speakers. Teacher can't expect our English to be

perfect and then we can study for academic classes. In

fact, when we stay here with native speakers or study
for academic classes, we've already had a lot of
opportunities to improve our English abilities.

This week's new topic .

"Which type of society do you believe predominately

exist in the US, in (CITY)?" In my observation, "Matter

recycling" society exists in the US, in (CITY)...

In the language event under inquiry the receiving end
of an e—mail message included a group of message recipients
who were often treated as different individuals as well as a
unitary audience. To some degree, the speaker has the
freedom to define the relationships between the addressees
and himself or herself. The speaker's freedom to manipulate
the participant framework gives him or her flexible
strategic resources to meet his or her discourse goals of
the moment. Shifting the participant framework is one way
to achieve the goals. In the excerpt above, there are
several switches of participant frameworks involved in a
single e-mail message. Shifts of participant frameworks can
be depicted either explicitly or implicitly depending on the
discourse goals of the speaker. A speaker may explicitly
indicate the switch of a particular participant framework
for an on-record purpose or he or she may switch the
participant framework without any explicit indication.

Here, first Yenmin constructed a participant framework

that positioned herself as the addresser and everyone else

112

in the group as the addressees for the general message.

Then the participant framework was shifted to ones that

involved only those who contributed to the discussion of
relevant topics.

For example, the way Yenmin responded to David and Lim
on the winter explicitly aligned them as the addressed
recipients and positioned Adil, who chose a different topic,
as the unaddressed recipient. This shift helped clarify the
context of Yenmin's response.

In her response to Adil, Yenmin once again switched the
participant framework to align him as the focal recipient of
the message, and positioned the rest of the group as
unaddressed recipients by an explicit description of the
change of framework "Response to Adil." As the focus of
topic changed, the participant framework changed. In the
same paragraph, Yenmin further shifted the participant
framework from one that animated Adil as the focal addressee
to one that positioned everyone as the addressed recipients
for her opinions about the grading system of the EL.

Finally the participant framework was shifted to one
that positioned the instructor, who was usually placed as an
unaddressed recipient of the discussions, with other
unratified participants (other teachers in the EL) as the
focal addressees. The purpose of Yenmin's shift of
participant framework to one that involved the instructor of
the course and other instructors of the same institution was

for her to request a fairer grading system. This shift of

113

frame without explicit indication gave Yenmin the chance to
be able to do her FTA without directly damaging the
instructor's autonomy face want.

Another example of shifting participant framework,
which had a strong indication of politeness, is illustrated

in Excerpt 23.
Excerpt 23 (David's argument on euthanasia)

First of all, I would like to clear about my
side of this topic. I don't really know what is the
voluterary or involunterary euthanasia or mercy
killing. But I think every people have their rigth to
control their life and so people shouldn't decide what
is right or what is wrong. It just like abortion, Who
can decide should have or shouldn't have abortion and
should they legeal or shouldn't they?? one of the point
that mendeyeperegn point out, Her mother have cancer
and she was dead later, I feel sorry for yen and ifi_1
WWW

suffer some pain during the
end of her life but I think that there may be have
some people that don't want to see one of their family
member suffer these pain and they would like to see
them die peacefully. But on the other hand, Every body
would like to stay with their family as long as they
could, like mendey_pereen mother. So I think It is kind
of hard to decide which should be right and I think
that is depend on the family.

Here, David began to construct his participant
framework in such a way that he positioned himself as the
addresser, Yenmin as a cited addressee and the rest of the
group as the addressed recipients. The frame was
constructed for David to be able to address to the whole
group without too much involvement in interpersonal
interactions.

Later, when a disagreement of a sensitive nature was

directed to Yenmin, David was very cautious about the

114

seriousness of a potential offense in his disagreement and
thus issued an apology to mitigate the FTA. However, an
apology issued in the original participant framework was
probably not felt by David to be strong enough to be able to
mitigate the serious threat to Yenmin's modesty face want.
David eventually shifted his participant framework from one
that positioned Yenmin as a cited recipient to one that
particularly positioned her as the focal recipient of the
apology. By positioning Yenmin as the focal recipient of
the apology, David was able to intensify his redressive
action (apology) in an exclusive speaker-addressee relation
and hence became more polite.

Once David's discourse goal of the moment was achieved,
he switched back to the original participant framework to
invite the rest of the group once again as addressed
recipients in order to get them involved in his arguments.
This case provides evidence for the effect of concern for
face on the shift of participant frameworks. The shift of
participant framework itself may or may not constitute a
redressive action, but it surely can intensify a redress or

an FTA .

I I I E I. . I. E I

As stated above, participation framework consists of a
set of positions individuals may take in relation to talk.
The concern for face wants has significant effects on the

way someone is depicted in a talk. Because of the

115

pre-determined turn-taking system in the language event in
this study, a speaker was able to utilize the turn-taking
system to create address terms in a way that is closely
related to the face concerns of the participants. For
example, participants were animated as particular figures
that displayed fewer personal attributes in FTAs. Since
every participant in the study was assigned a particular day
for him/her to do the e-mail assignment, a functional
address term, such as Monday person or Tuesday person, was
often interchanged with other identification of the
participant. For instance, one may be identified in e-mail
by first name, Monday person, or even more general terms
such as "someone" or "some people." A semantically neutral
expression, such as "Monday person," can become face-laden
and function as an addressee distancer in the talk. It was
often observed that a particular participant was animated in
such a way as to indicate care for face wants of the
participants. That is, the purpose is to keep the addressee
distant from the FTAs so that the threats to his face may be
minimized.

The example can be seen in Excerpt 16 in which Yenmin
was animated as the Monday person, a functional address
term, to reduce her identification in the message. In fact,
Kenji never addressed any group member except for Yenmin by
functional address terms. The fact that Kenji was an old
acquaintance of Yenmin and he always addressed Yenmin or any

of the group member by their first names in every occasion

116

makes it a strong indication that his use of the functional
address term was for polite purpose. In other words,
Kenji's addressing Yenmin as "the monday person" is
primarily to reduce the unwelcome effects of direct
disagreement toward her. In contrast, the following excerpt
illustrates Kenji's effort in constructing a participation
framework for agreement, which involved figures that were
clearly identified by their personal names rather than
functional address terms.

Excerpt 24 (Kenji's continued discussion on abortion
issue)

Aa_Xenmin_eeid, most of pro-side people knows
that abortion is not things that we should always do or

support. This is something that we sometimes have to
do, knowing and feeling guilty somehow.

WWW this is something that we

suold be more careful in everyday life. Because,

afterall, this is so complexed and controversial issue,

which also is full of conflict.
See you in class,
Kenji.

The use of personal names by Kenji in this excerpt was
the normal usage when he mentioned someone in his group.
Since there was no need to be concerned about damage of the
addressee's face in agreement, Kenji did not bother to
create a figure that had fewer personal attributes.

Another example of the manipulation of participation

framework can be seen in Excerpt 25.

Excerpt 25 (Adil, complaining about Yenmin's English
errors.)

Hello every body.

This is Adil. Actually I 'm really enjoying the
E—mail discussions, and I think they're going to be
helpful to all of us. However, we have had a lot of

117

grammar and spelling mistakes since we got started. 1;

WW
be transferred to all of us with out knowing if we are
doing it or not...

Here Adil was complaining about the grammatical and
spelling errors Yenmin made in her previous e-mails. As
Goodwin points out, "speaker does not simply cite addressee
in his talk but simultaneously comments on the cited
character and formulates him in a particular way" (1990:80).
The way Adil cited and animated Yenmin indicated his concern
for Yenmin's modesty face want. It was done by animating
her as someone who shared common attributes with other group
members. First Yenmin was depicted as a second language
learner so that "it is natural result" to make the mistakes.
Later Yenmin was addressed as a student just like every
other member in the group. What identified Yenmin as the
responsible party for the English mistakes was the order of
the speaking turn in the current language event (first
student) rather than her personal identity (Yenmin). The
follow-up e-mail message discussing the same event by Adil
himself (See Excerpt 27) and the interview with Adil
revealed that his complaint about language errors was
directed toward Yenmin. By animating a figure in this way,

Adil was able to indicate his concern for Yenmin's modesty

face want to some degree while issuing his criticism.

118

I I I l H II . J E . . . E . . .
Framework

Very often a speaker would create figures that were not
ratified participants in the utterances. The creation of
hypothetical figures in a particular participation framework
was observed to serve the function of politeness strategies
in situations in which damages to the face wants of the
addressees were expected. For example:

Excerpt 26 (Yenmin, arguing against abortion.)

After reading your responses, It seems most of you
agree with pro-choice. In my opinion, I think the world
become more and more chaos because people care too much
about human being's needs. People always have a lot of
excuses when they want to support their benefits, and
they often ignore some other innocent things or lifes.
For example, when people shoot animals for sports, they
think it's not only a fun thing to do but also a

wonderful exercise If_xeu_blame_them_fer_killing
an1mals1_thex_w1ll_ersue_w1th_¥eu1_these_eneeiees_ef
. J 1'1] I . J II .

quantieiee1 However, nowadays there are a lot of
endangered animals because ancient people ignore their
quantities and kill them for food or for fun. Even
though our natural science is predominant, nobody can
promise any kind of animals .won' t disappeare in the
world. ' '

d9, but some people still enjoy that because shooting
animals can make them feel satisfied but not quilty.
Denlt_xeu_th1nk_that_netien_eeme_frem_neenlels
eelfiehneeel Compared to abortion, some people think
it's a way to control the world population. Sinee_ue

haxe_eeme_ether_wexs_te_de_eentraeent1en1_wh¥—de_we

] I I. I I'll . i . J J'E 9
AetuallM1_mest_ef_zeu_denlt_think_ahertien_1s_a_r19ht
thins_te_de. inst_heeause_neenle_need_1t1_se_we_sheuld
allew_1t_te_be_legel1 I think this notion will cause
more disasters for people because human being's desires
are endless. When we achive our purpose, we probably.
will ask for more desires. We shouldn't just care about
people's desires, especially for something bad, and
ignore the truth and the moral.

I think we should ask ourselves to discipline our
sexual life and try our best to do contraception.

119

Here, Yenmin was arguing against abortion by giving a
comparison between animal hunting and abortion. The motive,
Yenmin argues, for killing animals was people's selfishness.
By then comparing people who selected to do abortion with
animal killers, Yenmin implies that the two groups have the
same motive. Since all her group members supported
abortion, criticizing people doing abortion for selfishness
in the real world might transgress the face of her
addressees.

Narratives show "how individuals recount their
histories - what they emphasize and omit, their stance as
protagonists or victims, the relationship the story
establishes between teller and audience - all shape what
individuals can claim of their own lives." (Rosenwald and
Ochberg 1992:1). They do not only reveal who the narrator
is, but also tell how he or she sees the world. As Riessman
points out, in a narrative, a speaker "takes a listener into
a past time or 'world' and recapitulates what happened then
to make a point, often a moral one" (l993:3). The narrative
Yenmin created is a hypothetical narrative. Hypothetical
narratives are those "which depict events that did not
happen" (Riessman 1993:18). In addition to making a point,
Yenmin's creation of a hypothetical narrative allows her to
address face concerns. The people in the hypothetical
narrative were created and animated through the constructed
excuse as very selfish people who deserved the blame of

wrong doing. By adding the hypothetical people into the

120

frame and further animating her addressees as people who
were willing to blame the selfishness of those hypothetical
people ("If you blame them for killing animals"), Yenmin was
able to minimize the differences between her addressees and
herself before she approached the more sensitive abortion
issue. The creation of the hypothetical participants in
this message served as an example for people's selfishness
and also gave Yenmin an opportunity to assume her group
members were not as selfish as those she criticized and
therefore implied that her criticism was not directed toward

her group.

I 1 5 E I. . I. E 1 fl 'fl

The shifts of the participation frameworks created by
the functional address terms further provide the speaker
with strategic resources for a particular discourse goal of
the moment of interaction. This discourse goal may be
politeness-related. For example:

Excerpt 27 (Adil, responding to Yenmin's request for
clarification on the criticism of her grammatical and
spelling mistakes.) [Relevant previous e-mail message
is italicized.]

Yenmin:

Hi, Adil! Thank you for caring about our grammar and
spelling mistakes. Hewever, I don't understand why you
say,"...a mistake from the first student can be
transferred to all of us..." would you please explain
this more clear? I think that the function of EeMail is
a bridge for communication. we should care more about
our ideas but not grammar or.mechanica1 errors.

Yenmin

121

Adil:

H11_X_enm1n1
This is Adil first thing WW

fgr_ygnr_xespgnd. What I wanted to say is whatever
Grammar or spelling mistakes from the_MQnday_persQn can

be transferred to the_Inesday;persgn and the same will

happen to all of us. Because we_are_using_the_same

WW

Here, Adil responded to Yenmin's request for
clarification by addressing Yenmin as the focal recipient,
the rest of the group members as unaddressed participants
and himself as the speaker in the beginning. Throughout the
message, the participant framework was held constant but the
positions of both Yenmin and Adil animated in the
participation framework were undergoing changes.

First Yenmin and Adil were animated as figures that
acted as specific individuals interacting with each other.
Second, both the speaker and the addressee were animated as
figures that acted not as two specific individuals but as
two general positions assigned by a pre—determined turn-
taking system when it came to the criticism of spelling and
grammar mistakes. That is, the participation framework was
changed from Adil vs. Yenmin to Tuesday person vs. Monday
person when the criticism was mentioned.

This switch of participation positions was functionally
critical to the maintenance of the relationships between the
two of them because Yenmin was the Monday person, who was
responsible for transferring the mistakes to the group while

Adil himself was the Tuesday person, who was supposed to be

the first victim by the mistakes. The switch to a

122

participation framework that focused on functional
attributes of the participants reduced the strength of the
criticism in a confrontational situation.

Later, both were animated by the first person plural
pronoun "we" as figures that shared commonality in the
target language and topic and were equally vulnerable to be
victimized by the mistakes made "by any one" in the group as
well. By switching the participation positions of the two
main characters in the same participant framework, Adil was
able to avoid harsh and direct criticism of Yenmin and to
show his care of her modesty and solidarity face wants. In
general, the participation framework was shifted from one
that animated Yenmin and Adil as two different protagonists
in a one-to-one interaction to one that depicted them as
people sharing common characteristics generated by the pre-
determined functional address terms and eventually to one
that animated both as unitary recipients subject to the same
language mistakes. Politeness was thus achieved by the
shifts of participation frameworks proceeding in the
direction that gradually decreased the differentiation
between the two main characters in the event.

Adil's manipulation of both the participation framework
and participant framework in this case displayed the
complexity of e-mail discourse. Adil was attempting to show
his care for Yenmin's modesty and solidarity face wants in
his manipulation of participation framework shifts. In

addition, Adil created a participant framework that invited

123

the rest of the group as the unaddressed participants after
Yenmin's private challenge of clarification suggested his
intention to criticize or even embarrass Yenmin on her
errors in public. The selection of the participant
framework and the participation framework provided Adil with
strategic resources to achieve his discourse goal of the
moment (criticizing Yenmin) while maintaining politeness on
the surface level at the same time. In the interview, it
was pointed out by Yenmin, who was apparently annoyed by
this strategic use of participant framework, that Adil's
criticism of her linguistic mistakes and his answer to her
request for clarification "should have been sent as private
mails. It should have been sent to me directly. He
shouldn't have seEdWit to everybody to read. Didn't others
receive this mail too? Isn't it weird, right? I feel it is
very weird. Isn't it embarrassing?" If Adil was indeed
trying to be polite, he could have just sent his criticism
to her privately to save her from public embarrassment.
Another example of participation framework shift with
politeness function can be observed in Excerpt 26. As
described above, the debate on abortion was pursued by two
opposing sides of the group: Yenmin vs. the rest of the
group. By the shifts of participation frameworks in her
e-mail message, Yenmin was able to demonstrate her concern
for the face wants of her group members. First, Yenmin and
the rest of the group members were described in the frame as

figures who had contrary viewpoints from each other in the

124

issue of abortion (e.g., "it seems most of you agree with
pro-choice."). Later, they were animated as figures who
would hold the same position on the issue of hunting animals
(e.g., "If you blame them for killing animals,...") when the
hypothetical participants were introduced. As Yenmin's
arguments developed, the participation framework was once
again shifted to one in which Yenmin herself was animated as
someone who was included in the opposition group by the use
of first person plural pronoun "we" or "us" (e.g., "why do
we choose abortion to kill an innocent and potential
life?"). The shifts in the participation frameworks
advanced in a direction in which the same logical thinking
process and viewpoints of the speaker and the addressees
were presumed, thus mitigating the disagreements and

criticisms generated by the speaker.

13W

While how to construct both participant and
participation frameworks may depend on the speaker's
discourse intention, e-mail communication provides the
speaker with a more flexible and convenient way to construct
interactional environments than face-to-face interaction.
As introduced in Chapter One, computer-mediated
communication provides users with a non—face—to-face
interactional environment in which unique language features

are developed. Since e-mail interaction is asynchronous,

125

users are often relieved from the immediate interactional
pressure that people often face in face-to-face interaction.
E-mail users are left ample time to meditate upon how to
construct and edit their discourse to meet their
communicative goals before actually sending out their final
linguistic productions. The time to reflect upon and edit
what one has in mind before actual linguistic production in
e-mail may be attributable to the features of written
language. However, written features are not the only
features seen in computer-mediated communication.
Interactive Written Discourse shows "heavy involvement...
traditionally associated with oral language and face-to-face
interaction" (Ferrara et al. 1991:22). The study of Ferrara
et al. claims that "computer-mediated human-to-human written
discourse, an emerging hybrid variety of language, displays
features of both oral and written language" (1991:23). The
participants in computer-mediated communication are actually
given more flexibility in their expressions than those in
face-to-face communication in terms of the choice of
oral/written discourse styles.

Furthermore, e-mail communication provides the user
with an extra interface that may serve as a strategic
resource for communication. On the one hand, a speaker who
prefers to have person-to-person interaction in e-mail may
choose to engage in interactional discourse by ignoring the

interface between him and the addressees. Such is what was

126

displayed in Excerpt 28 in which the speaker attempts to
have close interpersonal relationships with the addressees.

Excerpt 28 (Kenji)

What's up, evrybodyl? I'm so sorry again that I 'm

about a week late, and also that I had so many

misspelling on the last E-mail discussion. I'v must
been ****ed up. One more thing, thanks a lot for this

telnet conversation. You guys have been so great, I

sure will miss E-mail disscussion, believe it or not.

On the other hand, a speaker who wants to keep distance
from his interlocutors or to avoid the unwelcome effects of
FTAs may select to engage in a transactional discourse by
focusing himself on person-to-computer interaction.

Knowing that no immediate feedback and interaction could be
obtained through e—mail, a speaker may act as if he is
primarily involved with a computer or the e-mail mailing
system rather than his interlocutors because what he faces
physically is a computer terminal and the e-mail interface.
At times it may be preferable to engage with a terminal,
thus eliminating the immediate pressure for attending to the
face wants of the participants in a person-to-person
environment.

For instance, a speaker may not need to worry as much
in a human-to—computer interaction about the face wants
related to interruptions, or questions, that often occur in
face-to-face discussions. By becoming involved in human-to-
computer interaction, a speaker may display disinterest in

interpersonal interaction or intentional distance from FTAs.

Such is the discourse style Fang-chih typically used to

127

indicate her detachment in most of her e-mail messages. For
example:
Excerpt 29 (Fang-chih)
From: Fang-chih
To: group3@machine.school.edu
Subject: e-mail exercise
Topic: Environment crisis
Environment crisis can range from air, water,
soil pollution, the over exploit of natural resources
such as lands, mine and the increasing population of
human being, greenhouse effect ect.

Here, it looks as if the primary function of Fang-
chih's message was to fulfil the e-mail requirement by
filling up the blank spaces and screens on the e-mail system
with her opinions rather than talking to her group members
as persons. By focusing on the transactional discussion of
the topic, Fang-chih was able to keep distance from her
group members in a way that would seem awkward, if not
impossible, in face-to-face classroom discussions. In the
interview, Fang-chih indicated that even if she wanted to do
the same as what she did in her e-mail messages, it would be
hard for her to keep so much distance from her group in
face-to-face discussion with ease. She said: "Sometimes I
disagree with others, but I won't say anything. It's just
my personal characteristics. I don't like to argue with
others. I just focus on my viewpoints. In e-mail, it's
easy to do so. But in face-to-face group discussion, I

can't just continue to present my viewpoints without

considering others' reactions." Fang-chih's deliberate

128

concentration on transactional discourse was in part a way
showing her reluctance of transgressing the face of her
addressees.

Discussions via e-mail are characterized by the ease of
switching interactional environments where the choice of
oral/written language features, discourse styles,
involvement in the event, and participant and participation
frameworks are all affected. The hybrid features of
language used in e-mail allow the users more freedom to
switch to different discourse styles in a single language
event. Users of e-mail are also allowed more choices in
pursuing interpersonal interaction. The mass communication
capability and the structure of e-mail discussions further
allows users more flexibility in constructing various
combinations of participant frameworks in a single speaking
turn than oral discussions.

The study shows that computer-mediated communication is
capable of transmitting natural richness and interactions of
interpersonal communication, which are not determined by the
medium, but rather by the discourse goals of the speakers.
These participants in the present study, inexperienced in
e-mail in general, are quite capable of manipulating their
language to match the unique characteristics of the
communication medium and this speech event. E-mail provides
a more flexible environment for language users to exploit
this new medium and the language activity for their

communicative goals.

129

In this chapter, I distinguished two slightly different
and yet intertwined phenomena: participant frameworks and
participation frameworks. I described how innovative users
of e-mail were capable of manipulating these frames to
mitigate disagreements and criticisms at a global level.

The next chapter will be devoted to the discussion of Brown
and Levinson's dichotomous face and politeness concept.
Further discussions will focus on the inadequacy of their
theory to deal with the fuzziness and ambiguity of

politeness strategies that were often found in the data.

CHAPTER FIVE

AMBIGUITY OF POLITENESS STRATEGIES

This chapter will be devoted to the analysis of
the problematic and controversial aspects of Brown and
Levinson's (1987) politeness strategies used in this study
at the speech act level. It will point out the inadequacy
of adopting Brown and Levinson's (1987) framework of
politeness to categorize particular linguistic features or
constructions into either positive or negative politeness.
It will argue instead that the politeness strategies found
in the study are ambiguous in terms of Brown and Levinson's
classification. Five types of mitigating strategies
discussed by Brown and Levinson (positive politeness
strategy 6: avoid disagreement; negative politeness strategy
2: hedges; negative politeness strategy 4: minimize the
imposition; negative politeness strategy 6: apology;
negative politeness strategy 7: impersonalize S and H ) will

be particularly discussed (cf. Table One).

ill—Intrndnntion
The e-mail discourse in the current study is
particularly characterized by avoidance of direct

disagreement at both speech act level and discourse level.

130

131

Participants not only skillfully manipulated the participant
framework (Goffman 1974) to soften the unwelcome effects of
disagreements at global level (see Chapter Four), they also
used mitigating strategies locally, such as hedges, apology,
impersonalizing speaker (S) and hearer (H), or distancing H
from face-threatening acts (FTAs), for the same purpose.
However, many of the politeness strategies used at local
levels are ambiguous in nature when Brown and Levinson's
(1987) framework of politeness is used as the interpretive
basis (cf. Section 1.7.2). For example, the "minimizing
imposition" technique used to reduce face damage by
disagreement is found to have little to do with either a
redressive attempt to respond to H's want not to be coerced
(negative politeness) or to respond to H's want of his or
her self-image or want to be desirable (positive
politeness). This causes confusion in determining the
precise nature of a politeness strategy if Brown and
Levinson's (1987) framework is used as the only basis for
interpretation. Researchers doing quantitative analysis on
politeness need to re—think the significance of their
findings if Brown and Levinson's (1987) theory of politeness
is used as the framework for their research.

The ambiguity of politeness strategies found in the
study points out a need to modify and thereby advance Brown
and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory. Finally this study

attempts to provide, in the next chapter, an alternative

132

interpretation of the politeness behavior found in the study
and suggests a continuum model of face wants and politeness.
Brown and Levinson's (1987) complicated interpretive
framework and numerous detailed examples provide a coherent
theory of politeness. However, their theory is not able to
satisfactorily interpret many of the polite behaviors in
this study when it is tested against the data found in the
discourse of group discussion on e-mail, as will be
illustrated and discussed in the next section. This study
will not only employ but also challenge Brown and Levinson's
(1987) politeness theory with abundant empirical instances.
This study attempts to argue that Brown and Levinson's
(1987) dichotomous "face" framework does not account for the
ambiguous and non-mutually exclusive speech activities in

the study.

Politeness

Brown and Levinson (1987) assert that all on-record
politeness strategies that aim to "give face" to the
addressee can be categorized either as positive or negative
politeness. That is, all the on-record redressive actions
are dichotomized. This dichotomous view of politeness is
derived from the assumptions of two basic human face wants
(cf. Section 1.6.1 for details). Any "face" that one wants
to claim for oneself has to fall into one of the

dichotomized categories. As a result, the politeness

133

strategies are dichotomized as well to redress either side
of the two categories of face wants. Figures 2 and 3
illustrate their dichotomous view of face and politeness.

In section 1.6.3, I discussed Brown and Levinson's
strategies for doing FTAs in detail. Brown and Levinson
claim that politeness strategies are determined by the
estimation of risk of face loss. As Brown and Levinson's
five superstrategies for doing FTAs are listed in a linear
fashion corresponding to the seriousness of face risk (see
Figure 1), there is a continuum in politeness strategies in
terms of the seriousness of FTAs. For example, they assert
that positive politeness strategies are used for less
serious FTAs and negative politeness strategies are for more
serious ones. However, they never conceptualized politeness
strategies as redressive actions towards a continuum of face
wants. Rather, those redressive actions are dichotomized.
In other words, Brown and Levinson believe that there are
continuous relationships between positive and negative
politeness in terms of redress degrees, but there are no
continuous relationships between them in terms of face
redress.

On the one hand, Brown and Levinson (1987) point out
that there may be various degrees of face risk. On the
other hand, I argue that there may also be various degrees
of one's wants being desirable or one's actions being
unimpeded. Though Brown and Levinson see no gradations

between H's "positive" and "negative" face wants, actually

Basic Human face wants

Negative face

claim of territory;
self-determination;
action being unimpeded

 

Positive face

wants (or actions,
acquisitions, values
resulting from them)
being desirable

 

Politeness

Negative Politeness

redressive actions
oriented toward H's
negative face

(S indicates that he
recognizes H's
negative-face want
and will not, or will
only minimally,
interfere with H's
freedom of action.)

 

Positive politeness

redressive actions
oriented toward H's
positive face

(8 indicates that he,
in some respects,
wants H's wants.)

 

Figure 2: Brown and Levinson's View of Face Wants

135

there may be grey areas between these two face wants and the
politeness strategies addressing them. In other words,
Brown and Levinson's framework postulates that no
continuation between positive and negative categories may
exist. Every face want and redressive action has to belong
to one of the two categories of this dichotomous system.
Actually, the want of not being rejected may lie on a
continuum between the want of being liked and the want of
actions being unimpeded. Detailed discussion on the view of
face and politeness as a continuum will be presented in
Chapter Six.

As can be seen in Figure 3, Brown and Levinson's notion
of "face" and the "face-preserving" act is basically
conceptualized as a coin with two distinct faces. No
continuity between the two categories may exist. Every FTA
and redressive action has to belong to one of the two
categories (positive or negative) of this dichotomous
system. This dichotomous framework for a universal
politeness theory is inadequate and simply too broad to be
capable of interpreting some of the politeness phenomena
found in the study. There are at least two potential
problems that can't be satisfactorily dealt with by the
dichotomous view of politeness: (1) the implication of
mutual exclusiveness of politeness strategies, and (2) the
fuzziness and ambiguity of politeness strategies. The

following sections will illustrate these problems.

136

Negative Positive
face, and

face, and
politeness

politeness

Figure 3: Brown and Levinson's Concept of
Face and on-record Politeness

137

J J . E i J' S .

Although Brown and Levinson (1987) did not explicitly
claim that the output politeness strategies are mutually
exclusive, as Aronsson and Satterlund-Larsson (1987) point
out, their systematic and detailed presentation of output
strategies may indirectly suggest a strict hierarchical
ordering which would prohibit the operation of politeness
strategies across classifications. The dichotomous view
basically suggests the mutually exclusive nature of their
"face" concept and politeness strategies. For instance,
what is considered as a "negative" politeness strategy can't
co-exist as a strategy of other categories. However, many
of the politeness strategies used in the study are so
ambiguous in nature that no clear categorical boundary (cf.
Section 1.7.2 for detailed discussion) can be drawn. The
data in this study also suggest the difficulty of
categorizing participants' output politeness strategies as

if they belong to one single clear classification.

5 I E . i E 1' . E E 1' SI I .

In the discourse of argument in these e-mail
discussions, politeness strategies were widely employed by
participants. Those strategies range from redressive
actions that are mainly oriented towards the "positive" face
of H (e.g., "It's nice to see you guys' opinions no matter
they are for or against mine.") to ones that are mainly

oriented towards the "negative" face of H (e.g., "I'm sorry

138

but I think we should change to another topic.") Not all
FTAs threaten only one single face, so not all politeness
strategies can be clearly categorized as either "positive"
or "negative." Actually, the output politeness strategies
derived from Brown and Levinson's (1987) dichotomous "face"
concept are often characterized by fuzziness and ambiguity
rather than clearness, in the discourse of class discussions
in e-mail studied here. The ambiguity of disagreement and
several so-called "negative-politeness" strategies used in
disagreement: minimizing the imposition, distancing, hedge,

and apology will be examined in what follows.

5 I J E 'i E'
Disagreements are extremely common speech moves in the
discourse of class discussion in this study. According to
Brown and Levinson (1987), disagreement is an intrinsic FTA
that threatens the positive face want of the addressee. It
is an act that damages H's positive face, because it shows
that the speaker indicates that he thinks H is "wrong or
misguided or unreasonable about some issue" and that the
speaker does not care about the addressee's feelings and
wants and in some important respect he doesn't want H's
wants (1987:66). Remember that redressive action means
action that attempts to counteract the potential face damage
of the FTA by indicating that no such face threat is
intended and that S in general recognizes H's face wants and

wants them to be achieved (Brown and Levinson 1987:69-70).

139

In the discourse of arguments, a redressive action
qualifying as a "positive politeness" strategy may be one
that addresses H's want of his argument being agreed with.
That is, if a speaker would like to be positively polite in
argument, he may indicate that he has no intention of
disagreeing with H or that he wants to agree with H's
arguments. One of the positive politeness strategies
mentioned by Brown and Levinson (1987) in disagreement is
positive strategy 6: avoid disagreement.

In communicative interaction, people usually tend to
avoid disagreement with their interlocutors in order to
maintain a smooth social relationship. Sacks (1973) notices
that speakers would often twist in a remarkable degree their
utterances to appear to agree with their interlocutors or to
hide their disagreement. It is not surprising that Brown
and Levinson's (1987) positive strategy 6: avoiding
disagreement is a very common strategy used among all
"positive" politeness strategies in arguments in the study.
Token agreement, the mechanisms for pretending to agree with
H, is in turn the strategy used commonly under avoiding
disagreement.

Brown and Levinson illustrate that avoiding
disagreements may be achieved by using token agreement,
pseudo-agreement, or white lies to pretend to agree with the
addressee. It may also be achieved by hiding disagreements
or hedging one's opinions, "so as not to be seen to

disagree" (1987:116). These strategies are classified under

140

the same general strategy (politeness strategy 6) by them
and are regarded as "positive" politeness strategies, the
redressive actions oriented toward H's wants of being
desirable. However, there are differences in degree in
terms of "positive" politeness between strategies used to
pretend to agree and those used to avoid to disagree or to
hide disagreements. When a speaker pretends to agree with
an addressee, what he or she attempts to satisfy may
primarily be the addressee's want being desirable. When a
speaker hides the disagreement or avoids disagreeing with an
addressee, what he or she attempts to satisfy may be a face
want other than just the want being desirable (cf. Section
6.1.2 for detailed discussion). The following examples
Brown and Levinson used for their positive politeness
strategy 6 illustrate the differences in degree in one's
attempt to satisfy the addressee's want being desirable.
Example 1

A: And they haven't heard a word, huh?
B: Not a word. Not at all. Except Mrs. H. maybe.

Example 2

A: Yuh comin down early?

B: Well I got a lot of things to do. I don't know. It

won't be too early.

(Brown and Levinson 1987:114)

Although the strategies used by B in both examples are
classified by Brown and Levinson as strategies oriented
toward H's "positive" face want, they can't be seen as the

same. While the strategy B uses in Example 1 is primarily

to let A know that B attempts to agree with A, the strategy

141

used in Example 2 is to let A know B's hesitation or
reluctance to disagree. If B really wants to indicate his
or her attempt to satisfy A's want being desirable in
Example 2, B might answer "Of course, I'm coming down early
if I can finish the things I need to do in time," instead.
On the one hand, one can avoid disagreement by pretending to
agree with others. On the other hand, one doesn't need to
pretend to agree in order to avoid disagreement with others.
While to pretend to agree and to avoid disagreeing may be
distinguished as two types of strategies, the distinction
between these two strategies is fuzzy. The nature of Brown
and Levinson's "positive" politeness strategy 6: avoiding
disagreement is also ambiguous because it includes
strategies that are not closely related to the satisfaction
of H's want being desired.

There are several types of actions by students in this
study that were used to redress disagreement, including
strategies of both positive and negative politeness.
Strategies that were found in the data and related to the
concept of Brown and Levinson's (1987) positive politeness
strategy 6 include token agreement, minimal agreement,
acknowledgement, hiding disagreement, and minimizing
disagreement. The strategies used to avoid disagreement
varied, ranging from primarily appearing to agree to

basically hiding disagreement with fuzzy boundaries between

nearby strategies.

 

142

Besides the distinction between the attempts to pretend
to agree and those to avoid to disagree, there are actually
various degrees in pretending to agree too. For example,
one may appear to agree with others completely or one may
pretend to agree with reservation before actual disagreement
is voiced later. The data indicate that there are
gradations of politeness strategies whose functions are
either to pretend to agree or to avoid direct, unmitigated
disagreement with others. These gradations suggest that
face may not contain dichotomous values as Brown and
Levinson (1987) propose. The following excerpts illustrate
such gradations. The ambiguity of these strategies will be
discussed.

Excerpt 30 (Dong, disagreeing with Li-yuh on abortion
issue) [Emphasis is indicated by underlining.]

Anyway. W I mean. I'm
against the abortion bascially. Because fetus is
living thing but if a woman is pregnant that she
doesn't want to be, what can she do?

In Excerpt 30, Dong pretends to agree with Li-yuh on
the issue of abortion before he states his actual
disagreement. The strategy Dong used is what Brown and
Levinson (1987) refer to as "token agreement" or Pomerantz's
(1984) "prefaced disagreement." The purpose of "token"
agreement is to appear to agree with H so that S's

disagreement can be softened. According to Brown and

Levinson, Dong's strategy would be seen as a redressive

143

action oriented toward Li-yuh's "positive" face want and

therefore qualify as a "positive" politeness strategy.
Excerpt 31 (Lim, disagreeing with Yenmin's argument
referring to the hypothesis of Koreans' prejudice

against Japanese) [Relevant previous e-mail message is
italicized.]

Yenmin: Hewever, this hypothesis was not accurate.
. . . .
Elng3Tghg—$3%fI1LxrQfEXfiffianfl-allz?-£Qd?¥rn%¥§r

should be not the main reason.

this

LIT: ' old people who lived that time

never forget that.

In Excerpt 31, Lim, who is Korean, disagreed with
Yenmin's argument referring to the hypothesis of Koreans'
prejudice against Japanese in her previous mail. It is
difficult to determine whether Lim's repeating part of
Yenmin's idea was to partially agree with her, or to appear
to agree with her. Unlike a conversation, e-mail discussion
often needs to construct the discourse context by specifying
relevant texts from previous messages in order for the
readers to be able to grasp the meaning. Therefore, a
"token" disagreement (e.g., "yes, but old people who lived
that time never forget that.") in face-to-face conversation
may turn out to be long or repetitive (e.g., "Since I did
not live that time. I do not know the pain of that time. But
old people who lived that time never forget that.") since
repeating some of the texts are necessary for the
construction of contexts. The use of partial repetition by

Lim may serve the purpose of pretending to agree and hence

satisfy Yenmin's "positive" face want.

144

Excerpt 32 (Lim, disagreeing with Yenmin on her
previous e-mail opposing unconditional abortion)

I, of
caurse, think that abortion is very crue act and it
must not happen to everybody. However, the abortion
exist in the world and the problem is very serious
today. Life is the most important thing in the world
and even premature. But something can happen by
accident like mistake or rape.

In that case, if the baby is born, there is also
big problem after they born. The parents will like them
even though they do not want that baby? The person will
happy when he grow up and know about his birht? I
strongly say "NO". Those are the big reasons why I
agree with abortion.

Here, Lim also resorts to "token" agreement. He
displays an effort to appear to agree with Yenmin before his
actual disagreement with her on the issue of abortion.
However, Lim's use of the hedge "I think" indicates a
reservation on his agreement with Yenmin. There is a
gradation of attempts to counteract the potential "positive"
face damage done by disagreement between this excerpt and
the previous two.

Excerpt 33 (Tatyana, arguing against the legalization

of Euthanasia) [Ellipsis (...) indicates my omission

of text.]

Actually I even don't know what to say about it. 1

WW
II 12'11'11 J l I. I]:

... May be some situation will change my
attitude too, but now I don't think that euthanatia
should be legal. At this point I agree with John saying
that people can make mistakes and even person who has
chosen voluntary euthanasia can regret about it at the
last moment of his or her life. And it happens only
because we don't know, I mean even now, we can't
realise the real value of our life.

In Excerpt 33, Tatyana expressed her disagreement with

two of her group members (Wang and Cindy) on the issue of

145

the legalization of euthanasia. Her disagreement was
mitigated by hesitation of showing her own viewpoint on the
issue and a minimal agreement with everyone in the group.
Although Tatyana turned out to oppose the legalization of
euthanasia, she displayed her attempts to avoid face damage
from direct disagreement. However, to what degree the
"positive" face wants of Wang and Cindy were satisfied
remains controversial since Tatyana's appearance of agreeing
with them contradicted her agreement with all the group
members' opinions, which included John's opinions opposing
those of Wang and Cindy. As does Excerpt 32, this excerpt
illustrates a decrease in degree in the speaker's attempt to
pretend to agree with the addressees.

Excerpt 34 (Yenmin, disapproving of Adil's resistance
to discussing the topic chosen by the group)

Except this, I'm curious about the messages from Adil.
Although I've received your response, they are not

related to last week's topic. 1_Lhink_you_gan_ta1k
ammmmmmm
I'll i i' .

In Excerpt 34, Yenmin disagrees with Adil's resistance
to discussing the topic chosen by the group. To be able to
avoid direct disagreement, Yenmin displays her approval of
Adil's irrelevant talk and yet includes a hedge to indicate
her unwilling support. This strategy seems to appeal less
to the appearance to agree with Adil than to the avoidance
of total disagreement with what Adil did in his e—mail.

The strategies used in Excerpts 30 to 34 are what Brown

and Levinson (1987) term "avoid disagreement." They are

146

considered to be positively polite because they all appeal
to H's positive face want. Another type of attempt to avoid
disagreement is illustrated in the following excerpt.

Excerpt 35 (Dong, avoiding direct disagreement with
Fang-chih)

I read Akira and Fang- chih' s e— —mail. actually, l_agree
w1th_Ak1ra. according to Akira, if brain died,
euthanasia is admitted.

Here, Dong, the Thursday person in his group, is
responding to two of his group members, Fang—chih, the
Monday person, and Akira, the Tuesday person, on the topic
concerning the legalization of euthanasia. By indicating
support for one of the two teammates who disagree with each
other, Dong is able to avoid disagreement with anyone in the
group. However, Dong's redressive action (to hide direct
disagreement with Fang-chih) to his FTA (disagreement with
Fang-chih) differs from those politeness strategies in the
above excerpts in that Dong shows no effort to appear to
agree with Fang-chih at all. What Dong does is avoid
directly disagreeing with Fang-chih by focusing his argument
on supporting Fang-chih's opponent, Akira.

As can be seen in Excerpts 30 to 35, the strategies
used had different degrees in 8's desires to pretend to
agree or avoid to disagree with H. The gradations of
strategies found in the data suggest a continuum view of
"face" and "politeness." While some of these strategies
(e.g., those in Excerpts 30 to 33) may be classified as the

same category because they all address H's want of his

147

arguments being desirable, others become ambiguous in
nature. For instance, in Excerpt 35, Dong's politeness act
appealing to Fang—chih's want of her argument's points being
desired was probably overshadowed by her want of her
argument's points not being confronted or rejected in
public. It is disputable whether we may regard these two
wants as the same.

The ambiguity of the politeness strategies found in
this study also occurred in categories that are regarded as
"negative" politeness. The data in the study showed that
some of the politeness strategies that are described and
identified by Brown and Levinson as "negative" politeness
strategies were not redressive actions directed to the
addressee's negative face wants.

The following will be dedicated to the discussion of

these ambiguous strategies.

5 I 2 H' . . E'
Excerpt 36 (David, disagreeing with Yenmin on
euthanasia)

I read two messege from my group and I think this topic
is really interesting. The monday person said that
people should let the people die naturelly and don't
waate the time and money to save the person who is
unconscious. And the tusday person use the religious to
talk about the euthanasia. But I have different idea

about this tOPiC and _l1ttle_d1segree_aheut_the_1dea_en
monday—nereen.

Example 3 (constructed example)

Can I borrow a_11ttle_eugar from You?

148

In Example 3, Brown and Levinson's negative politeness
strategy 4: minimize the imposition, is used. This strategy
is considered to be negatively polite because by claiming
the imposition is small S implies that the coercion is small
and therefore at least part of H's negative-face want, his
freedom of action being unimpeded, may be satisfied. In
Excerpt 36, the strategy David used involves no attempt to
unhinder H's freedom of action or unimpede his attention.

If the minimizing technique is viewed as a negative
politeness strategy, it will cause a problem when used in
disagreement. It may not be adequate to categorize
minimization of disagreement as a negative politeness
strategy because there is no impingement of freedom of
action involved. Unless the act of disagreement is viewed
as an imposition and therefore would damage H's negative
face, disagreement itself, based on Brown and Levinson's
assertion (1987), will only be seen as an act threatening
H's positive face. Since there is no imposition involved in
disagreement, there is no way to redress that imposition
caused by disagreement.

That is, if disagreement is an FTA threatening only H's
positive face, as preferred by Brown and Levinson (1987),
minimizing that FTA (disagreement) will be a redressive
action directed to H's positive face want. If disagreement
is an FTA threatening both H's positive face (disagreeing
with H) and negative face (imposing disagreement on H),

minimizing that FTA will be a redressive action of both

149

faces. No matter how disagreement is seen in terms of face
threat, minimizing disagreement can't be a negative
politeness strategy alone.

As described above, the minimization of disagreement in
Excerpt 36 should be counted as a positive strategy since
minimization of positive-face threats (David's disagreement
with Yenmin) is in effect. However, a positive politeness
is, by definition of Brown and Levinson's theory, the
redressive action oriented toward H's positive face, his
want being desirable at least to some others. This is
similar to what Dong displays concerning Fang-chih's
argument in Excerpt 35. David shows no support of Yenmin's
want or idea (at least superficially) in Excerpt 36 except
the use of "little" to indicate partial acceptance of her
points. Although one may argue that "a little disagreement"
may suggest that David tries to imply he agrees with Yenmin
mostly and therefore serves as an indication of his attempt
to satisfy her positive-face want, it still fails to explain
why David wouldn't simply select a strategy that emphasized
his want of Yenmin's opinions being accepted (e.g., "I agree
with you except one little point.") While the avoiding
disagreement strategies in Excerpts 30 to 34 may be claimed
to fit in "positive" politeness because of their
superficially common support of H's points, the one in
Excerpt 36 is ambiguous and can't fit in either one of the

politeness categories Brown and Levinson (1987) proposed.

150

What we have seen here in Excerpt 36 may be a
redressive action that is oriented toward a different human
want that is between the so-called "positive-face" and
"negative-face" wants. I would argue that what David
recognized is Yenmin's want of her values, personality, and
opinions being un-rejected, even though they are not being
desired. Hence the strategy used in Excerpt 36 can't be
readily categorized as positive politeness either because
the strategy used by David is not a redressive action
directed toward the positive public self-image of Yenmin but
rather one that is directed to the recognition of Yenmin's
want of her points to be un-rejected in the discourse of

argument.

5 I 3 I J' 5 i H . E'

Excerpt 37 (Yenmin, disagreeing with her group members
on abortion)

After reading your responses, it seems most of you
agree with pro-choice. In my opinion, I think the world
become more and more chaos because pepple care too much
about humen_he1ng;e needs. Pepple always have a lot of
excuses when thex want to support their benefits, and
they often ignore some other innocent things or lifes.
For example, when people shoot animals for sports, they
think it's not only a fun thing to do but also a
wonderful exercise. If you blame them for killing
animals, they will argue with you,"these specices of
animals are too many, we kill them is to control their
quantities. However, nowadays there are a lot of
endangered animals because ancient people ignore their
quantities and kill them for food or for fun. Even
though our natural scienceis predominant, nobody can
promise any kind of animals won't disappeare in the
world. ' ' ' ' ' '
d9, but some people still enjoy that because shooting
animals can make them feel satisfied but not quilty.

' I

W

151

self1ehneee1 Compared to abortion, epme_peeple think

it's a way to control the world population. Since we

have some other ways to do contraception, why do we

choose abortion to kill an innocent and potential life?

Actually, ' ' ' ' '

' just because people need it, so we should
allow it to be legal. I think this notion will cause
more disasters for people because human being's desires
are endless.

Another strategy frequently used by participants in
their attempts to reduce the unwelcome effects of the
disagreements is what Brown and Levinson (1987) called
negative strategy 7: impersonalize S and H. This strategy
is to implicitly indicate that it is not S's "own wish to
impose on H but someone else's, or that it is not on H in
particular but on some people in general that this
imposition must be made" (Brown and Levinson 1987:187). By
dissociating himself or H from the FTA, S may implicate his
reluctance to impinge. There are two ways to achieve the
dissociation by this strategy: (1) "making it unclear or
generalizing who the agent of the FTA actually is," or (2)
"being vague or non-designatory about who H is" (Brown and
Levinson 1987:187). Once again, this strategy is ambiguous
and it is hard to determine the category it belongs to when
used in disagreements.

For instance, the distancing strategy used in Excerpt
37 appears to be a "negative" politeness strategy, but it is
not oriented toward "partially satisfying (redressing) H's
negative face, his basic want to maintain claims of

territory and self-determination" (Brown and Levinson

1987:70).

152

The issue of abortion has been extended as the
discussion topic for two consecutive weeks as Yenmin
expressed her criticism/disagreement in Excerpt 37. In the
previous week, Yenmin was the only one who took the stand
against abortion in her group. Here, Yenmin was trying to
make her point with some criticisms directed toward her
teammates in a polite way by dissociating them from the FTA
(criticisms).

Notice that there is a parallelism between the two
utterances: "Most people don't think it's a right thing to
do" and "most of you don't think abortion is a right thing
to do." This parallelism suggests that Yenmin was
attempting to compare, if not to equate, "you" in the
abortion issue to "people" in the hunting example. It was
confirmed later in the interview that Yenmin was trying to
be polite while at the same time criticizing her group's
stand on the abortion issue with those utterances. She
described that "it's a hint to my group members and peOple
who do abortion just to avoid their responsibility. It's
more polite and indirect to criticize the people who hunt
than to criticize people who do or agree with abortion
because I am not directly criticizing them. I think they
will understand what I'm really trying to say." By
criticizing the selfishness of the people who realize
hunting is bad and yet still keep doing it, Yenmin was
hoping to get her criticism across to her teammates and

those who agree on abortion in an indirect way. Her effort

153

to keep some distance between her criticisms and the target
indicated her reluctance to damage her group's face want.

According to Brown and Levinson's (1987) dichotomy of
face, the group's face want Yenmin was trying to attend to
falls into the positive face category because by doing the
criticism Yenmin indicates that she doesn't like or want her
group's beliefs or values. However, Yenmin's distancing her
group from her criticism is really not related to the
redressive action that is oriented toward H's positive-face
want either, since what Yenmin did is not indicating her
desire of accepting her group's viewpoints on the abortion
issue at all. Rather she was trying to indicate that she
was not willing to give direct criticism to her group. The
fact that Yenmin showed no interest in pretending to agree
with the viewpoints of her group on the abortion issue
indicates that what she wanted to achieve was not the
positive self-image or personality of her group.

A better interpretation would be that Yenmin recognized
her teammates' want of their standpoints on abortion not
being rejected or criticized rather than being desired.
Brown and Levinson (1987) have been very affirmative on
viewing criticism as an intrinsic FTA threatening the
positive face of H. Unless doing criticism is viewed as an
imposition which may damage H's freedom of action, it is
doubtful that the strategy used in this example would
contain a "negative" attribute in politeness. Unlike the

strategy used in the utterance "One shouldn't sit on a

154

dining table," Yenmin's distancing her group from her
criticism has little to do with the redressive action that
is oriented toward her group's basic want to maintain claims
of territory and self-determination. While viewing
impersonalizing S and H as an exclusive negative strategy is
not plausible in the discourse of criticism/disagreement,
assigning the strategy Yenmin used in Excerpt 37 to either
one of Brown and Levinson's (1987) dichotomy of politeness
would also distort its true nature. Their dichotomous
system of face and politeness is once again too broad and
unable to provide a satisfactory interpretation of why
several strategies originally categorized in a particular

class can be shared by different classes.

5 I I H i . E' I
Hedges are the most common strategies used by the

participants. Lakoff (1972) proposes the term "hedges" to
indicate those words that are able to modify the force of a
speech act. She mentions:

For me, some of the most interesting questions are

raised by the study of words whose meanings

implicitly involve fuzziness - words whose job is

to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy. I will

refer to such words as 'hedges' (1972: 195).

Brown and Levinson state that "a 'hedge' is a particle,
word, or phrase that modifies the degree of membership of a

predicate or noun phrase in a set; it says of that

membership that it is partial, or true only in certain

155

respects, or that it is more true and complete than perhaps
might be expected." (1987:145)

Hedges are considered by Brown and Levinson as mostly
negative strategies and sometimes positive ones (e.g.,
hedging opinions). I would argue that most hedges found in
the data were not used either as negative strategies or as
positive strategies. For example:

Excerpt 38 (Yenmin, disagreeing with the rest of her
group on abortion)

After reading your responses, 1L_eeeme most of you

agree with pro—choice. ln_my_pp1n1en1_l_eh1nk the world

become more and more chaos because people care too much

about human being's needs. People always have a lot of

excuses when they want to support their benefits, and

they often ignore some other innocent things or lifes.

Here, Yenmin, the Monday person in her group, was
responding to the previous week's e-mail messages on
abortion by her group members, who were all holding opposite
viewpoints on the issue. Yenmin used hedges to emphasize
that what she said ("the world become more and more chaos
because people care too much about human being's needs") was
an opinion rather than truth. Since opinions are subjective
and would not always be true, the statements of Yenmin's
group members may not necessarily be wrong. By doing so,
Yenmin was able to reduce the face damage of her group
members. However, what type of face want Yenmin wanted to
redress here is disputable.

Brown and Levinson (1987) are particularly ambiguous on

defining the nature of criticism and disagreement that

threaten the "positive face" want of H and that of hedges.

156

Two points are at issue here: the nature of hedge
strategies, and the imposition force in disagreement.

Brown and Levinson pointed out that "normally hedges
are a feature of negative politeness,... but some hedges can
have this positive-politeness function as well, most notably
(in English): sort of, kind of, like, in a way" (1987:116).
Brown and Levinson's claim of hedges as normally a feature
of negative politeness does not find support in this study.

The hedges Yenmin used in Excerpt 38 ("In my opinion, I
think") are what Brown and Levinson call "Quality hedges"
(1987:164), a negative politeness strategy. "Quality
hedges" have straightforward politeness applications because
those that "weaken S's commitment may redress advice or
criticisms" (Brown and Levinson 1987:171).

According to Brown and Levinson, a hedge for negative
politeness strategy usage is one derived from the motivation
"not to presume and the want not to coerce H" (1987:145).

By "carefully avoiding presuming or assuming that anything
involved in the FTA is desired or believed by H," (1987:144)
S will be able to give redress to H's negative face.
Hedging is basically regarded as an avoidance strategy.
Using hedges means avoiding presumptions about H and his
wants. When S uses hedges to keep ritual distance from H,
the hedges he or she uses would minimize the imposition
force of an FTA.

If the hedges Yenmin used ("In my opinion, I think") in

Excerpt 38 are considered as a negative politeness strategy,

157

what Yenmin attempted to do then would be to avoid presuming
that the criticism/disagreement involved in the FTA was
desired by her group. Her use of hedges would be to reduce
the strength of imposition of her criticism/disagreement.
This assertion of imposition force in disagreement/criticism
would be seriously contradictory to Brown and Levinson's
previous view of disagreement as an FTA threatening only the
positive face of H and therefore is unsatisfactory to the
integrity of their theory.

If Yenmin's use of hedges is considered as a positive
politeness strategy, these hedges failed to address H's
positive face want of their argument points being desirable.
What was accomplished by these hedges was the fuzziness of
Yenmin's criticism and disagreement rather than the
appreciation of her opponents' viewpoints. The purpose of
producing fuzziness by hedges in this case is not to
indicate Yenmin's desire to her group members' abortion
position but to indicate her understanding of their want of
not being criticized or disagreed with. It would be
inadequate to equate the attempt of lessening criticism or
disagreement to that of desiring H's arguments. To be
positively polite to her group members, Yenmin would have
expressed that the opinions of her group members were liked
or agreed with. Here then Brown and Levinson's dichotomous
view of face prohibits them from seeing hedges in

disagreements or criticisms as redressive actions oriented

158

toward partially satisfying something other than the
"positive" face want of H.

Schiffrin (1990) points out that presentations of
opinions are often marked by what is generally termed as

hedges, which may contain linguistic features such as

meta-linguistic cues ("my opinion is"), the use of verbs ("I
think," "it seems"), or hedged modals ("should," "could,"
"would"). Schiffrin defines an opinion as "an individual's

internal, evaluative position about a circumstance"
(1990:244). Opinions "shift a speaker's participation
status that they can be used to negotiate truth and
sincerity in argument" (1990:245). In other words,
"opinions free the speaker (as author) from a claim to
truth, by emphasizing the speaker's claim (as participant)
to sincerity" (1990:245). "This footing change creates a
partial sacrifice of claims to truth for claims to
sincerity: the facts presented by the author cannot remain
undisputed, but the principal's stance toward that
proposition cannot be disputed" (1990:248-9).

That is, as Schiffrin suggests, opinions increase the
negotiability of truth in argument while decreasing the
disputability of one's stand toward that preposition.
Therefore, the hedges Yenmin uses ("In my opinion, I think")
in Excerpt 38 are to indicate that her claim to truth is
disputable and subjective. By showing that her
disagreement/criticism is based on a disputable and

subjective claim to truth, Yenmin will be able to indicate

159

that her disagreement/criticism is not necessarily valid and
hence partially satisfy H's face want of not being
criticized or proved to be wrong. The use of a hedge is
more closely related to 8'3 want not to disagree with H
rather than S's want to agree with H's on his point because
the increased negotiability of truth by opinions does not
necessarily mean the acceptability of each other's opinions.
There is still some difference in degree between these two
face wants and those differences may be qualified to be
further distinguished in order to interpret the politeness
phenomena that occurred in this study.

As described above, the use of hedges in disagreement
often involves the increase of S's claim to sincerity and
decrease of S's claim to truth. The willingness of S to
increase the negotiability of truth by hedges allows the
speaker to indicate that he or she has no desire to
absolutely reject H's points. Hedges used in disagreement
to express opinions are not what Brown and Levinson suggest
as a feature of negative politeness. They are not used to

indicate S's intention to want H's want either.

5 I 5 E J . E' I
Disagreement violates the basic "positive" face want of
the addressee and may cause friction with the addressee
during a communicative interaction. The friction caused by
disagreements may need what Goffman (Goffman 1971) called

"remedial work" to reduce the offense. Goffman claims that

160

the function of "remedial work" is "to change the meaning
that otherwise might be given to an act, transforming what
could be seen as offensive into what can be seen as
acceptable" (1971:109). He points out that accounts,
requests for permission to infract, and apologies are the
three main devices to achieve remediation.

Fraser (1981) also argues that four assumptions must be
true in order for an apology to be valid. The addresser of
an apology must:

I. believe that some act has been done before the time of
speaking,

2. believe that the act is personally offensive to the
addressee,

3. believe he was at least partly responsible for the
offensive act,

4. genuinely feel regret for the offensive act he committed.

While both Goffman and Fraser assumed that apology was
a device for remediation, Brown and Levinson emphasized
apology as a negative politeness strategy, which "performs
the function of minimizing the particular imposition that
the FTA unavoidably effects" (1987:129). They claimed that
"by apologizing for doing an FTA, the speaker can indicate
his reluctance to impinge on H's negative face and thereby
partially redress that impingement" (Brown and Levinson

1987:187). However, all these assumptions of the functions

161
of apologies are incomplete in explaining the way apologies
as a mitigating device were employed in the data of this
study.

While apology can be a remedial device for people to
reduce the offense, it is not exclusively used for remedial
purposes. An apology may serve as a mitigating device for
an offensive act about to occur as well as a remedial device
for an offense already occurred. Actually most of the
apologies in the discourse of argument in this study were
used to mitigate anticipated or accompanying offenses which
resulted from disagreement or criticism.

The following excerpts illustrate the mitigating force
of apology for an expected offense:

Excerpt 39 (David, requesting forgiveness for the
offense)

David: one of the point that monday person point out,
Her mother have cancer and she was dead later, 1_feel
eprry for you and if i say some offensive, pleeee
ferg11e_me,...and the monday person said that her
mother suffer some pain during the end of her life but
I think that there may be have some people that don't
want to see one of their family member suffer these
pain and they would like to see them die peacefully.
In Excerpt 39, David was afraid that his following
disagreement with the way a terminal cancer patient should
be treated at the end of her life would be offensive to
Yenmin since the disagreement involved the reference of the
death of an immediate family of Yenmin. The topic became
highly personal and sensitive and David's apology for his

potential offense is understandable.

162

Although apology was defined by Brown and Levinson
(1987) as a negative politeness strategy, in my data it was
often seen to be used as a redressive action that was not
oriented toward the negative face of H.

Excerpt 40 (Yenmin, disagreeing with David on

conviction record issue)

l;m_eprzy to tell you that it's definitly against

human's right because he is not a criminal anymore

after jail.

For example, in Excerpt 40, Yenmin disagreed with David
on the issue "should conviction record be destroyed after a
person is released from jail?" The strategy she used was to
express her regret for the accompanied offense. By
apologizing right before her disagreement, Yenmin was able
to mitigate the potential unpleasant feelings caused by her
refusal of the face want of her addressee, David. The
apology used was for a mitigating purpose instead of a
remedial one since no offense had been made before the
apology occurred. As the two excerpts show above, the
apology employed here was functioning as a mitigating
strategy for the potential unwelcome effects caused by later
disagreement.

The reason why apology is categorized as a negative
politeness strategy by Brown and Levinson is because it
"involves recognizing the impingement and making amends for
' it" (1987:187). So, a request for forgiveness such as "I'm
sorry to bother you..." acknowledges the impingement and

implies S's reluctance to impinge on H's negative face.

163

While many apologies are used for the indication of S's
reluctance to impinge on H's negative face, some can be used
for S's reluctance to impinge on H's positive face. For
instance, Yenmin's apology may be multi-functional. It may
be used to indicate her reluctance to impinge multiple faces
of David. It may be used to redress the damage to David's
positive face want caused by the FTA as a disagreement ("you
are wrong on this issue"), an accusation ("your assertion
violates human rights"), and that to his negative face want
as an imposition ("sorry to make you listen to my
disagreement and accusation"). The apology Yenmin issued
might have been used as a mitigating strategy aiming at
mitigating the offensive acts that impinge both the positive
and negative face wants of David.
Excerpt 41 (Adil, misunderstanding David and
disagreeing with him on who has the right to decide the
use of euthanasia.) [Relevant previous e-mail message
is italicized.]
David: First of all, I would like to clear about my
side of this topic. I don't really know what is the
voluterary or involunterary euthanasia or mercy
killing. But I think every people have their rigth to
control their life and some
Adil: WW I really did not get
your point of view here. What do you mean by people
have their rigth to control their life. ... It is all
up to the patient himself. Nobody forces the patient

to choose being killed.

David : peopl e
[Ellipsis (...) indicates my omission of text.]

The apology Adil offered here is functioning as
remedial work, which helped to ease the potential infraction

caused by the abrupt interruption. Adil's interruption was

164

done by inserting his own opposing utterances in the middle
of David's message. Although the interruption was not
synchronous and was done in a way that was not able to
interfere with or interrupt David's speech, Adil treated it
as if it were an interruption in a real-time conversation
and offered an apology for the interruption. Furthermore,
Adil's apology might have served as a redress to his
disagreement. Adil chose to use a linguistic strategy to
minimize the potential unpleasant effects in a friction
caused by both the imposition of the interruption act and
the disagreement. If there was no disagreement, Adil would
not need to interrupt and needed no apology.

These excerpts thus illustrate that imposition may
simultaneously co-exist with acts threatening positive face
want such as Adil's interruption and Yenmin's way of
expressing of disagreement. However, it may not always be
so. For example:

Excerpt 42 (Mitsuha, apologizing for his disagreement
on recycling issue)

Hey, this is Mitsuha. How are you doing? I recived the
letter from Monday person, and I am going to response
his opinion and about environmental crisis. So, if you
guys do not understand what I am saying, or if you guys
think that what I am talking about when you guys
finished reading. WELL I
hope you guys understand what I feel and say when I am
writing about this.

In Excerpt 42, Mitsuha was trying to argue against the
empty ideas of recycling to save the environment. He did
not only differ from the rest of his group in viewpoint, he

actually severely criticized those who simply shouted empty

165

slogans on this issue. His request for forgiveness was
derived from his understanding and worry about his
disagreement and criticism and was confirmed in the
interview. When asked why "please forget it, and forgive
me" was used, Mitsuha revealed that "I think my ideas not so
great for others. Others might disagree with me and my idea
may hurt them. So, I apologize." His apology was to
mitigate the illocutionary force of his criticism and
disagreement rather than the imposition of them on his group
members. In other words, Mitsuha didn't apologize for
having his group members listen to his talk, but he did
worry about the potential face damage incurred by the
content of his talk and tried to mitigate the force of his
disagreement and criticism.

Once again, the fact that apology as a negative
politeness strategy is often used for positive face redress
evidences the ambiguity of Brown and Levinson's (1987)
dichotomous politeness framework. Why would a basically
negative politeness technique be used to function as a
positive politeness strategy? An utterance like "I beg to
differ" involves an act that threatens primarily the
positive face of H and very little on H's negative face
since disagreement has little, if any, imposition force on
H's behavior or attention. Even if we take it to the
extreme and assert that every single speech act including
assertions contains imposition to some degree, we are still

incapable of explaining why a speaker wants to choose to

166

minimize the secondary threat force instead of the primary
threat to H's positive face in disagreement.

Although Brown and Levinson did realize that politeness
may be addressed to "any potential aspect of the FTA, not
necessarily just to the most relevant one(s)" (1987:286),
they did not attempt to explain why people would
consistently select a particular aspect of FTA over the most
relevant ones to be addressed. No satisfactory account can
be derived from their positive vs. negative viewpoint of
face and politeness strategies.

As has been demonstrated above, many of the negative
politeness strategies (e.g., negative politeness strategy 2:
hedges, negative politeness strategy 4: minimize the
imposition, negative politeness strategy 6: apology,
negative politeness strategy 7: impersonalize S and H) found
in this study are used as positive ones. An explanation of
the frequent use of negative politeness techniques for
redressing H's positive face wants may be made by arguing
that the FTAs (disagreements, criticisms, interruptions, and
challenges) demonstrated in the study acquire the strength
of imposition to some degree and therefore threaten both the
positive and negative face wants of H. However, other acts
that threaten "positive" face wants of H can't be easily
redressed by negative politeness techniques. For example,
it would be very rare in a normal conversation that did not
involve disagreement, if not strange, to say: "I'm sorry I

didn't call you honey" in a situation where the addresser

167

just remembered that he or she forgot to address the
addressee intimately as expected. A negative politeness
technique would seem awkward in a situation like this. A
proper politeness may be shown by simply doing what the
addressee expects, such as saying "Honey." Similarly,
utterances like "I notice your fantastic garden a little
bit"; "Someone always does the dishes! I'll do them this
time," or "your viewpoint is a little interesting, I have
learned something from someone." are uncommon ways of
displaying politeness. On the other hand, an expression
like "I have a little disagreement with you" sounds
definitely polite, if not common. As discussed above, in
the excerpts where "negative politeness" techniques were
used as "positive politeness" strategies, the "positive
face" wants of H that S wishes to address are addressed not
by S's attending to or desiring what H wants for his self-
image or personality, but by what H does not want. Brown
and Levinson's (1987) definition of "face" and "politeness"
is simply too broad to capture the meaning of all the
politeness behaviors displayed in this study. In other
words, there is a need for further distinction between
"positive face" wants to account for the minimization and
avoidance strategies used by the participants to achieve in
disagreements a particular politeness which is
distinguishable from the dichotomized politeness system

proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987).

168

Therefore, it seems that assigning two single values to
cover all the human wants that are related to "face" is at
best too broad and unsatisfactory and in fact it may
misinterpret the politeness phenomena in a particular
"ethos." Brown and Levinson claim that "the linguistic
realizations of positive- and negative- politeness
strategies may serve as a social accelerator and a social
brake, respectively" (1987:258). Researchers who did
quantitative analysis following Brown and Levinson's (1987)
framework of politeness may have misinterpreted the polite
phenomena in their studies when trying to propose a
statistically significant dominance of a particular type of
politeness being found in the studies. For instance, some
of the politeness strategies that were originally
categorized as "positive politeness" might turn out to be
communicative attempts of avoidance of transgressing H's
wants of his wants being un-rejected rather than attempts of
accelerating social relationships. Some of the "negative
politeness" strategies might turn out to be redressive
actions that aim to satisfy H's wants of being un-rejected
rather than putting a social brake on the social
relationships between interactants.

In this chapter, I have discussed the dichotomous
nature of Brown and Levinson's face concept and the
problematic aspects of the politeness strategies oriented
toward the satisfaction of these two face wants. I pointed

out that there is no clear line that can be drawn between

169

the dichotomous faces. Rather, there are grey areas between
the two faces and the associated politeness strategies of
Brown and Levinson's theory. The ambiguity of face wants
and politeness was discussed with the focus on five
politeness strategies used in the study (positive politeness
strategy 6: avoid disagreement; negative politeness strategy
2: hedges, negative politeness strategy 4: minimize the
imposition, negative politeness strategy 6: apology,
negative politeness strategy 7: impersonalize S and H).
Arguments were made favoring a continuum view of face and
politeness. The next chapter will provide an alternative
theory concerning the nature of this particular "face" want

and politeness.

CHAPTER SIX

ALTERNATIVE POLITENESS THEORY

ell—AlternatimEeliteneeeJheery

The study supports Craig, Tracy, and Spisak's (1986)
suggestion that there are politeness strategies which cannot
be classified as either negative or positive politeness. In
fact, as was shown in the previous chapter, a lot of so-
called "positive" or "negative" politeness strategies by
Brown and Levinson can actually be termed either
alternatively or in another way. A simple categorization
and generalization of linguistic features at the face value
will miss the complicated nature of language. One of the
weak points of Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory
is that their framework was constructed on a simplified and
unverified assumption of basic human want of self—image.
Since each of the two face wants proposed by Brown and
Levinson (1987) has a unidimensional value, other human
wants that may be related to one's public self-image were

inadequately categorized.

EJJE'E I. EIIEJI 'T]

In this chapter, I will attempt to address the

difficulties of applying Brown and Levinson's theory to my

170

171

data. I propose an approach which incorporates Brown and
Levinson's theory but modifies and extends it in significant
ways.

Specifically, my approach assumes the following: (1)
people have self-defense mechanisms, which come along with
other wants; (2) Brown and Levinson's (1987) "positive" face
can be further distinguished into two different wants:
solidarity want and modesty want; (3) negative face want and
modesty face want share common characteristics; and (4) face
wants occur along a continuum instead of categories with
clear boundaries.

There are at least two ways in which people satisfy
face wants: passively or actively. A person's face may be
satisfied by either actively seeking the desirability of his
public self-image or 'personality' claimed by himself or by
passively avoiding being rejected/disapproved or being
imposed on. That is, every adult in a society would not
only have the want that his desires be admired and accepted,
he would also have the want to avoid his personality being
damaged or his self-image being humiliated by others'
rejection or imposition.

In this new view, Brown and Levinson's (1987)
"positive" face wants can contain two values: active vs.
passive. The two polarized face concepts of their
politeness theory (i.e., "positive" vs. "negative" face) are
bridged by various degrees of efforts to actively or

passively seek the satisfaction of face wants. We may see

172

solidarity face want as the active want of being accepted,
liked, or desired and modesty face want as the passive want
of not being rejected, or disliked. A person's solidarity
face wants can be satisfied by others' recognition and
attention to his or her wants while the modesty face wants
can be satisfied by other's recognition and avoidance of
transgressing his or her wants. In this sense, solidarity
face wants contain active face attributes. One's autonomous
face wants, the wants of actions being unimpeded, share with
modesty face wants the passive face attributes.

Rathus (1984) points out that the famous psychologist
Henry Murray's (1938) study of the needs of humanity
indicates that many of the learned human needs are
independent and consist largely of social motives. "Like
physiological drives and stimulus motives, social motives
prompt goal-directed behavior" (Rathus 1984). Among
Murray's classic list of motives (1938), there are some that
are close to what Brown and Levinson (1987) assert about the
"positive" and "negative" face wants and yet there are
others that are close to the concept of passive avoidance of
being rejected or humiliated (see Table 3).

Out of twenty human social motives identified by Henry
IMurray (1938), the motives of "affiliation," "autonomy,"
"avoidance," "defendance," and "infavoidance" contain
concepts that are very close to the positive and negative
face wants of Brown and Levinson (1987). While Brown and

Ilevinson's (1987) definitions of basic human face wants are

173

Table 3: Partial List of Motives Compiled by Henry Murray

 

Motives

Definition

 

Affiliation:

Autonomy:

Avoidance:

Defendance:

Infavoidance:

To form friendships and associations. To
greet, join, and live with others. To co-
operate and converse sociably with others.
To love. To join group.

To resist influence or coercion. To delay an
authority or seek freedom in a new place. To
strive for independence.

To avoid blame, ostracism or punishment by
inhibiting asocial or unconventional
impulses.

To defend oneself against blame or
belittlement. To justify one's actions. To
offer extenuations, explanations and
excuses. To resist 'probing'

To avoid failure, shame, humiliation,
ridicule. To refrain from attempting to do
something that is beyond one's power. To
conceal a disfigurement.

(Rathus 1984:275)

174

in some degree agreeable with some of Murray's (1938) social
motives such as "affiliation" and "autonomy," they mention
nothing about another characteristic human beings are likely
to have in dealing with one's public self-image: the
avoidance tendency and defensive mechanism. Murray (1938)
believed that people would avoid blame, criticism,
humiliation, and defend themselves against blame or
belittlement. While people may have the active desire of
being liked or admired, they may also have the passive want
of avoiding being criticized, rejected, disagreed with or
imposed on. A person's concern to avoid criticism can't be
misinterpreted as the want for desirability, for the former
refers to the passive desire of defending his or her self-
image and the latter refers to the active desire of seeking
other person's approval of the self-image. It may cause
ambiguity or even misinterpretation of a polite behavior if
no specific distinction of the basic face wants is made.
For instance:

Excerpt 43 (Adil, the Tuesday person, complaining about

the grammatical and spelling mistakes in Monday

person's previous e-mails) [Emphasis is indicated by

underlining.]

Hello every body.

This is Adil. Actually I 'm really enjoying the
E-mail discussions, and I think they're going to be

helpful to all of us. However, we have had a lot of
grammar and spelling mistakes since we got started. It

I] I . i I i I I . 1
In Excerpt 43, Adil was trying to mitigate the strength

(of his face threatening act (FTA), a criticism to Yenmin's

175

English errors, by making excuses for her while criticizing
her at the same time. The strategy Adil used may be
identified in Brown and Levinson's politeness framework as
"positive politeness strategy 9: Assert or presuppose S's
knowledge of and concern for H's wants," which indicates
Adil spoke as if he were Yenmin and therefore understood
what Yenmin would argue (1987:125). By doing so, Adil
indicated that his knowledge was equal to Yenmin's knowledge
and he was familiar with Yenmin to such a degree that he
could assert what Yenmin might argue for herself.

Brown and Levinson assert that "positive-politeness
techniques are usable not only for FTA redress, but in
general as a kind of social accelerator, where S, in using
them, indicates that he wants to 'come closer' to H"
(1987:103). If Adil's mitigating strategy is interpreted as
"positively" polite, it would imply the desire of Adil to be
socially closer to Yenmin when actually what Adil did was to
satisfy Yenmin's want of self-defense. If Adil were
attempting to get close to Yenmin, he could have chosen
other strategies that might indicate stronger affiliation or
solidarity with Yenmin, such as paying attention to Yenmin's
arguments. For example, Adil might have said, "your
viewpoints are so interesting and excellent although there
are some mistakes in your spelling and grammar," if
solidarity was all that he had in mind. Another example can
be seen in Excerpt 36, David's use of minimization of

disagreement: "a little disagreement on the idea of monday

176

person." David was trying to primarily satisfy Yenmin's
infavoidance motive; her want of avoidance of the
embarrassment caused by disagreement, rather than to be
socially closer to Yenmin or to attend to her want of
freedom of unimpeded action. Avoiding embarrassing Yenmin
would allow David to avoid increasing the social distance
from her, however; David could have used strategies that
indicated stronger concerns for Yenmin's solidarity face
wants, such as first name or pre-faced agreement, if getting
closer to her was really David's primary discourse goal.
For example, he could have said: "I agree with Yenmin
mostly, but...."

This view of basic human wants may give us not just a
new view of Brown and Levinson's (1987) assumptions of
politeness, but may provide a base for the modification of

their dichotomous framework of politeness.

5 J 2 E]! I. E H I i E J'l
Adopting a vague face definition in the beginning of
their theory of politeness, Brown and Levinson (1987),
elaborate their framework into something that covers an even
broader range of politeness phenomena that do not strictly
adhere to their original definition of politeness. Some of
the concepts of face wants and output politeness strategies
demonstrated in their examples actually go beyond their
strict definition of the two face wants. In other words,

they define face want in such a broad and vague way that the

177

specific nature of some particular politeness is obscured
under an ambiguous application of the definition of
politeness.

Table 4 illustrates the alternative view of basic human
face wants and politeness.

The fundamental differences between Brown and
Levinson's assumptions of human face wants and the ones
listed in Figure 4 is the attitudes a person possesses in
his claim of public self-image. Brown and Levinson assume
that people will either actively pursue positive evaluation
of their self-images or passively request that their freedom
of action be unimpeded. Actually there may be further
distinguishable levels of "faces" or public self-images.

For instance, a person may wish others at least not to
openly disagree with or criticize his or her opinions,
values, or evaluations, even if they are not appreciated or
desired by others. When someone does not agree with another
on a certain issue and does not want to pretend to agree
superficially, he or she may still have ways to minimize the
disagreement in order to pay attention to addressee's want
of defense of his or her self-image.

Another reason why there is a need to further
distinguish a particular face want in Brown and Levinson's
framework is that they assume that "positive politeness"
strategies are used as a social accelerator and "negative
politeness" strategies function as a social brake (1987). A

unidimensional view of the value of "face" implies that all

178

Table 4: Alternative View of Face and Politeness

Basic human face wants

 

Self-determination Modesty want Solidarity want

Freedom of action personality, personality, value,

not impeded value, opinion opinion, wants being
not rejected accepted, desired, or

identified with by at
least some others

Politeness
Autonomy Modesty Solidarity
politeness politeness politeness

 

redressive actions redressive actions redressive actions

oriented toward oriented toward oriented toward

the impingement of the avoidance of the desired

freedom of action rejection of personality
personality, value, opinion

value, opinion wants

179

redressive actions towards H's face wants are capable of
serving the same functions when actually there are to some
degree differences in the capability of doing so. For
example:

Example 4

A: "Like my painting?"

B: "That's an absolutely marvelous painting you have,

buddy."

Example 5

C: "Like my painting?"

D: "It looks interesting."

B in Example 4 uses a "positive politeness" strategy,
which may serve as a social accelerator while the strategy D
uses in Example 5 may not function to bring social distance
any closer. What D is trying to do is to indicate his
recognition of C's desire not being rejected or criticized
and show his willingness to satisfy C's need.

In the modified theory of human face wants, it is
assumed that adults in a society have the public self-image
that they want to claim for themselves. Such a self-image
can be distinguished in three related aspects:

(a) Solidarity face want: the want of 'competent adult
members' that their self-images be accepted, and their wants
be desirable to at least some others

(b) Modesty face want: the want of every member that damage

to the integrity of his or her self-image be avoided or

defended

180

(c) Autonomous face want: the want of every member that the
freedom of his or her actions be respected by others (i.e.,
freedom from imposition)

This notion of 'face' is derived from that of Brown and
Levinson (1987) and primarily agrees with their basic
arguments: (1) All people have face wants and are rational
agents, (2) all people would maintain each other's face
because of the mutual vulnerability of face, (3) some acts
intrinsically threaten face (FTAs), and (4) S will want to
minimize an FTA unless the efficiency of an FTA by S is
greater than 8'8 want to preserve H's face. In other words,
each competent person is rational enough to recognize the
face wants of others and realize that it is in everybody's
best interest to maintain each other's face in interaction.

Solidarity face want is narrower in scope than Brown
and Levinson's (1987) "positive face." It is the want of
every member of a society that he will at the moment of
interaction be positively associated with at least some
others who will ratify, approve, like or admire his
self-image, personality, thoughts or desires. This face
want differs with Brown and Levinson's (1987) "positive-face
want" in that the range of solidarity face want is limited
to the want that S's self-image be positively accepted,
while Brown and Levinson's "positive face want" includes
both the wants that S's positive self-image be desired and

that it not be rejected.

181

Modesty face want means the want of every member that
his self-image will at the moment of interaction not be
openly challenged, denied, rejected, or opposed even if it
is not approved, or admired by at least some others.
Solidarity want differs from modesty want in that the former
can be satisfied by giving what H wants and the latter can
be satisfied by avoiding or minimizing doing what H does not
want. Hence, an utterance like "Hey, you look wonderful in
that pretty dress!" is a strategy attending to the
solidarity want of H while something like "I have a little
disagreement with you on that issue" is a strategy focusing
on H's want of not being disagreed with or confronted.

Autonomous face want is what Brown and Levinson (1987)
originally called "negative face." It is members' want that
their freedom of action not be suppressed or impeded. What
differentiates autonomous face want from modesty face want
is that the former is primarily directed to one's action and
the latter is primarily directed to one's belief and desire.
These two wants also share something in common. Both face
wants may be met with passive choices. That is, those two
wants may be satisfied by not doing what H doesn't like
rather than doing what H likes.

As can be seen, the wants of solidarity are
characterized by the preference of self-image being
identified or accepted while those of modesty and autonomy
are characterized by the preference of self-image being not

confronted. When doing an FTA, a speaker can select

182

redressive actions that address H's preference of his
self-image being desired, or his want of self-image being
un-damaged. The redressive actions that are primarily
oriented toward H's solidarity face wants are called
solidarity politeness. Solidarity politeness can best be
achieved by actively and openly satisfying H's solidarity
face wants (e.g., "You guys have been so great.")

Solidarity politeness strategies are not necessarily used to
soften an FTA. It can be used solely to function as "social
accelerator" without redressive purpose.

Those redressive actions that are oriented toward the
modesty face wants of H are called "modesty politeness"
(e.g., "I think there is a little difference between our
opinions."). Unlike solidarity politeness, modesty
politeness is basically characterized by avoidance acts.
However, a speaker who resorts to modesty politeness does
not necessarily intend to keep social distance from H.
Instead, what modesty politeness does is to avoid the
increase of social distance. Unlike autonomy politeness,
modesty politeness is constrained to redress H's
personality, self-image, desire, opinions, and wants rather
than impingement of his actions. However, modesty
politeness does not attempt to decrease the social distance
to H either. There is a difference in degree between
reducing social distance and avoiding its increase. Finally
autonomy politeness is redressive actions oriented toward

H's autonomous or "negative" face wants. Autonomy

183

politeness is also characterized by avoidance behavior and
the purpose of it is to reasonably keep social distance in
order not to transgress H's freedom of action (e.g., "Would

it be possible for you to gift-wrap this for me, Sir?").

5 I 3 I] 2 I. E E J'

In contrast to Brown and Levinson's (1987) dichotomous
view of politeness, the alternative politeness assumptions
view "face" wants and politeness as a continuum with no
clear boundaries. The relationship among these three may be
diagrammed as follows (see Figure 4).

As shown in Figure 4, politeness can be conceptualized
as a continuum of acts aiming at acquiring smooth social
relationships among interactants in a communicative
interaction. The stronger S's desire to identify with H,
the more tendency S has leaning toward the solidarity
politeness end. The weaker S's desire to identify with H,
the more tendency S has leaning toward the autonomy
politeness end. The desire of S to identify with H
functions as what Brown and Levinson refer as "social
distancing" (1987:130). Social distance can be reduced or
increased by the appeal to the polar ends of the continuum
of politeness to indicate the degree S wants to identify
with H.

Modesty politeness, which locates itself in the middle
of the continuum, has probably the least effect on social

distance and therefore is distinguishable from the other two

184

Concern for H's
self— image, desire

 

Ww-i..1‘.m» » -‘-11-.1--I-..1 . _ .<.. 1 .---..1----..-II-...-_-_-._--..---.-.—rm--.--_.._. . -.-1.--1-.... .-VVV‘WVV---_.--‘-.—‘.—.

KWOHOMY V 1x01318321? , , 3031‘9331“:
f: 1561:1131:sz POLITENESS porrrxus‘ssj

 

 

 

Avoiding impingement on H

Identifying with H
weakerl/ \- stronger

\ /

Figure 4: Relationships of Politeness in
the Alternative Model

 

185

types of politeness. It further provides a foundation for
interpreting why many of the mitigating strategies found in
the discourse of argument are hybrid in nature. In other
words, the reason why a lot of the politeness strategies in
the study are realized by the use of what Brown and Levinson
called "negative politeness" techniques to address the
"positive" face wants of H is that S's concern of H's self-
image overlaps S's avoidance of impingement on H.

Furthermore, I conclude that each two adjacent types of
politeness share a boundary that is fuzzy and ambiguous
because politeness is conceptualized as a continuum rather
than a dichotomous system. For instance:

Excerpt 44 (Yenmin, responding to Adil's complaint
about the EL)

Response to Adil:
Hi! 1_een_ee11_yenr_enger about EL. In fact, a lot of

international students complain its policies and exam,

but most people seem just endure this situation because

it's no use to argue with the EL staffs. Since it's one
of school policy for people who fail the exam must take

English classes, we just can recognize that our

English really needs to improve. Actually, after

studying in EL, I can feel my progress in English,

especially in writing.

Here, Yenmin was responding to Adil's complaint about
the EL with an e-mail that began with her attention to
Adil's emotion. Actually Yenmin revealed in the interview
that she disliked Adil's constant complaints about
everything and didn't really want to agree with him although
she herself did not like some of the policies of the

institution either. The fact that Yenmin showed limited

186

implicit support of Adil's anger indicates an ambiguity in
her attention in terms of politeness. While her attention
to Adil's emotion can be explained as a strategy directed
toward solidarity politeness, it can also be explained as
one that was oriented toward Adil's modesty face want. The
boundary between solidarity and modesty politeness in this
case is not clearly drawn.

Excerpt 45 (Yenmin)

Happy Valentine's Day! I'm the monday person--Yenmin.

Today I opened my E—Mail and found I've only got one

response from David. I know there are four persons in
our group. 1_wpnder_1f the other three persons have

responsed to me or not. At the same time, would you

please tell me if you received my response?

In Excerpt 45, Yenmin was trying to mitigate her FTA by
the hedge "I wonder." The FTA contains an act that
threatens two face wants of Yenmin's teammates who did not
respond to the assignment as required: the autonomy face and
the modesty face. Yenmin admitted that she really thought
the reason why she did not receive responses from those
three persons was because of their laziness. The hedge "I
wonder" was used here to soften her imposition of requesting
her teammates' participation on the discussion on time and
to mitigate her indirect disagreement with their laziness.
When serving to address the want of freedom of action, "I
wonder" is viewed as an autonomy politeness. However, it
may also serve as a politeness strategy that addresses the

want of H's self-image not being criticized or disagreed

with, and hence becomes a modesty politeness. Yenmin

187

indicated that it would be very impolite to express what she
really thought of her group members without the redressive
pretense of possible e-mail system failure (i.e., "would you
please tell me if you received my response?"). Once again,
the boundary between autonomy and modesty politeness can be

blurred.

L2_Cenelneien

This chapter provides an alternative view of Brown and
Levinson's (1987) face and politeness concepts. It argues
that Brown and Levinson's (1987) dichotomous definition of
politeness is too broad. Their definition fails to
interpret many of the observations of politeness acts
employed in this study. I propose an alternative framework,
adopting Brown and Levinson's (1987) framework as the basis
and viewing politeness as a continuum which varies in
degree, in terms of S's concern for H's self-image and
freedom of action. Three distinguishable face want and
politeness categories were identified with fuzzy boundaries.
The majority of Brown and Levinson's (1987) examples are
related to request and mitigation of request. This study
suggests that Brown and Levinson's (1987) theory of
politeness needs to be modified and advanced in order to

interpret politeness beyond the dichotomous view.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CONCLUSIONS

111__Summar¥

This study uses an ethnographic perspective to
investigate situated language uses among English as Second
Language (ESL) students in class discussions through
electronic mail (e-mail), in order to understand how social
relationships are established and maintained in this new
language event.

For a long time, language researchers have been
focusing on the study of oral discourse interchanges within
dyads and paying comparatively less attention to written
discourse. As the result of the invention and the
availability of computers and electronic communication
systems, written interaction has been rapidly increasing
especially among people in the business and scholarly
communities. New language events are developing and
beginning to be applied in our daily life for practical
purposes. For example, we begin to see the incorporation of
e-mail as part of the academic curriculum in both first and
second language classrooms. Linguistic researchers are now

able to get various types of abundant written interaction

188

189

for all sorts of studies that were unlikely to be conducted
before computer-mediated communication existed.

There have been arguments about whether computer-
mediated-communication generates less natural richness and
interpersonal interaction than face-to-face interaction.
The present study examined politeness strategies in e-mail
communication and contributed to this debate. It
demonstrated that concerns for politeness played a major
role in participants' construction of their discourse. Not
only is e-mail capable of transmitting natural richness and
interactions of interpersonal communication, it actually
contributes to shape up the unique realization of
politeness. The participants in this study, inexperienced
in e-mail discussion, were quite capable of manipulating the
unique characteristics of the communication medium to
achieve particular politeness concerns in this new language
event. E-mail provides the users a more flexible
environment for them to exploit the characteristics of this
new medium and the speech activity for their communicative
goals.

In this study, Brown and Levinson's (1987) framework of
politeness was used as the base for the investigation of
concerns of social relationships. The focus of the study
was on how people mitigate their disagreements and
criticisms in class discussions where opposing viewpoints

are likely expected and experienced. Brown and Levinson's

190

theory of politeness, especially face as the core element,
was discussed.

An important distinction between mitigation and
politeness was made. Politeness is conceptualized
differently by people from various cultures. For example,
Gu (1990) argues that politeness can be normative rather
than goal-oriented or functional in Chinese society.
Following the norms that are subscribed by the whole society
will be considered polite while violating the norms will be
impolite in Chinese society. This study focused on the ways
redressive actions were used to soften face threatening acts
(FTAs). It dealt only with the functional face-based
mitigation at the individual level rather than what Gu
(1990) called the normative aspect of politeness at the
level of society since the majority of politeness found in
this study was functional mitigation.

The study emphasized the importance of using naturally
occurring discourse with the help of in—classroom
observation and interviews to understand the situated uses
of language in discussions among students. The interviews
helped greatly in obtaining participants' overall view of
the language event and clarifying confusion about the nature
of a particular e-mail message. In general, the majority of
participants either liked e-mail or thought e-mail was an
acceptable medium for class discussions, although they
preferred using e-mail for non-serious or informal

discussions.

191

Since the focus of this study was on mitigating
strategies in disagreement, I attempted to define
disagreement for later analysis. The study found that
disagreement is a very complicated phenomenon that is beyond
the level of the speech act. Instead of seeing disagreement
as a speech act, Searle (1976) and Fraser (1983) view it as
part of a larger class, such as "representative," and Bach
and Harnish (1984) as "constatives." I rejected the use of
concrete disagreeing words, such as "disagree," "not agree,"
as the only criterion for the identification of
disagreement. During the interviews, I found out that many
disagreements in the study were not expressed due to various
factors. Hence, this study has regarded disagreement as a
belief expressed in opposition to others' belief on a
certain proposition. It has also been defined as a position
rejecting the appropriateness of other individuals' speech
acts or activities. Since a belief may be expressed either
explicitly or implicitly, disagreement, as a belief, may not
be readily identified. Whenever possible, a disagreement
has been identified by the confirmation from the speaker
through an interview.

The study indicated that a new "discourse community"
(Bizzell 1982) was developed in the very early stage of the
study. The data suggested that this discourse community was
constituted not just by participants who happened to attend
the class and were randomly assigned to a particular

discussion group but by their construction and recognition

192

of the appropriate norms for the newly-developed language
event and their willingness and capability to follow them
and perform their linguistic behaviors accordingly.

The participants in the study were very sensitive to
the need for constructing a "discourse universe" in which
meaningfulness is achieved by the incorporation of social
relationships, emotions as well as the exchanges of
information (Duranti 1986). As a result, their e-mail
discourses were characterized by predominant interactional
discourse mixing up with transactional discourse.

Politeness was achieved at global as well as local
levels in this new language event. The global politeness
strategies were realized by the manipulation of
participation frameworks (Goffman 1974). Participants were
very skillful in using the multiparty discussions and the
pre-determined turn-taking system of the language event as
strategic resources for their communicative goals at the
moment. The exploitation of participation frameworks was
found to be closely related to mitigation.

I made a distinction between two slightly different and
yet intertwined phenomena to address the politeness found in
the study: participant framework and participation
framework. Participant framework describes the positions of
the participants aligned toward one another by activities
and participation framework emphasizes the positions taken
by the depiction or animation of the participants as figures

or characters within talk. It was found that both the

193

participant framework and participation framework were
skillfully manipulated by many of the participants to
achieve politeness. The manipulation included (1) the
construction of frameworks, and (2) shifts of frameworks.

FTAs in the data were often mitigated by strategically
constructing the participant frameworks in a way that would
avoid explicit disagreements or criticisms. Mitigation of
disagreements and criticisms is basically done by
intentionally avoiding construction of a participant
framework that positions a particular person as the focal
recipient of the FTA in a multiparty communication since
exposing the addressee as the focal recipient of the FTAs in
a multiparty communication would put forward the addressee
and damage his modesty face.

Politeness was further realized by constructing
participation frameworks in such a way that depicted the
participants as figures that possessed fewer personal
attributes or shared common attributes with the speakers or
other parties when an FTA was issued and directed toward the
addressees.

The shifts of participant frameworks allow the speaker
to implicitly incorporate addressees into the frame for an
FTA (e.g., a request), or explicitly locate the addressee to
indicate the speaker's sincerity in mitigating an FTA or
satisfy the face wants of the addressees. Politeness was
further achieved by the shifts of participation frameworks

proceeding in the direction that gradually decreased the

194

differentiation or increased the common attributes between
the main characters in a confrontational situation.
Hypothetical narrative events were sometimes used to
indicate the speaker's presumption of the solidarity between
the speaker and the addressees to soften FTAs.

Participants not only skillfully manipulated the
participant framework (Goffman 1974) to soften the unwelcome
effects of disagreements at the global level, they also used
lots of mitigating strategies locally, such as hedges,
apology, impersonalizing speaker and hearer, or distancing
addressee (H) from face-threatening acts, for the same
purpose. When Brown and Levinson's (1987) framework of
politeness was examined against the new speech event, it was
found that their theory failed to provide adequate
interpretation for those politeness strategies.

Brown and Levinson posited a dichotomous face concept
which further resulted in a dichotomous view of on-record
redressive actions. Their politeness theory implied the
mutual exclusiveness of politeness strategies, and failed to
capture and address the fuzziness and ambiguity of
politeness strategies that were often found in the study.

It was found that strategies with "negative" techniques were
actually oriented toward satisfying a face want other than
the "negative" face want of hearers. There were no clear
categorical boundaries between the two types of on-record
politeness. Ambiguity was found to exist in various types

of politeness strategies discussed in Chapter Five.

195

Finally, arguments were made favoring a continuum view
of face and politeness. This alternative approach assumes
that there is a basic face want of self-defense other than
the "positive" and "negative" face wants. A person may
either actively seek the desirability of his public self—
image or 'personality' claimed by himself or passively avoid
the rejection/disapproval of his wants. The active want of
a person's self-image being desirable is the "solidarity"
face want and the passive want of his or her self-image not
being rejected or disapproved is the "modesty" face want.
The solidarity face want may be satisfied by others'
attending to the hearer's want while the modesty face want
may be satisfied by the avoidance of transgressing the
hearer's want. The want of action not being impeded or not
being imposed is called the "autonomous" face want. The
redressive actions that are oriented toward satisfying the
solidarity, modesty, and autonomous face wants respectively
are called solidarity, modesty, and autonomous politeness
strategies respectively. The solidarity politeness shares
with the modesty politeness the concern for the maintenance
of self-image. The modesty politeness shares with the
autonomous politeness the passive avoidance of transgressing
the hearer's want. Each two adjacent types of politeness
share a boundary that is fuzzy and ambiguous because
politeness is conceptualized as a continuum rather than a

dichotomous system.

196

ZZIJ'I' 1:].

New speech events deserve to be examined as they
emerge, as a contribution to discourse theory. We have an
obligation to propose alternatives and modifications to
discourse theory that proves inadequate to the data.

ESL discourse of this type is of great interest since
it is a snapshot of spontaneous conversation between
interlanguage users. The data in this type of new language
event have never been gathered before. Compared to the
research on oral language study, written interaction has
received far less attention. With the help of computers and
communication systems, researchers will be able to gather
and study a tremendous amount of written interaction from
various newly-developing language events.

As described in Chapter One (cf. Section 1.3), foreign
language classrooms have been dominated by discourse that
primarily focuses on transmission of information (LOrscher
and Schulze 1988). If the goal for second language teaching
is to help learners to become "communicative competent"
(Hymes 1964), the goal and the practice of many second
language classes would obviously be contradictory since
politeness has been given little attention in the
classrooms. Understanding ways of mitigating cross-cultural
communication will prove to be critical to the development
of good relationships among speakers and to the development

of true language competence by ESL users.

197

Therefore, it is important to study new ESL discourse
types between interlanguage users because it may provide ESL
teachers with additional chances to uncover ESL students'
sociocultural as well as linguistic inappropriateness which
might otherwise be ignored in other conventional discourse
types. ESL teachers may benefit from understanding what
influence the target language, and ESL students' own
cultures and languages may bring to their discourse. The
target language, English in this case, may have some
influence on the politeness strategies employed by ESL
students in e-mail communication. For instance, politeness
displayed by certain linguistic features specific to a
particular language (e.g., honorifics of Japanese and Korean
languages, and self-denigration or respectful terms in
Chinese) and non—linguistic gestures (e.g., nods, or bows to
the interlocutors) may have to be sacrificed by ESL students
using the target language in e-mail communication.

However, instances of politeness strategies from the
native languages and cultures of the ESL students in this
study were sometimes traceable if their discourse was under
careful examination. For example, the politeness strategy
in the utterance "First, I want to say sorry because I have
been very busy for academic classes. I sincerely hope you
guys can forget about this. Thank you." by a Japanese
student, Kenji, probably derived from the speaker's own
culture as a way to humble himself in order to restore group

harmony. The utterance, "No wonder he is our teacher

198

because he knows how to cite the sources," from Yenmin, a
female student from Taiwan, may bear more politeness weight
and evidence the influence from her own culture since
"teacher" may be used as a respectful term in Chinese
culture.

The politeness strategies of ESL students may share
similarity with those of the native speaker to a large
degree if the notion of face, as Brown and Levinson would
like to convince us, is indeed proven to be universal.
Differences between the politeness strategies of ESL
students and those of the native speakers can also be
expected because the notion of face in any particular
society would be expected "to be the subject of much
cultural elaboration" (Brown and Levinson 1987:13). In the
future study, comparative data from native speakers and
students from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds
can be collected for analysis to test Brown and Levinson's
universality hypothesis in e-mail communication.

Furthermore, future studies of politeness among ESL
students may have to look beyond Brown and Levinson's face-
based politeness framework to understand how the concepts of
politeness from different cultures may affect ESL learning.
Proper ways to construct politeness strategies have to be
incorporated into ESL pedagogy to give ESL students chances
to learn how to adapt themselves to politeness strategies of

the target language to be able to communicate as well as to

199

satisfy their need for establishing adequate social
relationships.

Studying politeness in e-mail cross-culturally and
cross-linguistically may be an area crucial to ESL and to
theories of politeness. Not only will cross—culture and
cross-linguistic studies benefit ESL learners, they may help
advance the theory of discourse that may in turn help the
applications of the theory. For instance, the cross-
cultural and cross-linguistic studies (Chen 1993; Cohen and
Olshtain 1981, 1985; Garcia 1989a, 1989b; Hill et al. 1986;
and Olshtain and Cohen 1983) may contribute to discourse
theory in the same way that theoretical proposals, such as
Brown and Levinson's framework of politeness (1987), could
have been contributing to other studies that are applied.
There is a recursive relationship between discourse theory
and actual studies. A cross-linguistic study of this sort
of e-mail data is planned for Taiwanese, the native language
of the researcher, and American English, as a development
from the present study. Such a study will feedback into the
theory and enrich this recursive relationship between theory
and application.

Due to the scope of the study, I did not examine the
influence of gender and power as factors in mitigating
strategies. It would be very interesting to evaluate how
gender and asymmetrical social role would affect the choice
and construction of mitigating strategies in e-mail. Once

larger samples are collected in the uniformity of a

200

particular culture, the researchers then would be able to
investigate the relation between mitigating strategies and
gender or power relationship.

Studying e-mail discourse is particularly interesting
and helpful for our understanding of a comprehensive
discourse theory. E-mail may be seen as a mixture of oral
and written communication. It is written in the sense that
it is visual, "edited" (Biber 1986:395), or "self-monitored"
(Halliday 1978:69). It exhibits many typical written
features identified as "integration" (Chafe 1982).

E-mail is oral because, as I have shown, e-mail is also
sensitive to the constraints similar to those found in
face-to-face interactions. Since interaction in e-mail
discourse is fundamental in this study, the participants
need to analyze the social order, the sequence of speaking
turn, and the backgrounds of the interlocutors before proper
interactions, speech activities, or genres can be
constructed in the language event. They also need to assess
what the conversational analysts describe as the orderliness
of talk displayed in the sequential conversational
organization. Most of all, the participants in the study
often chose to interact directly with their audience and
displayed features that are characterized as "involvement"
which is often associated with orality (Chafe, 1982). For
example, the three types of involvement Chafe (1985)
describes: ego involvement (e.g., "I"), involvement with the

hearer (e.g., " ou" or "Ken'i"), and expressions of the
Y J

201

speaker's interest in the subject matter (e.g., "Guys, let's
break this old prejudice!!!!!!!!"), were commonly present in
the data.

Since e-mail communication shares a lot of features
that are associated with oral discourse, it would be natural
to expect to see politeness strategies found in e-mails
being used in oral discourse. Many politeness strategies
found in written discourse in this study did share the same
features with oral discourse. Uses of in-group identity
markers, hedges, apology, minimizing the imposition, just to
name a few, were commonly used. There might also be
politeness strategies that are used exclusively or
predominantly for written discourse and can't apply directly
to oral discourse. For instance, an e-mail user might use
parenthesis to indicate uncertainty or unwillingness to
impose, or upper case letters to signify intense attention
to H's solidarity face want. The shifts of participant
frameworks for politeness purpose (cf. Excerpt 23) which
could be done easily in e-mail discussions might not be
readily applied to oral discussions.

This study was limited to an analysis of situated uses
of politeness strategies that were commonly used by ESL
students in e—mails in an academic environment. The new
language event in the study occurred as the result of school
assignments, which created a specialized context for
interactions. The interactions under such a context may be

different from those produced in other non-classroom

202

environments. For instance, "flamings" that are often seen
on the Internet might become fewer in a classroom
environment because grades may be a concern for
interactions. Data from e-mail and oral communication on
the same topics can be collected and compared to understand
how medium affects the construction of politeness
strategies. Furthermore, future research may investigate
the politeness strategies used in both oral and e-mail
interactions in strictly social vs. academic environments at

both local and global levels to enrich discourse theory.

 

APPENDICES

203

APPENDIX A

CONSENT TO USE STUDENT RESPONSES FOR RESEARCH

We are studying the ways native speakers of English and
speakers of English as a second language use e-mail. For
this research, if you agree, we will make copies of the
e-mail transmissions produced by your 5-member group in your
class.

Sometime during the term, we will interview you for this
research. You will not spend more time than required for
your course work except for a few minutes answering
questions of the interviews. The interview will be audio or
video tape—recorded.

With your permission, your responses and your e-mail
messages will be analyzed to study how language users of
various linguistic, and cultural backgrounds develop ways to
co-construct discourse events using e-mail as a medium of
communication.

Your name and responses to the questions and the tape-
recorded interviews will be kept in strictest confidence.
The instructors and Teaching assistants in the course will
not have access to the original responses containing your
name and student number.

After your responses to the interviews, all identification
of you as a respondent will be encoded into alpha—numerical
codes so that your identities will not be able to be known
except by the investigators. Your name or student number
will not be mentioned in any presentation or publication.

Participation in this study is entirely voluntary. You may
decline to participate or may withdraw from the study
without any risk of it affecting your grade.

204

Please indicate your decision on the use of your responses
for research by checking YES or NO and signing below.

YES, I voluntarily give you permission to use my
responses for research.

NO, I do not wish my responses to be used in research.

Signature: Date:

 

Student number:

 

Course:

 

Please also indicate whether you have an e-mail account
currently.

I presently have an e-mail account named

 

I do not presently have an e-mail account.

205

CONSENT TO USE STUDENT RESPONSES FOR PRESENTATIONS AND
EDUCATIONAL PUBLICATIONS

With your permission, your responses will be used for
presentations and educational publications. Your
identifications will not be mentioned in any presentation
and publication.

Please indicate your decision on the use of your responses

for presentations and educational publications by checking
YES or NO and signing below.

YES, I voluntarily give you permission to use my
responses for presentations and educational publications.

NO, I do not wish my responses to be used in research
for presentations and educational publications.

Signature: Date:

 

 

Student number:

 

Course:

 

206

APPENDIX B

INTERVIEW DATE:

PART I.

1. Name:

 

PLACE:

 

ETHNOGRAPHIC DATA

 

2. Major and Educational level:

 

3. Gender:

4. Age:
5. Country:
6. Languages:

7. Time stayed in U.S.A.:

 

 

 

 

 

8. How long have you been studying English?

 

9. Experiences with computers:

a.

b.

Do you have a computer? Yes No
What kind of computers do you have?
PC—compatibles Macintosh others

How long have you been using a computer?

 

You use a computer mainly for:

word processing database
communication spreadsheet
recreation educational purpose

others

207

10. Experiences with e-mail:
a. Have you ever used e-mail before this course?

yes no

 

 

b. How long have you been using e-mail:

 

c. Will you continue to use e—mail after this course?

yes no

 

PART II. GENERAL QUESTIONS

1. Do you think e-mail is a nice and effective medium for

communication? Why?

2. Other than required as part of the course requirements,
when and why will you choose e-mail as the medium for
communication when other options of communication media
(such as face-to-face, telephone, letters, etc.) are

available?

3. Where and when did you usually write your e-mails? How

much time did you usually spend on writing an e—mail?

4. Did you ever wish that you could use features like
gestures, facial expressions, smiles, tones, etc. in E-
mails when you found it hard to express your ideas or
positions on a particular issue? How did you overcome the
difficulties (e.g. give personal examples? use questions?

try to find the right words? etc.)?

PART III. SPECIFIC QUESTIONS FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

208

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