Les stratégies de politesse positive de Brown et Levinson (document en anglais)

Task 1. Brown and Levinson claim that Mediterranean cultures use positive politeness strategies more frequently tan Northern cultures. Do you agree? Why do you think this is so? Find examples from your every day life.

As a matter of fact, I don’t particularly find Mediterranean cultures to be any more prone to using positive politeness strategies than Northern cultures. I do find that both cultures use them quite frequently, and have not noticed a remarkable cross-cultural difference. My guess is the use of positive politeness strategies has to do more with the individual and the situation than with his/her cultural background. On the other hand, I am positive that the difference of usage in negative politeness strategies is much more acute between Mediterranean and Northern cultures. Expression such as:

-Would you know where the exit is?

Or

-You wouldn’t be able to possibly lower your TV set, would you?

Would certainly sound odd and extremely polite if translated to Spanish. Even so, the utterances above do pose an FTA as much in English as in Spanish. Nevertheless, their Spanish counterparts would probably look like this:

-Perdone, ¿por donde está la salida? O simplemente: Perdón, ¿la salida?

-Perdon, le importaría bajar el volumen?

The spanish translations are negative politeness strategies as well, but of a lesser force, meaning the FTA they intend to avoid or lessen is not considered as much face threatening as it would be in a linguistically anglosaxon environment. This denotes a cultural difference hinting towards the idea that, probably, the preserving of negative face is of greater importance in Northern cultures than it is in Mediterranean ones.

Task 2: Consider expressions in Spanish such as the following:

1. Between friends:

-¿Vamos a tomar un cafetito?

2. A shop attendant to a customer trying on clothes:

-Mira aquí hay una blusita que sienta fenomenal y el malvita además favorece mucho

How do you think diminutives are used in Spanish as a politeness strategy in examples such as these? What kind of relationship does it show between the speaker and the interlocutor?

Both utterances carry a FTA challenging the hearer’s negative face, for he/she is being compelled to do something which, in the best case scenario, didn’t come from his/her own free will. In other words, it wasn’t the hearer’s own idea to have a coffee or try on that particular sweater. In fact, he/she probably had something else in mind. The diminutives clearly have the function of minimizing the imposition of the speaker, thus saving his/her negative face.

Task 3: Consider again the utterance you analyzed in the topic on speech acts and answer the questions:

You won the game again, you bastard!

What kind of politeness strategy is being used? Who are the speaker and addressee? What kind of relationship does it show between the speaker and the interlocutor?

The utterance above is saving the speaker’s own positive face, as it has been just damaged by a recent previous FTA, presumably, the loss of a competition to the hearer. As the game is over and winner and loser tags are assigned to each participant, S’s face is automatically damaged in relation to the hearer. Hence the speaker trying claim common ground and perform a typically FTA on the hearer’s face, thus leveling both their positive faces. Speaker and interlocutor are very likely friends, otherwise S’s utterance would be considered as far more face threatening that the FTA it’s trying to counter-balance (the loss of a game).

Task 4: Read the following extracs from Edward Albee’s “Who’s afraid od Vriginia Woolf” and answer the questions:

Extract

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