Discourse as Cultural Struggle

8. Western Politeness Theory and Non-Western Context

8 Western Politeness Theory and Non-Western Context Jung-ran Park Introduction During the past few decades, linguistic politeness has drawn significant attention from Western and non-Western scholars. As indicated by its principal definitional characteristic as a so-called strategic device for reducing social friction by smoothening social interactions and by avoiding conflict during social encounters, linguistic politeness can be seen ultimately as a socio-cultural phenomenon. As such, it is encoded within linguistic systems through filtering of given social and cultural attributes. Such linguistic realization can be conspicuously observed in lexicon and conventionalized linguistic structures. In Asian languages, lexicalized and grammaticalized items that are filtered through socio-cultural attributes are rich in their lexicon. One of these lexicalized items is “face,” a cornerstone in theoretical frameworks of linguistic politeness. For example, Korean is full of lexical elements that represent “face,” such as CHEMYEN, NUN, IMOK, and NAT. This phenomenon can also be prominently observed in Japanese and Chinese lexicon (Ervin-Tripp 1995). From a non-Western perspective, issues and controversies surrounding theoretical frameworks of linguistic politeness, especially that of Brown and Levinson (1987), stem from the limitations of such frameworks to fully account for the socio-cultural phenomena of non-Western societies. In this chapter, Brown and Levinson’s theory (1987) is examined vis-à-vis the so-called social indexing approaches (Ide 1989; Matsumoto 1988; Gu 1990; Nwoye 1992; Hill et al. 1986) based on naturally occurring contemporary Korean discourse. For data, natural conversations with the author’s family and with friends in Korea and in the US have been audio-recorded. As well, two contemporary urban-based television dramas (soap operas) entitled 7ULIKA ETI NAMINKAYO (Are we strangers?) and .OLAN SONSWUKEN (Yellow handkerchief) (http:// www.kbs.co.kr/end_program/drama/yellow/index.html) were employed. 124 Jung-ran Park One of the merits of collecting data on linguistic politeness from these television dramas is that the full range of linguistic elements denoting politeness phenomena can be captured. This can be accounted for by the fact that the drama form covers the gamut of social interaction. McCarthy and Carter (1994, 118) describe the excellent value of drama-based data in the following way: Data for everyday linguistic genres such as favor seeking are not always easy to obtain, since such events take place in intimate personal settings. But dramatized data such as plays and soap operas … are often an excellent source of data considered by consumers to be “natural.” Concerning data analysis, I utilized the ethnographic microanalysis method (Erikson 1996). Through employment of this method, speech contexts and situated social identities that are manifested multidimensionally in a given speech context and moment were scrutinized. It is these contexts and situated social identities that directly influence the employment of linguistic forms, so that interlocutors express implicit epistemic, affective, and interpersonal stances in verbal as well as non-verbal modes. Regarding the transcription method, I romanized the conversations using the Yale system, and then translated the resulting text morpheme by morpheme, followed by translation into natural English. However, for general conversations I did not follow morpheme-bymorpheme translation. Theoretical frameworks of linguistic politeness: Issues and controversies For comprehensive coverage of the literature on politeness phenomena, Kasper’s works (1990, 2001) are the most suitable. Fraser (1990) classified politeness studies into four major categories: social norm/social indexing, conversationalmaxim , face-saving, and conversation-contract. To begin with, the aforementioned theoretical approaches are all couched according to Grice’s (1975) cooperative-principle (CP) and attendant maxims and in Goffman’s facework (1967). In other words, politeness provides a ground for violations of the Gricean maxims. Also, politeness is derived from the desire to establish and maintain a public self-image that is “an image of self-delineated in terms of approved social attributes” in Goffman’s (1967, 5) formulation. Brown and Levinson (1987, 5), in their “face-saving” framework, take the CP and its four maxims as “socially neutral (indeed a social) presumptive framework for communication.” Politeness, in this view, constitutes “principled reasons for deviation” from the Gricean maxims in the service of and concern for and the preservation of face. The verbal activities or face-works for smoothening social interactions and for enhancing the public self-image of interlocutors are based in strategic Western Politeness Theory and Non-Western Context 125 language use. “Conversational-maxim” (Lakoff 1973; Leech 1983; Edmonson 1981; Kasher 1986) and “face-saving” (Brown and Levinson...