While the Gricean theory of conversational implicature is regarded as a breakthrough in pragmatic study of language use, the cooperative principle (CP) is found inadequate in explaining the relation between sense and force. Leech (1983: 80) points out that CP in itself cannot explain why people are often so indirect in conveying what they mean. Grice's theory of CP is, fundamentally speaking, logic-oriented. Conversational interaction is also social behavior. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, choice of linguistic codes is central in language use. There are social and psychological factors that determine the choice. Besides being cooperative, participants of conversations normally try to be polite. The speakers consider the matter of face for themselves and others. Based on this observation, Leech (1983: 132) proposes the politeness principle (PP), which contains six maxims:
(i) Tact maxim
(a) Minimize cost to other [(b) Maximize benefit to other]
(ii) Generosity maxim
(a) Minimize benefit to self [(b) Maximize cost to self]
(iii) Approbation maxim
(a) Minimize dispraise of other [(b) Maximize praise to other]
(iv) Modesty maxim
(a) Minimize praise of self [(b) Maximize dispraise of self]
(v) Agreement maxim
(a) Minimize disagreement between self and other
[(b) maximize agreement between self and other]
(vi) Sympathy maxim
(a) Minimize antipathy between self and other [(b)
Maximize sympathy between self and other]
The maxims expressed in terms of maximize and minimize entail the concept of gradience in politeness. The tact maxim expressed in terms of cost and benefit can be exemplified by the following:
While the syntactic form is the same, the illocution varies in these utterances. A scale of politeness can also be illustrated by utterances that have the same proposition:
The purpose of the speaker is the same, but the degree of politeness increases as indirectness of the speech act ascends. “Indirect illocutions tend to be more polite, (a) because they increase the degree of optionality, and (b) because the more indirect an illocution is, the more diminished and tentative its force tends to be.” (Leech 1983: 108) This is often employed as a strategy in speech, a point to be made in 7.7.
The existence of degree of politeness allows for choice on the part
of the speaker. As a linguistic interaction is necessarily a social interaction,
the choice is largely determined by such social factors as social distance
and power. The more remote the social distance between the interlocutors,
the more polite the linguistic expressions tend to be. This phenomenon
is also a topic in sociolinguistics.
