Speech acts, facework and politeness: relationship-building across cultures

This chapter examines face, facework, politeness, and impoliteness from historical perspectives, beginning with Smith’s (1894), Hu’s (1944) and Goffman’s (1955) notions of face and Goffman’s (1955) facework. Drawing on empirical studies, relevant critical issues and topics in cross-cultural and intercultural communication are discussed to raise awareness of current contributions and suggest areas for future research. Although ‘cross-cultural communication’ and ‘intercultural communication’ both refer to communication across cultures, they are not exactly the same. Cross-cultural communication compares native discourse across cultures (for example, management meetings of Japanese and those of Americans), whereas intercultural communication involves an investigation of the discourse of people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds interacting either in a lingua franca or in the native language of one of the participants (Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris 1997; Lustig and Koester 2009). In the literature on speech acts, speech acts have been examined as ‘linguistic carriers of politeness’(Meier 1996: 345), and politeness is considered to be inherent in some speech acts. Speech act theorists (Austin 1962; Searle 1965, 1969, 1975) are concerned with the functional value of utterances rather than the form of utterances. Austin (1962: 14-15) describes the ‘felicity conditions’ that must be met if performatives are to be successful in the real world. Hymes (1972) defines speech act as ‘the level which mediates immediately between the usual level of grammar and the rest of a speech event or situation in that it implicates both linguistic form and social norms’ (ibid.: 57). Searle (1969) emphasizes the importance of the social institution within which speech acts are produced, and proposes a typology of speech acts for classifying the functional value of utterances: representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations. Searle’s approach to speech acts was modified by Weigand (2000), who combined the active and reactive speech act into a dialogue principle, with active and reactive speech acts forming a unit called ‘the minimal action game’, incorporating ‘the individual and cultural imprint of each human being’ (Grein 2007: 111). Very often, in speech act studies, particularly those involving cross-cultural and interculturalspeech acts, linguistic realizations in English and conversational strategies are interpreted as amanifestation of universal sociolinguistic rules of politeness. An increasing number of studies have, however, discussed speech acts as culture specific and language specific, with a focus on the relationships between different cultural norms, values and assumptions, different languages and different speech acts. In Brown and Levinson’s (1987) view, ‘certain kinds of acts intrinsically threaten face’ (ibid.:65). Face-threatening speech acts have received much attention in research as they are potentially the source of intercultural communication breakdowns or what Thomas (1983) refers to as ‘pragmatic failure’ or ‘the inability to understand “what is meant by what is said”’ (ibid.: 91). Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) argue for the universality of politeness and, at the same time, ‘acknowledge its cultural specification’ (Liebersohn et al. 2004: 922). Facework strategies, which are considered to be largely motivated by politeness in face negotiation in everyday human interaction, have also been examined across cultures and discussed in terms of such factors as cultural variability in values, interaction scripts and language.