Politeness : How it is Realized in a Speech Act

This paper aims firstly to review the pragmatic notion of 'politeness', then to describe examples of how 'politeness' is expressed and discerned in English and Japanese, based on the data collected from high school students in Utah, U. S. A., Victoria, Australia, and Tokyo, Japan. The participants were asked how they would respond in offending scenarios given in the Discourse Completion Test. With reference to previous studies, the author explains that 'politeness' is a linguistic strategy employed in order to save 'face' of the interlocutors with the manipulation of three factors ; Distance, Power, and the Weight of the Imposition. The data show that these factors are influential, and also indicate several different responses among the participants because these factors are relational and culturally based, and because pragmatic skills are developmental. Conspicuous inter-cultural differences are: Japanese high school students tend to employ a 'hierarchical politeness' system to their teacher but their social tact is not highly developed yet. American high school students tend to employ a 'deference politeness' system basically to their teacher and classmate, and their developmental stage is relatively high. Australian students tend to employ a 'solidarity politeness' system more frequently than the other systems.