Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labor in Society. Macmillan: New York, New York, 1984 (1893)

Goffman, Erving. Interaction Ritual. Pantheon: New York, 1967.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday: Garden City, New York, 1959. Goffman, Erving. Stigma. Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1963.

Gottlieb, Roger. Marxism: 1844-1990. Routledge: New York, 1992.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Methuen: New York, 1979.

Tucker, Robert. The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition. W.W. Norton: New York, 1978.

Grice, Paul (1975). "Logic and conversation". In Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts, ed. P. Cole & J. Morgan. New York: Academic Press. Reprinted in Studies in the Way of Words, ed. H. P. Grice, pp. 22–40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1989)

Cameron, D. (2001). Working with Spoken Discourse. London: Sage Publications.

For more about correspondences between landscape and national psyches, see: Novinger, Tracy. Intercultural Communication. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001, p. 31

Okun, Barbara F., Fried, Jane, Okun, Marcia L. Understanding Diversity. A Learning as Practice Primer. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing, 1999, pp. 59-60.

Lecture # 14. Politeness theory of P. Brown and S. Levinson

According to Brown & Levinson, one can subsequently distinguish between two types of face wants: positive face and negative face. Positive face refers to the desire to be appreciated as a social person. Negative face refers to the desire to see one's action unimpeded by others. Corresponding to these two face-types, language communities develop strategies to attend to positive and negative face wants. These strategies are referred to as positive and negative politeness strategies. With particular reference to negative face wants, Brown & Levinson have developed the concept of a face threatening act to refer to verbal acts which intrinsically threaten face and may therefore require face-redressive action (Click for a schematic overview of available options). According to Brown & Levinson, there is a direct correlation between the amount of face work speakers put in and particular situational variables: (a) power, (b) social distance and (c) the gravity of the imposition (cf. a request to borrow someone's car usually involves more face-work than a request to use that person's pencil).

Brown & Levinson predominantly see face wants in individualistic terms. Their speaker is a rational model person, who, when interacting, adopts rational goals of which she is conscious. The underlying assumption is that the behaviour of interactants displays a sensitivity towards a satisfaction of mutual face wants. In contrast, one may stress the situational diversification of systems of politeness as well as their conventional nature. See, for instance, Bourdieu who sees politeness in terms of conventions which reflect the determinate nature of power relations in a social space. Subcription to these conventions counts as an act of political concession. Compare also with critiques of speech act theory.

Brown & Levinson are preoccupied with “losing face”, but there is hardly an equivalent discussion of “gaining face”. This choice of metaphor has been criticised as ethnocentric.

The relevance of "face" in interactional analysis can be extended beyond Brown & Levinson’s particular utterance-oriented interpretation of it. Suggestions for this can be found in Goffman’s own work. In addition, one can think here of situations where speakers enter into confrontations with institutions in order to (re)claim certain entitlements. In terms of scope, this takes us beyond a pre-occupation with the "local" face-related dimensions of individual utterances towards a more "global" analysis of the face work dimensions of complete exchange sequences or encounters, especially disputes (see Sarangi & Slembrouck 1997)

The study of reference is essentially a pragmatic theme. The focus is on how speakers establish various types of linkage between their utterances and elements in a situational context (e.g. objects, persons, etc.). One central question is the functioning of deictic elements, sometimes called shifters (i.e. lexical items such as "I, you, here, now, there, tomorrow, etc." whose referential meaning shifts with every new speaker or occasion of use). Within a linguistic anthropological strand of enquiry, deixis is viewed as a linguistic phenomenon which fundamentally challenges the view that language would be a self-contained, autonomous system. The presence of deictic elements ties up an utterance with contextually variable factors and such can even be argued to affect the meaning of other lexical items in the co-textual vicinity (see Duranti & Goodwin (1992b:43-4) for a lucid argumentation to this effect).

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