礼貌原则

Leech (1983) formulates ‘Politeness Principle’, or PP for short, trying to remedy Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle (CP) which is presumed to be unable to interpret why, for instance, people are prone to use indirect ways of saying things. To Leech, it is politeness that motivates it.

Social acts like competitives (ordering, asking, begging, etc.) demand politeness far more than other kinds like convivials and collaboratives, because the former makes a threat to the audience’s face, or negative face (in Brown and Levinson’s (1978/1987) terms). V arious politeness strategies, thus, are employed to mitigate the face-threatening power. According to Leech, the greater the cost an act is (be it verbal or non-verbal) to the audience, the more polite the speaker ought to try to make the utterance. 1) is a request, and it is (made) polite by (means of) the smallness of the cost to the other person, and the politeness particle please. 2) is an order, impolite in nature. So is 3), ruder and more dangerous for it is robbery.

1) Give me ten cents, please.

2) Put up your hand!

3) Give me all your money and get out of the house.

If the act is benefit (beneficial) to the hearer, the speaker does not have to sound polite, or extremely so, for the benefit speaks for itself. 4-5) are polite requests, so please as a token of politeness is not necessary, least so with 6) which is a huge if not impossible benefit.

4) Y ou can take this newspaper.

5) Take this bike.

6) Drive my car away as you please.

The PP of Leech has six maxims (below is adapted from Leech: P. 132):

(1) Tact Maxim: Minimize cost to hearer; maximize benefit to hearer.

(2) Generosity Maxim: Minimize benefit to speaker; maximize cost to speaker.

(3) Approbation Maxim: Minimize dispraise of hearer; maximize praise of hearer.

(4) Modesty Maxim: Minimize praise of speaker; maximize dispraise of speaker.

(5) Agreement Maxim: Minimize disagreement between speaker and hearer; maximize agreement between speaker and hearer.

(6) Sympathy Maxim: Minimize antipathy between speaker and hearer; maximize sympathy between speaker and hearer.

We do not have to exemplify all the maxims, for most of them are self-evident, and we can easily detect that these maxims are not equally true with all cultures. Between the east and the west there may be found some noticeable differences, but in spite of that, Leech doubts if there is any ‘divide’. (Leech 2005) According to him, the PP as a principle is universal across cultures. Differences lie only in the social parameters of politeness like age, sex, rank of imposition represented by the saying, social distance between the two people or sides, relative power of one person over the other, and so on. When Americans and Chinese receive the same praise, for instance, the former like to thank or appreciate the praiser, while the latter try all means to minimize their own praise-worthy merit. But this does not mean that Americans disobey the Modesty Maxim. Thanking in this case implies modesty by thanking the praiser or other people (like the good director or teacher of the praised), and over-dispraising self is a typical (extreme) modesty model in the eastern culture. So the skepticism about the universality of PP all over the globe, which seemed to be gaining ground in the two or three decades after the appearance of Leech (1983), does not really hold under scrutiny.

作为社会的人、社交的人、合作的人——作为人，我们需要礼貌。