胡壮麟语言学6

Face Threatening Act (FTA)
• Face is something that is emotionally invested, and that can be lost, maintained, or enhanced, and must be constantly attended to interaction. In general, people cooperate in maintaining face in interaction, such cooperation being based on the mutual vulnerability of face. That is, normally everyone’s face depends on everyone else’s being maintained. Only by maintaining each other’s faces, can the communication proceed in a harmonious atmosphere.
• Positive face: the positive consistent self-image or ―personality‖ (crucially including the desire that this selfimage be appreciated and approved of) claimed by interactants. eg. You look wonderful today! Hero knows hero.
2. The use of fuzzy definite （模糊限制语） Fuzzy definite (Gorge Lakoff,1992)—those words or structures that make things fuzzy.
e.g. 你这么做不太合适啊，我觉得。
3. Politeness–marked words（礼貌标记语） Please close the door. 劳驾帮我抬一下行李吧！
Some other strategies: • off-record strategy （增加话语间接性） • the use of passive voice （被动语态） • interrogative questions（疑问句） • Implicit negative sentences （含蓄否定） • Ellipsis （省略）
D. Modesty Maxim (谦逊准则) (in expressives and assertives) (a) Minimize praise of self; (b) Maximize dispraise of self. e.g. Please accept this small gift as a token of our
e.g. Lend me your bike.
I want you to lend me your bike. Will you lend me your bike? Can you lend me your bike? Would you mind lending me your bike? Could you possibly lend me your bike?
• To conclude, the participants should always try to maintain each other’s face, in order to make the communication successful. Once the FTA can not be avoided, the speaker should adopt proper strategies to minimize the threat, in accordance with the situation, the communicative purpose, the hearer, etc.
B. Generosity Maxim (慷慨准则) (in impositives and commissives) (a) Minimize benefit to self (speaker); (b) Maximize cost to self. e.g. You can lend me your car. (impolite) I can lend you my car.
politeness
• According to Thomas, politeness has been studied from the following five prospectives: • Real-world goal • deference • register • Utterance phenomenon • Pragmatic phenomenon
• Negative face: the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction --- i.e., to freedom of action and freedom from imposition. To be specific, if the speaker can put himself in the listener’s place, leaving the listener room and freedom to choose, and then he saves the listener’s negative face. • eg. I wonder if it will help to get haircut.
C. Approbation Maxim (赞誉准则) (in expressives and assertives用于表态和断言) (a) Minimize dispraise of other; (b) Maximize praise of other. e.g. 表现可以！
表现真不错！ *我觉得表现一般。 *表现不行，没表情。
politeness strategies
• Some of the strategies : 1. The use of empathetic person deixis （语用移情人称指示语） The speaker switches the profit center to H, and speaks from the perspective or standpoint of H. e.g. One (you) shouldn’t always behave like a child.
• As to these questions, Grice failed to give a plausible explanation. However, his followers like Lakoff, Brown & Levinson and Leech have put forward the concept of politeness which acts as a supplement to the CP theory.
face
• ―Face‖ is the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself, consisting in two related aspects: negative face and positive face.
pragmatics
-----language in use
• Why do people have to indirectly imply their real meaning? • Why do they say one thing and actually mean another? • Why don’t they just say what they want to so that the listener will have less difficulty understanding them?
• However, it is intuitively the case that certain kinds of acts intrinsically threaten face, namely those acts that by their nature run contrary to the face wants of the addressee or of the speaker. This kind of speech acts can be called as Face Threatening Act---FTA
Leech’s Poli来自百度文库eness Principle
There are six maxims:
A. Tact Maxim (得体准则) (in impositives and commissives用于指令和承诺) (a) Minimize cost to other (hearer); (b) Maximize benefit to other.
Lakoff’s Politeness Rules
• One of the criteria against which politeness and impoliteness are distinguished is that polite utterance or behaviors make people pleasant while impolite speeches or behaviors make people uncomfortable and even lose their temper. In view of this, politeness is an interactional act (verbal or non-verbal).
Brown & Levinson’s View on Face
In the book Politeness: Some Universals of Language Usage, Brown & Levinson systematically explain their face theory. There are three basic concepts in their theory: face, face threatening acts (FTA) and politeness strategies.
esteem.
* Please accept this large gift as a token of our
esteem.
E. Agreement Maxim (一致准则) (in assertives) (a) Minimize disagreement between self and other; (b) Maximize agreement between self and other. e.g. A: A referendum(公民投票) will satisfy everybody. B: Yes, definitely. e.g. A: English is a difficult language to learn. B: True, but the grammar is quite easy. (Partial agreement is often preferable to complete disagreement.)