Negative Politeness Strategies (Brown and Levinson)

Another kind of politeness strategies is negative politeness. This strategy used when S wants to show that he cares and respect H’s Negative Face. If S did or will do an FTA, he will minimize the threat by using apology, deference, hedges and other strategies. Negative Politeness strategies consist in assurances that the speaker recognizes and respects the addressee’s negative-Face wants and will not (or will only minimally) interfere with the addressee Freedom of Action.

This strategy assumes that there might be some social distance or awkwardness between speaker and hearer and it is likely to be used whenever a speaker wants to put a social brake on his interaction (Brown and Levinson, 1987: 129).

Moreover, they (p. 129) introduce some strategies that included in negative politeness, they are:

1. Be direct
In the formal situation, sometimes the directness is needed to minimize the imposition by saying the point and avoiding the further imposition of prolixity and ambiguity as mentioned by Lakoff (in Goody, 1996). Fortunately, this strategy is rarely used in negative politeness because it is more relevant to be used in bald on-record strategy. For example, “Help me to pick up these boxes!”
In this strategy, S chooses to come rapidly to the point directly when she or he wants something. She does not care about maintaining face of the H but still respects and assure not to disturb the freedom of action of H.

2. Don’t assume about H’s wants
This type tries to avoid assuming that anything in FTA is desired or believed by H. it is stressed by hedging such assumptions in the form of word and phrase that modify the degree of predicate membership. For example, “A swing is sort of a toy’, or “You are quite right”.

3. Don’t coerce H
a. By avoiding coercing H’s response means that S gives H the option not to do a certain act.

b. By avoiding coercion of H means that S minimizes the threat by clarifying S view of the P, D and R values. 

c. Communicate S want not to impinge on H Indicate that S is aware and he takes account in his decision to communicate the FTA is one of the ways to satisfy H’s negative face.

4. Redress others’ wants of H

This is the higher strategy of negative politeness that consists of offering partial compensation for the face threat in FTA. It shows that negative politeness attends to other wants can be derived (H’s desire for territorial integrity and self determination). 

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Concept of Face and FTA (Face Threatening Acts)

Face
Based on Brown and Levinson (1987: 61) “Face is derived from the notion of Goffman and English people which is related to the idea of being embarrassed or humiliated, or ‘loosing Face’.” Since Face is something that is emotionally invested, can be lost, maintained, or enhanced, a person has to pay attention to his interlocutor’s Face. In other words, the speaker and the hearer must cooperate in maintaining each other’s Face in interaction. The action of maintaining each other’s Face called ‘Face work’.
Moreover, Goffman in Renkema (1993: 13) introduces the concept of face as an image which is projected by a person in his social contacts with others. Face has the meaning as in the saying to loose fact. Based on the opinion of Goffman, every participant in the social process has the need to be appreciated by others and the need to be free and not to be disturbed. He calls the need to be appreciated as a ‘positive face’ and the need to be free or not to be disturbed is called as ‘negative face’.
While negative face is defined as the desire of every member that he has Freedom of Action as well as freedom of imposition (the desire to not to be disturbed). For example is a father who is in the middle of giving advice to his children expects that his children do not tend to interrupt his speech (freedom of imposition).


Face Threatening Acts (FTA)
Politeness strategies are developed for the main purpose of dealing with the FTA’s. We understand the notion of ‘face’ previously from the dramaturgical theories of Erving Goffman that individuals as social actors perform (present a public self) on the stage of everyday life. The acts that threaten either the negative or positive face of the hearer are called ‘Face Threatening Acts’ (FTA) (Brown and Levinson, 1987: 65). There are acts that threaten the H’s Negative Face such as order, request, suggestion, advice, reminding, threat, warning, offer, promise, compliment and expression of negative emotion. Here, the speaker does not intend to avoid impeding H’s Freedom of Action. For example, when you ask someone to lend you some money, you are considered threaten that person’s Negative Face. It happens since you have violated his want to be free from being imposed.
In contrast, there are acts that threaten the H’s Positive Face such as expression of dissatisfaction, criticisms, complaints, accusation, and insult, disagreement, out of control emotion, irreverence, and bringing bad news about H or boasting about S, raising divisive topics, and blatant non-cooperation in an activity. All these acts indicate that the speaker does not care about the addressee’s feeling or wants. For example, disagreeing with someone’s opinion also causes a threat to his Positive Face, as it means that you indicate that he is wrong about something.

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Positive Politeness Strategies (Brown and Levinson)

Positive politeness is redress directed to the addressee’s positive face, his perennial desire that his wants (or the actions/ acquisitions/ values resulting from them) should be thought of as desirable. Redress consists in partially satisfying that desire by communicating that one’s own wants (or some them) are in some respects similar to the addressee’s wants. There are 15 strategies of positive politeness proposed by Brown and Levinson, those are:

Strategy 1: Notice, attend to H (his interests, wants, needs, goods)
This output suggests that S should take notice of aspects of H’s condition (noticeable changes, remarkable possessions, anything which looks as though H would want S to notice and approve of it).
e.g. “You must be hungry,
it’s a long time since breakfast. How about some lunch?”

Another aspect of the notice output is that when H makes an FTA against himself (a breakdown of body control, or any faux pas), S should ‘notice’ it and indicate that he’s not embarrassed by it. (By contrast, in negative politeness S should always ignore H’s faux pas). He can do this by a joke, or teasing H about his penchant for faux pas: For example: “God you are farty tonight!”

Strategy 2: Exaggerate (interest, approval, sympathy with H)
This is often done with exaggerated intonation, stress, and other aspects of prosodic, as well as with intensifying modifiers.
e. g: “How wonderful!”

Strategy 3: Intensify interest to H
S wants to share his interest to H as a form of S’s contribution into the conversation. Therefore, S exaggerates facts as well as he makes good story to draw H as a participant into the conversation, and H also usually uses tag questions like ‘uhuh’, ‘what do you think?’, etc. Sometimes, this can involve switching back between past and present tenses.
e. g: “I never imagined that there were thousands beautiful girls in Jim’s party
last night!”

Strategy 4: Use in-group identity markers
By using any of the innumerable ways to convey in-group membership, S can implicitly claim the common ground with H that is carried by that definition of the group. These include in group usages of address forms, of language or dialect, of jargon or slang, and of ellipsis.

• Address forms. Other address forms used to convey such in-group membership include generic names and terms of address like Mate, honey, dear, babe, mom, brother, sister, cutie, sweetheart, guys. Using such in group kinds of address forms with imperatives. For example: “Come here, honey” indicates that S considers the relative P (power, status difference) between himself and the addressee to be small thus softening the imperative by indicating that it isn’t a power-backed command.
• Use of in-group language or dialect. Another type of code-switching phenomenon is the switch in English into a spurious dialect, or a dialect not normally used by S or H, to soften an FTA or turn it into a joke.
• Use of jargon or slang. Use brand names in a request may stress that S and H share an (in-group) reliance on the required object.
• Contraction and Ellipsis. S and H must share some knowledge about the context that makes the utterance understandable (for example that S and H are cooperating in building a house and S has the hammer in his hand).

Strategy 5: Seek Agreement

• Safe topics. The raising of ‘safe topics’ allows S to stress his agreement with H and therefore to satisfy H’s desire to be ‘right’, or to be corroborated in his opinions.
• Repetition. Agreement may also be stressed by repeating part or all of what the preceding S has said in the conversation and by using that function to indicate emphatic agreement (‘yes’, ‘Really’, etc) whenever someone is telling story.

e. g: “There was flood in my hometown.”
“Oh my God. Flood!”

Strategy 6: Avoid Disagreement

• Token agreement. S may go in twisting their utterances so as to appear to agree or to hide disagreement-to respond to a preceding utterance with ‘yes, but…..'in effect, rather than a blatant ‘No’.

e. g. H: “How the girl looked like, beautiful?”
        S: “Yes, I think she is quite, but not really beautiful, she is certainly not really ugly.”

• Pseudo-agreement. Another example of apparent or pseudo-agreement is found in English in the use of then as a conclusory marker.

e.g. I’ll meet you in front of the theatre just before 8.0, then.

• White lies. S may do white lie to hide disagreement. By doing this, S is saving H’s face.

e. g. In response to a request to borrow a car, “Oh I can’t, my father will use it
tonight.”

• Hedging opinions. To soften FTA of suggesting, criticizing or complaining, hedges may also be used.

e. g.: “I know you are sort of a polite person”

Strategy 7: Presuppose/ raise/ assert common ground

• Gossip or small talk. S is talking about unrelated topics to show that S is interested in H as the mark of friendship and does not come only to impose him.

e. g.: “You look so bright today. It must be because MU had defeated Chelsea, right? By the way, can you take me to the airport this afternoon?”

• Point-of-view operations. S may claim common ground by using cooperation point of view. (S speaks as if H were S, or H’s knowledge were equal to S’s knowledge).

e. g. I had a really hard time learning to drive, didn’t I.

• Presupposition manipulations. S presupposes something when he presumes that it is mutually taken for granted.

e.g.: “Wouldn’t you like a drink?”

Strategy 8: Jokes
Jokes can be used to stress the fact that there must be some mutual background knowledge and values that S and H share. That is why, the strategy of joking may be useful in diminishing the social distance between S and H.
e. g.: “OK if I tackle those cookies now?”
“How about lending me this old heap of junk?” (H’s new Cadillac)

Strategy 9: Assert or Presuppose S’s knowledge of and concerns for H’s wants.
It is the way to indicate that S and H are co-operators, and thus potentially to put pressure on H to cooperate with S. S wants to assert and imply knowledge of H’s wants and willingness to fit one’s own wants in with them.
e. g.: “I understand you can do it yourself, but this time, do what I suggested
you.”

Strategy 10: Offer or promises
S and H are good co-operators that they share some goals or S is willing to help to achieve those goals. Promise or offer demonstrates S’s good attention in satisfying H’s positive-face wants, even if they are false.
e. g.: “I’ll go there sometimes”

Strategy 11: Be optimistic
S assumes that H wants S’s wants for S (or for S and H) and will help to obtain them. This usually happens among people with close relationship.
e. g.: “You’ll tell your father that you did it, I hope”

Strategy 12: Include both S and H in the activity
Here, S manipulates the subject of an activity is done together. S uses an inclusive ‘we’ from when S actually means ‘you’ or ‘me’. Inclusive form ‘we’ is usually used in the construction ‘let’s’.
e. g.: “Bring us the book’ (i.e. me)
“Let’s go downtown, uh?” (i. e you)

Strategy 13: Give (or ask for) reasons
S uses H as the reason why S wants something so that it will seem reasonable to the hearer. S assumes (via optimism) that there are no good reasons why H should not or cannot cooperate.
e. g.:”Why not lend me your car for the weekend?”

Strategy 14: Assume or assert reciprocity
S asks H to cooperate with him by giving evidence of reciprocal rights or obligations between S and H. Thus, S may say, in effect, “I’ll do x for you if you can do y for me”.
e. g.:”I’ll tell you what it looks like if you tell me where she is now.”

Strategy 15: Give gifts to H (goods, sympathy, understanding, cooperation)
S satisfies H’s Positive Face want by giving gift, not only tangible gifts, but human relation wants which are the wants to be liked, admired, cared about, understood, listened to, etc. in other words, this strategy is usually used for the benefit of H.
e. g.:”I’m sorry to hear that”.

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Leech's Politeness Principles

Politeness concerns a relationship between self and other. In conversation, self is identified as the speaker and other is the hearer. Beside that, the speaker also shows politeness to the third parties who may be present or not. The politeness principle (PP) is introduced by Geoffrey Leech. PP is Minimizing (other things being equal) the expression of impolite beliefs, and there is a corresponding positive version (maximizing (other things being equal) the expression of polite beliefs) which is somewhat less important. PP proposes how to produce and understand language based on politeness. The purpose of PP is to establish feeling of community and social relationship. Thus, PP focuses on process of interpretation that the center of the study is on the effect of the hearer rather than the speaker. There are six maxims of the politeness principle that are used to explain relationship between sense and force in daily conversation, those are:

The Tact maxim
The tact maxim is minimizing cost to other and maximizing benefit to other. This maxim is applied in Searle’s speech act, commissives and directives called by Leech as impositives. Commissives is found in utterances that express speaker’s intention in the future action. Then, Directives/ impositives are expressions that influence the hearer to do action. The example of the tact maxim is as follows:

“Won‘t you sit down?”

It is the directive/ impositive utterance. This utterance is spoken to ask the hearer sitting down. The speaker uses indirect utterance to be more polite and minimizing cost to the hearer. This utterance implies that sitting down is benefit to the hearer.

The Generosity Maxim
The generosity maxim states to minimizing benefit to self and maximizing cost to self. Like tact maxim, the generosity maxim occurs in commissives and directives/ impositives. This maxim is centered to self, while the tact maxim is to other. The example will be illustrated as follows:

“You must come and dinner with us.”

It is an advice utterance that is involved in directive illocutionary act. In this case the speaker implies that cost of the utterance is to his self. Meanwhile, the utterance implies that benefit is for the hearer.

The Approbation Maxim
The approbation maxim requires to minimizing dispraise of other and maximizing praise of other. This maxim instructs to avoid saying unpleasant things about others and especially about the hearer. This maxim occurs in assertives/ representatives and expressives. Assertives/ representatives are utterances that express the true propositional. Meanwhile, expressive are utterances that show the speaker feeling. The example is sampled below.

A: “The performance was great!”
B: “Yes, wasn’t it!”

In the example, A gives a good comment about the performance. He talks the pleasant thing about other. This expression is a congratulation utterance that maximizes praise of other. Thus this utterance is included the approbation maxim.

The Modesty Maxim
In the modesty maxim, the participants must minimize praise of self and maximize dispraise of self. This maxim is applied in assertives/ representatives and expressives like the approbation maxim. Both the approbation maxim and the modesty maxim concern to the degree of good or bad evaluation of other or self
that is uttered by the speaker. The approbation maxim is exampled by courtesy of congratulation. On other hand, the modesty maxim usually occurs in apologies. The sample of the modesty maxim is below.

“Please accept this small gift as prize of your achievement.”

In this case, the utterance above is categorized as the modesty maxim because the speaker maximizes dispraise of himself. The speaker notices his utterance by using “small gift”.

The Agreement Maxim
In the agreement maxim, there is tendency to maximize agreement between self and other people and minimize disagreement between self and other. The disagreement, in this maxim, usually is expressed by regret or partial agreement. This maxim occurs in assertives/ representatives illocutionary act. There example will be illustrated below.

A: “English is a difficult language to learn.”
B: “True, but the grammar is quite easy.”

From the example, B actually does not agree that all part of English language difficult to learn. He does not express his disagreement strongly to be more polite. The polite answer will influence the effect of the hearer. In this case, B’s answer minimize his disagreement using partial agreement, “true, but…”.

The Sympathy Maxim
The sympathy maxim explains to minimize antipathy between self and other and maximize sympathy between self and other. In this case, the achievement being reached by other must be congratulated. On other hand, the calamity happens to other, must be given sympathy or condolences. This maxim is applicable in assertives/ representatives. The example is as follows.

“I’m terribly sorry to hear about your father.”

It is a condolence expression which is expressed the sympathy for misfortune. This utterance is uttered when the hearer gets calamity of father’s died or sick. This expression shows the solidarity between the speaker and the hearer.

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Brown and Levinson's Politeness Strategies

As it has been discussed in the previous article: means of communication, that as a means of communication, related to discourse study, language has two primary functions, those are, transactional and interactional function. In a simple definition, the first term refers to language as a means of conveyance of information, while the second refers to language that functions as a means of social relation maintenance. In line with the second function of language,  interactional function, people have to see to whom they are speaking, because it may be some expressions are considered rude. It is needed to identify the social values of a society in order to speak politely. Making decisions about what is not regarded as polite expressions in any community will involve assessing social relationship along the dimensions of social distance or solidarity, and relative power or status. Being polite may also involve the dimension of formality.

The study of politeness strategy is basically the study of knowing the way the people use the language while they are having interaction or communication. It preaches how to use the language and conduct the conversation run well and go smoothly.
In case of communication, however, everyone wants to be understood and not to be disturbed by others; moreover, he or she does not want to loose his face while communicating. Loosing face means the notions of being embarrassed, humiliated or disappointed. That is why face is something that is emotionally invested, maintained, enhanced and constantly attended in an interaction.

Concept of face
Face means respect, self-esteem, self-image in the community, Brown and Levinson say that society is governed by two desires: to be free from imposition, and to be appreciated and approved of. First desire considered a negative politeness, and the latter is considered a positive politeness.
Face is the central idea of ​​this theory:

• Negative face includes the following aspects: the basic demands of the private property and personal space, rights not to be disturbed, freedom of action and freedom from imposition. 
• Positive face refers to personality as well as desires that his own self-image is accepted and respected, the value of face is different in different cultures: the definite boundary  is a private space and the local culture. 

Face-Threatening Act (FTA) 
Meanwhile, in a conversation, the interlocutor could be a threat to someone's face and the face of his own by making a question, suggestion, criticism, reveling mistake, thanking, and so on. All of these are so-called face-threatening act (FTA). Most of the speech acts of speaker emerged potentially results FTA.

FTA could threaten the face of both positive and negative, as in point (I) and (II):
(I) Negative FTA: command, request, suggest, suggestions, remind, threaten, warn, offer, promise, express jealousy, admiration, hate, anger, passion, etc
(Ii) Positive FTA: an expression of disapproval, criticism, felt disgust, complaining, accusing, insulting, diagreeing, emotionally abusive, mentioning taboo topics, interrupting and uncooperative, etc.

4 Kinds of politeness strategies (Brown & Levinson) 
• The bald on-record strategy does nothing to minimize threats to the hearer's "face" (directly without regard to the "face" of listener-usually in a subordinate-supervisor relationship)

 e.g. close the door!

• The positive politeness strategy shows you recognize that your hearer has a desire to be respected. It also confirms that the relationship is friendly and expresses group reciprocity. (Wish yourself image is accepted and appreciated)

e.g. we both know that (seek agreement) everything will be alright from now on.

Brown and Levinson propose fifteen positive and 10 negative politeness strategies in which for further explanation will be discussed in "Positive Politeness Vs. Negative Politeness Strategies".

kinds of positive politeness strategies
1. Notice, Attend to H: speakers are advised to pay attention to the condition of the listener
2. Exaggerate: exaggeration on the condition of the listener
3. Intensify interest: strengthening S's interest to the condition H
4. Use in group identity markers: put H as part of the community of S
5. Seek agreement: provide the same perception of the condition that occurs towards the S.
6. etc.

• The negative politeness strategy also Recognizes the hearer's face. But it also Recognizes that you are in some way imposing on them. (Right to not be disturbed)

e.g. "I do not want to bother you but ..." or "I was wondering if ..."

• Off-record indirect strategies the main purpose is to take some of the pressure off of you. You are trying to avoid the direct Face Threatening Act of asking something. (Do indirect FTA-satire / questions)

e.g. This day is very hot, is not it?

Used to tell someone standing / sitting near the window to open it.

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