Politeness Some Universals in Language Usage

Exploitations of strategies

Our model would predict a number of possible exploitations of the politeness strategies. We consider these briefly here.

Trying to re-rank R, P, or D. We mentioned in section 3.4.2, in our discussion of the nature of the sociological variables that go into assessing the seriousness of an FTA, that a speaker may exploit the fundamental ambiguity that derives from the compounding of the factors D, P, and R into a single index of risk, and attempt to redefine one of the variables. That is, any FTA utterance will encode the estimated danger of the FTA, but it does not necessarily display which of the social variables is primarily responsible for the assessed weight of Wx . S and H will both have some estimate of these variables, and S may choose to try to re-rank the expectable weighting of one of the variables at the expense of the others.

In trying to re-rank R, S may take advantage of mutual-knowledge assumptions between S and H of their respective social distance D and social power P, and S may choose to act as though R x is smaller than he in fact knows (and knows that H knows) it really is. He can do this by saying, for example, ‘Hey, Harry, how about lending me your new car!’ and hoping that the positive-politeness optimism will convince Harry that it is not a very big or unreasonable request. This is risky, as Harry may decide that it is D or P that the addressee is manipulating, rather than R, and take offence.