A Critique Of Brown And Levinson's Politeness Theory: An Iconic Proposal

This paper attempts to apply the iconicity theory advocated by Peirce to the anatomy of linguistic politeness.In Chapter 1, I set the groundwork by addressing what researchers have taken to be the domain of linguistic politeness. Following this, I present in detail Brown and Levinson's model, since virtually all the papers since 1978 pay obeisance to their work, even those efforts to provide an alternative model of accounting for politeness.In Chapter 2, I turn to many of the varied challenges to this model, and suggest that the cross-cultural universality of the face-maintenance strategies under their framework is questionable.In Chapter 3, I argue that the cognitive-psychological drive for politeness is universally valid, notwithstanding the dubious nature of the uniformed pancultural notion of face wants. In view of this, an iconic solution is proposed.In Chapter 4, three subjects - politeness tactics, euphemism, and address forms - are placed under scrutiny to instantiate their iconic motivation. Previously, studies on the abovementioned three subjects were embedded in different theoretical backgrounds: socio-pragmatics, rhetoric and sociolinguistics. At first blush, they seem to lack a compatible interface, each covering a small patch of linguistic data. It is a tempting idea if these explanations can be brought under the same theoretical title.In socio-pragmatics, politeness tactics are categorised as either positive or negative. They are taken to be static tactics inextricably bound with certain illocutionary forces, and are largely explained by the face-want theory proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987 [1978]). Under the iconic analysis, politeness tactics prove the working of iconic principles that exhibit the psychological distance between interlocutors. Formality in linguistic forms is iconic of deference paid to the hearer, whilst simplicity in linguistic forms is iconic of psychological affiliation. This might find its cognitive basis in terms of psychologicalprocessing.Traditionally, euphemism has all along been regarded as an object of enquiry that falls within rhetoric. Its presence was justified in terms of stylistic purposes. As a figure of speech, euphemism was treated as a rhetorical artefact. This study, however, pinpoints the nature of the motivating force behind the use of euphemisms, namely, the complexity of euphemistic expressions is iconic of the more complicated state of mind in which people are talking about touchy subjects. Hence, linguistic circumlocution iconises conceptual indirectness.And in sociolinguistics, studies on address forms centre on two semantics -power and solidarity - proposed by Brown and Oilman (1968 [I960]). However, these two concepts in themselves are not without conflict. In face of explanation, it is hard to tell where one of the claims leaves off and the other takes over, and which one is preferred if both are potentially available. Therefore, how to reconcile these two competing motivations becomes a problem too. In order to reveal the hidden cognitive factors, this paper probes the basic impulses that underlie the linguistic diversity, and finds that the linguistic formality/reduction is iconic of the social power/solidarity, and that linguistic categorisation iconises conceptual categorisation.As a result, this paper manages to reduce to the same unifying principle several proposals used for explication. Findings in this paper confirm that they all can be accounted for under the rubric of iconicity.