An Exploration Of Verbal Politeness Within Adaptation-relevance Model

Verbal politeness has been extensively studied.Fraser(1990) postulates four main ways of viewing politeness,namely,the conversational-maxim view,the face-saving view, the social-norm view and the conversational-contract view.These views neglect the function of contextual factors and thus are unable to account for the diversity and complexity of verbal politeness.In addition to these four views,studies on verbal politeness based on Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory have been conducted.The former take a cognitive approach to verbal politeness and hold that politeness is the result of interpretation;the latter take contextual correlates into consideration and claim that verbal politeness is the result of language users' adaptation to various contextual correlates. While being more reasonable than the four views made clear in Fraser(1990),studies based on Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory are not beyond criticism.The former are considered to be more concentrated on the interpretation of verbal politeness but less on the production side and they fail to give a detailed description of various contextual correlates involved in verbal politeness;the latter are criticized for putting more emphasis on the production side but less on the interpretation of verbal politeness and they do not answer how language users conduct the adaptation.A brief review of the existing politeness literature reveals that the notion and the working mechanism of verbal politeness have not been clearly explained yet.Therefore, the present study attempts to revisit the notion of verbal politeness and then explore its working mechanism.The theoretical framework employed in the present study is Adaptation-relevance Model which takes into consideration both the production and interpretation sides of verbal communication and can make an effective account of verbal politeness.In the present study,verbal politeness is viewed as a cognitive-pragmatic phenomenon in which the speaker conveys his/her politeness intentions by choosing utterances according to his/her contextual assumptions,and the hearer,evaluates whether the speaker is speaking properly or not by taking relevant contextual correlates into consideration and accordingly generates a certain kind of mental effect which can be referred to as politeness effect.This revisited notion reveals that verbal politeness is characterized by subjectivity,relativity and fluidity.Subjectivity refers to the fact that language users' cognition,communicative intentions,salience and emotive elements exert great influence on the production and interpretation of verbal politeness;relativity denotes that whether an utterance is polite or not is determined by contextual correlates with which it is produced and interpreted;fluidity means that verbal politeness is a dynamic notion.At the micro-level,both the production and interpretation of verbal politeness is dynamic;at the macro-level,the standards on being polite or impolite vary along with the passage of times.The revisiting of the notion and pragmatic features of verbal politeness reveals that the so-called politeness and impoliteness are not two distinct things.Instead,they are two components in the same continuum(verbal politeness phenomenon) and there are intermediate zones between them.In our daily life,especially in long-stretch verbal communications,the occurrence of politeness is often accompanied with that of impoliteness.Based on the revisited notion,this study explores the working process of verbal politeness within the framework of Adaptation-relevance Model from three aspects, namely,contextual dynamism,the relationship between utterances and contextual correlates,and the generation of politeness effect.The exploration leads to the following conclusions:(â…°) Contextual dynamism functions in the whole process of verbal politeness and it can guarantee the successful conveyance of the speaker's politeness intention and the hearer's correct location of the speaker's politeness intention.(â…±) There exists an inter-adaptation between utterances and contextual correlates in verbal politeness communication.When a speaker chooses a certain utterance,he/she meanwhile selects relevant contextual correlates.The purpose in doing so is to make sure that his/her politeness intention can be made manifest to the hearer.When a hearer chooses relevant contextual correlates he/she simultaneously takes the speaker's utterance into account so as to recognize the speaker's politeness intention.(â…²)The generation of politeness effect is dynamic.Both the generation of anticipated politeness and that of inferred politeness involve dynamic processes.However,the generation of inferred politeness calls for more cognitive effort.In communication that consists of more than one turns,anticipated and inferred verbal politeness may be alternately generated since the speaker and hearer switch their roles frequently,and meanwhile vary their cognitive contexts continuously with the proceeding of the communication.