An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Politeness And Indirectness

During the past 30 years, "Politeness" has drawn extensive attention from the fields of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, anthropology, applied linguistics, and so on. Among all the theories concerning politeness, the Face-saving Theory or rather Face-Threatening Act (FTA) proposed by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987) is the most influential theory. Brown and Levinson's range of politeness strategies from "bald on-record" to "off-record" indicates that politeness is a matter of degree and can be equated with indirectness and that higher levels of indirectness may result in higher levels of politeness. Brown and Levinson (1987) think their theory is universally right. However, in recent years, some scholars'researches have proved there is little connection between indirectness and politeness in other languages, such as German. In Chinese, will higher levels of indirectness result in higher levels of politeness? Surprisingly, few studies have touched upon this issue; let alone using a quantitative approach to verify the scalar nature of politeness and indirectness and the corresponding relationship between these two in Chinese. Therefore, in this thesis, an empirical study is conducted aiming to give an elaborate explanation of the relationship between politeness and indirectness in Chinese. To clearly show the relationship, the author chooses the speech act of request as a case study.Altogether 90 subjects take part in the experiment and they are divided into three groups. Group 1 needs to complete the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) to provide some original data of the Chinese request strategies. Then the scale questionnaires are formed based on the results of the DCT. Group 2 has to complete the scales to make judgment on the different levels of indirectness of the strategies while Group 3 has to make judgment on the different levels of politeness of the strategies. With the help of Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS), the data of the scales is analyzed to obtain a sequential order respectively from the perspective of indirectness and from that of politeness. Then the comparison of the two sequential orders is conducted to test whether there is a correlation between indirectness and politeness. After that, post-test interviews are conducted among some of the subjects to provide some explanations of their judgment.The comparison of the two sequential orders of indirectness and politeness shows that there is no strong relationship between indirectness and politeness. The results challenge Brown and Levinson's theory. This difference between English and Chinese can be attributed to their cultural differences. In Chinese, politeness is more complicated and attaches greater importance to the social order and reflects one's personal quality. Indirectness is not necessarily aimed to achieve politeness. Rhetorical function is an important function of the indirect speech. In this sense, politeness can not be equaled with indirectness and it is no wonder there is no strong relationship between these two.Besides, this study also finds some characteristics of the sequential order of indirectness and that of politeness. People's judgment of different levels of indirectness is relatively the same while that of different levels of politeness varies. This is also because politeness in China is very complicated and there is no universal accepted criterion to judge the degree of politeness.