Politeness Essay

939 Words4 Pages
Politeness is one of those advantages which we never estimate rightly, but by the inconvenience of its loss. (Samuel Johonson) The Game of Politeness Two years ago, when I came to Belgium, I didn’t know much about politeness and the barriers it can create in the cross-cultural environment. I took different communication courses, which surprisingly for me, all mentioned this notion to a certain extend. However the Cross-Cultural Communication course was the final push that made me analyze deeper the notion of polities and its different aspects. There are many theories that try to define politeness, but the first theory was established by Erving Goffman who says that “ when people interact they constantly worry about maintaining a nebulous yet vital commodity called face” (from the idiom to “save face” ), in other words the face is a positive social value that people expect from you and you would like in return. In order for us to penetrate this notion, it would be interesting to know: How many types of politeness are out there? How is the notion of politeness diverse in different cultures? How do we perceive politeness and what situations can it create? I will analyze all of these aspects and make a cultural case study. Like all abstract concepts, politeness is difficult to define, as it is perceived differently from culture to culture; but one thing that was well established is that there are two types of politeness. “First-order politeness is thus intuitively a mixture of politeness as a lay concept, of which speakers are consciously aware, and politeness-in-action, which is implicit only in discursive practices, and thus at times people are not necessarily consciously aware of it” (Eelen, 2001; Ehlich, 1992). “Second-order politeness, on the other hand, is a theoretical construct, a term within a theory of social behavior and
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