Full Text - VPU biblioteka - Vilniaus pedagoginis universitetas

þ m o g u s i r þ o d i s 2 0 0 6 I I I
Power Relations and Politeness
Janina BUITKIENË
Vilniaus pedagoginis universitetas
Studentø g. 39, LT–08106 Vilnius
El. paðtas: afk@vpu.lt
Straipsnyje, remiantis T. Williams’o pjese Geismø
tramvajus, nagrinëjama lingvistinë diskurso dalyviø
valios raiðka. Ði raiðka glaudþiai siejasi su pokalbio
dalyviø teigiamu ir neigiamu ávaizdþiais, kuriuos
jie, priklausomai nuo savo socialinës padëties,
iðsilavinimo ir kitø veiksniø, bando apsaugoti
arba paþeisti. Analizë leidþia daryti iðvadà, kad nagrinëtame
kûrinyje pagrindiniai diskurso dalyviai savo
valiai iðreiðti vartoja tokias lingvistinës raiðkos
The aim of the present article is, on the basis of
T. Williams‘ play A Streetcar Named Desire, to
analyse the relationship between power relations
and those politeness strategies which are used by
discourse participants to hide or to demonstrate
their power. Politeness strategies, first of all, deal
with participants’ positive and negative face and,
secondly, certain linguistic means which help save
Power relations are clearly observable in social
life. Language, being an inalienable part of our social
life, possesses manifold ways to exhibit power
relations. To quote Kress (1990, 52), “… language
is entwined in social power in a number of ways: it
indexes power, expresses power, and language is
involved wherever there is contention over and
challenge to power”. Linguists working in this sphere
agree that these relations can be analyzable at
different levels: from institutions as the highest level
of social structuring (Fairclough 1997; Wodak
1996) to the most concrete level, that of a particular
social event or action (Short 1996). In the first case
scholars are interested in how certain institutions
employ power relations to pursue the goals of an
institution or those of its separate members. In this
Santrauka
Summary
Introduction
Valios raiðkos priemonës ir
mandagumas
k albotyra
priemones kaip tiesioginius (direktyvinius) kalbinius
aktus, pasakymus ðvelninanèius þodþius ir frazes,
pauzes ir t. t. Diskurso dalyviø valià taip pat
parodo jø pasakymø ilgis ir turinys, t. y. kaip jie
sugeba nukreipti pokalbá jiems palankia kryptimi.
Esminiai þodþiai: mandagumas, mandagumo
santykiai, teigiamas/neigiamas ávaizdis, veiksniai, keliantys
grësmæ ávaizdþiui, pasakymà ðvelninanèios
priemonës, mandagumo strategijos.
or threaten that face. The analysed material shows
that face-threatening or face-saving acts are realised
through direct/indirect speech acts, certain language
means which could be labelled as hedges or boosters,
and turn-taking.
Key words: politeness, power relations, negative/
positive face, face-threatening acts, mitigation
devices, politeness strategies.
respect doctor-patient communication, ‘school
partnership’, and other institutional discourses were
researched. At the other end, discourse analysts and
scholars working in the field of stylistics are much
concerned about how speech acts and certain
principles accompanying them contribute to the
realization and expression of power relations. Power
relations, however, have a tendency to be hidden in
modern societies both at the institutional level and
in face-to-face discourse for manifold reasons, e.g.
for manipulative reasons or certain restraints on
formality. Therefore, interlocuters tend to be polite
and to resort to certain politeness strategies in order
to preserve the addressee’s ‘face’, to recognize
differences of power, degrees of social distance, etc.
(Fairclough 1991). Being polite means expressing
ISSN 1392-8600
15

16
Power Relations and Politeness
respect towards the person you are talking to and
avoiding offending him/her. In many works
‘politeness’ is used to refer to behaviour which
actively expresses positive concern for others as well
as non-imposing distancing behaviour. The
The research was conducted on the basis of
drama dialogue, as it most closely resembles
spontaneous conversation in which speech acts and
politeness principles function most naturally.
Following Short (1996), it should be noted that
discourse structure of drama possesses features both
similar to and different from casual conversation.
The scholar claims that drama dialogue differs from
conversation mainly in 1) it is written to be spoken
while conversation is unprepared and unrehearsed
and 2) normal non-fluency does not occur in drama
dialogue: if these features do appear, they serve some
other meaningful purposes as intended by the
dramatist. In ordinary conversation these normal
non-fluency features are usually not noticed. On
the other hand, both drama dialogue and casual
Materials and methods
Valios raiðkos priemonës ir mandagumas
linguistic means by which politeness is expressed in
languages are varied. In this paper an attempt is
made to briefly analyse the correlation between
power relations and politeness strategies employed
in T. Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire.
conversation share certain similarities such as turntaking
patterns; characters or persons perform
certain speech acts; their utterances are situation
dependent; they may say one thing but mean
something else, etc. (Short op. cit., 174-181). The
above mentioned commonalities give plausible
grounds to treat drama dialogue as being rather close
to casual conversation.
The paper analyses the above mentioned issues
applying the method of linguistic research which
has become known as critical linguistics (Kress
1990; Fairclough 1991, 1997) and which is
essentially concerned with discourse as a social
phenomenon, social interaction involving displays
of power.
Theoretical prerequisites of the study
Power relations are an all-embracing
phenomenon of social life. The current tendencies
in our present-day societal life presuppose the
avoidance of explicit expression of institutional or
personal power; thus, at both levels those in power
are supposed to resort to certain measures which in
a way tend to hide power relations. Preference to
indirect speech acts, observing the cooperative
principle and already established politeness
strategies can work in the opposite ways: either to
‘hide’ power relations (if it is unavoidable, at least
to reveal them in the most socially acceptable way)
or to expose them. This is the point at which power
relations and politeness meet or overlap, and
generations of linguists tried to explain and give
reasons for such behaviour of ours.
First of all, politeness is closely connected with
speech act theory. Pertinent to the study of politeness
is the fact of dividing speech acts into direct and
indirect. It became generally acknowledged that
politeness is more associated with indirectness;
directives are more often expressed as interrogatives
or affirmatives than imperatives. Thus indirect
speech acts are one of many forms of politeness
frequently used in situations which lack familiarity,
exhibit the formality of the context and social
distance (differences of status, role, age, gender,
education, class, occupation, and ethnicity) (Cutting
2003).
Another discourse framework which is capable
of revealing the nature of social relationships
between individuals was developed by P. Brown and
S. Levinson who laid foundations for the principles
of politeness. Central to the notion of politeness
phenomenon is the concept of face. Face is seen as
a kind of public ‘self-image’ which members of a
society claim for themselves. It consists of two
related aspects: positive and negative face.
According to Brown & Levinson (2000, 322),
negative face “is the want of every ‘competent adult
member’ that his actions be unimpeded by others”,
while positive face “is the want of every member
that his wants be desirable to at least some others”.
In other words, negative face refers to any person’s
basic claims to territories, personal preserves and
the right to non-distraction, i.e. the need to be
independent. Positive face, on the other hand, refers
to any person’s need to be accepted, even liked, by
others, to be treated as a member of the same group,
and to know that his/her wants are shared by others,
i.e. the need to be connected. However, speakers
often perform acts which ‘threaten’ the addressee’s
face. These acts are called face-threatening acts
(FTA). According to the above mentioned scholars,
Janina BUITKIENË

þ m o g u s i r þ o d i s 2 0 0 6 I I I
there are various ways of performing FTAs which
depend upon the social (power) relationship of the
interlocutors, the context of interaction and the
amount of imposition. As a result, the addresser,
while performing a FTA, may select one from a
number of strategies. He may choose a direct, though
impolite, form (e.g. Open the window!) which is
named by the scholars ‘baldly, without redress’.
Performing such an act, the speaker shows little
concern for the hearer’s face. Very often such bald
non-redressive speech acts occur where the speaker
holds relatively high power. Another solution is to
perform a FTA using an indirect strategy, which is
called off-record (e.g. It’s a bit stuffy in here. – an
indirect request to open the window). By choosing
to go off record, the speaker uses the form of a
declarative sentence, thus appearing to be noncoercive
and avoiding the responsibility of damaging
the addressee’s face. As noted by Brown & Levinson
(op. cit., 327), Cutting (2003, 48) and other
pragmatists, linguistic realization of off-record
strategies include metaphor, irony, rhetorical
questions, understatement, tautologies and all kinds
of indirect hints. A milder FTA will be when the
speaker goes on record. By going on record, he may
choose to perform the FTA baldly, without redress
(mentioned earlier) or to perform a FTA with
redressive action, e.g. Would you mind opening the
window, I wonder if you could open the window, etc.
Most frequently, however, speakers do FTAs on
record taking account of face. Thus they do this on
record with redressive action, using negative
politeness and positive politeness. These two types
of politeness are realized through different strategies
and depend strongly on certain social dimensions
such as the solidarity-social distance dimension, the
power dimension, and the formality dimension
(Holmes 1999, 11).
Some of these politeness strategies are rather
transparent in terms of their classification and
inventory; however, others, such as hedges, present
a more confusing picture as far as their classification
and labelling are concerned. Hedging is considered
to be one of the most important politeness strategies,
and hedges are described as a means of toning-down
utterances and statements in order to reduce the
riskiness of what one says, to mitigate what may
otherwise seem too forceful, to express politeness
or respect to strangers and superiors. Scholars,
working in this field, completely agree upon this
crucial function of hedges; however, their inventory
is far from clear. Following Markkanen & Schröder
(2006, 4), it could be stated that “no clear-cut lists
k albotyra
of hedging expressions are possible” because “no
linguistic items are inherently hedgy but can acquire
this quality depending on the communicative
context or the co-text”. Roughly speaking, linguists
attribute the quality of hedging to such word-groups
and expressions as modals (e.g. may, might, could,
etc.), modal adjuncts (e.g. possibly, perhaps, probably,
etc.), modal nouns (e.g. possibility), lexical verbs
highlighting doubt (e.g. suggest), ‘approximators’
(e.g. roughly, sort of, quite, etc.), that clauses (often
in combination with modals) (e.g. it could be the
case that…, it appears that…). Holmes (1999)
attributes to hedges vocal hesitations (um, er) and
such linguistic forms as you know, I think, sort of
which she labels as pragmatic particles. In her
opinion, tag questions also function as hedges. Hoye
analysed modals and their adverb satellites (they
are called modal-adverb expressions) such as could
kindly, will kindly, could possibly on three levels –
syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. At a pragmatic
level, the scholar claims, “their role of protecting
face in negative politeness strategies in particular,
is crucial” (Hoye 1997, 133).
Hedges are considered to be negative politeness
strategies. However, there is no one-to-one
relationship between a linguistic form and its
realization; one form may serve many functions,
and particular functions are expressed by a variety
of forms. Functioning of the above mentioned
linguistic items as hedges or boosters, as a means of
expressing positive or negative politeness depends
heavily upon the context.
In the discussion of power relations and
politeness, a mention should be made of turn-taking.
Turn-taking in general is the major concern of the
Conversation Analysis (CA) approach to spoken
discourse, which investigates the principles of the
organization of taking turns. The essence of this
approach is to analyse ‘pure’ versions of discourse,
without appealing to any evidence that comes from
outside the talk itself. The pioneers in this field, H.
Sacks, E. Schegloff and G. Jefferson, defined the
structure of the conversation and the mechanism of
turn-taking. Later, CA was supplemented by
ethnomethodological approach which implies
investigation of concrete actions of people going
about their everyday business. Thus spoken
discourse, or turn-taking, became viewed as a means
to express gender, ethnical, age, etc. differences, to
establish dominance (power) and self-identity. In
any case, it is evident that turn-taking can be
considered as one of mitigating or face threatening
devices in the analysis of power relation and
ISSN 1392-8600
17

18
Power Relations and Politeness
consideration of speaker’s/hearer’s face wants. Such
qualities of turn-taking as defining the content of
conversation and its direction, the number of moves
The analysis was based on the relationships
between two characters of the play – Stanley and
Blanche, and a couple of significant encounters
between them were taken into consideration.
Their first encounter takes place as soon as
Blanche arrives at her sister’s place, and it is
Blanche’s and Stanley’s first meeting. Their
relationship during this meeting seems to be
symmetrical in terms of power relations, those of a
polite host and his visitor, his wife’s sister. As soon
as they see each other, Blanche establishes his
identity using a booster must (You must be Stanley)
and introduces herself. The assumed symmetry on
Stanley’s part is maintained throughout their first
encounter, first of all, by his constantly addressing
Blanche by her first name. This way Stanley employs
one of many solidarity strategies. Another instance
when Stanley tries to save his and Blanche’s negative
face during this encounter is when he wants to take
off his shirt – he resorts to on record redressive
action, e.g. Do you mind if I make myself
comfortable?, thus minimizing his imposition and
showing deference to Blanche. In addition, during
their first meeting it is Stanley who uses tag questions,
e.g. You’re a teacher, aren’t you?, You were married
once, weren’t you? Tag questions are considered as
one of mitigating devices mostly employed by
women (Tannen, 2003). One of the possible
explanations why Stanley uses this kind of mitigation
strategy could be the factor that in this first face-toface
encounter with Blanche Stanley attempts to
hide his power and to maintain his own and Blanche’s
face. A hedge I’m afraid in I’m afraid I’ll strike you
as being the unrefined type also serves the same
purpose.
However, as claimed by Holmes (2000, 80), tag
questions can fulfil four distinct functions:
epistemic modal, challenging, facilitative, and
softening. Out of these, only facilitative and softening
tags serve as positive/negative politeness strategies.
Tags used as epistemic modals express the speaker’s
uncertainty rather than politeness while challenging
tags are more impoliteness devices. In the given
situation, i.e. in case of written discourse, turns are
devoid of prosodic features, and their absence makes
it difficult to differentiate among the above
mentioned functions. It is hardly believable that
Valios raiðkos priemonës ir mandagumas
Results and discussions
and their length, the use (or not use) of mitigation
in the moves – all these are strategies for expressing
power relations and politeness.
Stanley could have used challenging tags during their
first meeting; it is quite possible that he is uncertain
about some facts and wants to elicit additional
information. Thus he might use tags as epistemic
modals rather than politeness strategies.
Yet, his dominance is clearly felt in their
discourse, and this feeling is supported by turntaking:
his turns are longer, he shows the initiative
and thus controls the content and direction of the
conversation. To get the necessary information, he
uses on record without redress actions which find
their expression in the form of questions having the
force of command, e.g. Stella’s sister?, You going to
shack up here? etc. Most of Blanche’s turns are short,
heavily mitigated and contain hedges of various
sorts. She uses unfinished sentences, e.g. I –uh-;
elliptical sentences, e.g. Stella’s sister? – Yes., What
do you teach, Blanche? – English. etc.; hesitation
pauses which are the major mitigating devise in her
discourse, e.g. Why, I – live in Laurel., I – don’t know
yet., The boy – the boy died.; modal adjuncts, e.g.
No, I – rarely touch it., and other mitigating phrases,
e.g. I’m afraid I’m – going to be sick!
Turn-taking plays a crucial role in defining the
relationship between Blanche and Stanley. Though
the latter uses quite a few politeness strategies (both
positive and negative) as well as certain mitigation
devices, turn-taking demonstrates Stanley’s power.
Blanche only feebly and hesitantly reacts to Stanley’s
questions and comments, especially if we take into
consideration the preceding interaction between her
and her sister; she controlled their conversation, its
content and direction, and her turns were long.
Their second encounter takes place after Stanley
finds out about the loss of Belle Reve, the piece of
property, which belonged to both sisters. This piece
of news irritates and antagonises Stanley while
Blanche feels less unnerved and more of herself.
The basic feature of this encounter is that Blanche’s
turns vary from those of polite and face-saving to
those of face-threatening; Stanley’s turns, on the
other hand, contain mainly face-threatening acts
performed baldly on record.
At the beginning of this encounter Blanche
attempts to control the length of the turns and their
content – she speaks about how she feels, wants to
be praised on her looks, even asks Stanley to button
Janina BUITKIENË

þ m o g u s i r þ o d i s 2 0 0 6 I I I
her dress at the back. She tries to be friendly and
polite, first of all, by greeting him and addressing
him by his first name, e.g. Hello, Stanley! which
fulfills phatic function and, according to Malinowski
(2000 304), “serves to establish bonds of personal
union between people brought together by the mere
need of companionship…”. Goffman (2000, 318)
also claims that greetings as well as farewells put
people in certain social relationships the
characteristic obligation of which is “that each of
the members guarantees to support a given face for
the other members in given situations”. Thus
Blanche resorts to positive and negative politeness
strategies, the others being apology, e.g. Excuse me
while I slip on my pretty new dress!, I’m sorry,
expressions of gratitude, e.g. Many thanks!, Why,
thanks!; she tries to include Stanley into a joint
activity performing a face-threatening act with
redressive action, e.g. I’m going to ask a favor of you
in a moment. It is interesting to note that during the
first half of their encounter Blanche more often
addresses Stanley by name than he does; thus she
resorts to a positive politeness strategy,
demonstrating closeness and appealing to
friendship. With the growth of tension, she passes
onto his family name Mr. Kowalsky. On the one hand,
the use of formal address forms could be considered
a negative politeness strategy aiming to save the
interlocutor’s face; on the other hand, taking into
consideration the context of the situation, it is
possible to claim that Blanche here performs a facethreatening
act which is done baldly, without redress.
The change in her attitude towards their relationship
is reinforced by a comparison as well, e.g. What’s in
the back of that little boy’s mind of yours?
Blanche uses hedges such as modals, e.g. May I
have a drag on your cig?, I cannot imagine any witch
of a woman casting a spell over you., That must’ve
been what happened.; lexical verbs highlighting
doubt, e.g. It looks like my trunk has exploded.,
pragmatic particles, e.g. Well, life is too full of evasions
and ambiguities, I think. You are simple,
straightforward and honest, a little bit on the primitive
side, I should think. In the latter turn Blanche uses
bald on record face-threatening act to describe
Stanley’s character; in order to mitigate her
The analysis of the relationship between power
relations and politeness strategies in T. Williams’
play A Streetcar Named Desire proves that power
relations and politeness are closely interrelated.
Conclusions
k albotyra
statement she employs double-hedging in her
statement – the pragmatic particle combined with
the modal I should think and the approximator a
little bit thus aiming to save Stanley’s negative face.
All in all, Blanche employs most of positive and
negative politeness strategies during the first part of
the encounter before their conversation reaches its
highest point. Later she performs quite a lot of bold
non-redressive face-threatening acts thus showing
little concern for the hearer’s face, e.g. Give those
back to me!, The touch of your hands insults them!,
Just give them back to me!, etc.
Stanley’s turns are short and matter-of-fact at the
beginning, e.g. Have one for yourself, That’s right,
That’s good, etc. He makes no attempts to be either
polite or impolite. The hedge looks like in It looks
like you raided some stylish shops in Paris bears more
face-threatening than face-saving meaning.
However, his later turns mainly contain bold on
record face-threatening acts which are linguistically
expressed as imperatives and questions, e.g. Don’t
play so dumb., Where’s the papers? In the trunk?,
What in hell are they?, I don’t want no ifs, ands or
buts! etc. These face-threatening acts overtly show
Stanley’s power and dominance in this situation. In
addition, these acts are reinforced by his body
language, i.e. he seizes the atomizer and slams it
down, opens her trunk in search of papers, etc. Only
at the end of the encounter, having perceived Stella’s
sorrow and distress and as if trying to apologize, he
mitigates his statement by the pragmatic particle
you see, e.g. You see, under the Napoleonic code – a
man has to take interest in his wife’s affairs –
especially now that she’s going to have a baby.
The turn-taking in this episode is different from
the previous one. Both discourse participants
demonstrate efforts to control the content and
direction of the conversation, and both of them take
long and short turns. Though Stanley mainly resorts
to bald on record face-threatening acts thus
exhibiting his power over Stella, the latter, unlike
during their first encounter, tries to dominate the
situation by using positive politeness strategies and
bald on record face threatening acts as well as
boosters.
Positively polite behaviour expresses friendliness;
negatively polite behaviour expresses respect.
Respect most clearly is expressed to those who are
complete strangers or who are in a higher social or
ISSN 1392-8600
19

20
Power Relations and Politeness
professional position, i.e. they have power. Those
who are in a lower social position and have less
power tend to rely heavily on negative politeness
strategies to express the deference. Those who
possess power can go to extremes while
communicating with their less powerful partners;
they can either hide their power by also resorting to
negative politeness strategies or show it openly by
using bald on record non-redressive acts.
Turn-taking and hedging play a crucial role in
expressing power relations and positive/negative
Brown P., Levinson S. C., 2000. Politeness: Some
Universals in Language Usage. In: The Discourse
Reader ed. by A. Jaworsky and N. Coupland. -
London & New York: Routledge.
Cutting J., 2003. Pragmatics and Discourse. - London &
New York: Routledge.
Fairclough N., 1991. Language and Power. - London &
New York: Longman.
Fairclough N., 1997. Critical Discourse Analysis. - London
& New York: Longman.
Goffman E., 2000. On Face-work: An Analysis of Ritual
Elements in Social Interaction. In: The Discourse
Reader ed. by A. Jaworsky and N. Coupland.-
London & New York: Routledge.
Holmes J., 1999. Women, Men and Politeness. - Longman
Group UK Limited.
Holmes J., 2000. Women, Men and Politeness:
Agreeable and Disagreeable Responses. In: The
Discourse Reader ed. by A. Jaworski and
N. Coupland. - London & New York: Routledge.
References
Valios raiðkos priemonës ir mandagumas
politeness. A more powerful speaker usually
possesses greater opportunities to control the length
of the turns, their content and direction.
Hedging is a powerful instrument in expressing
negative politeness; on the other hand, some hedges
serve as strategies for showing positive politeness.
It should be mentioned, however, that so far there
does not exist a detailed inventory of hedging devices
and there is no unanimous agreement how to label
one or another language item which serves as a hedge
in a concrete situation.
Hoye L., 1997. Adverbs and Modality in English. -
London & New York: Longman.
Kress G., 1990. Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural
Practice. - Hong Kong: OUP.
Markkanen R. & Schröder H. Hedging: A Challenge for
Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis. http://
www.sw2.euv-frankfurt-o.de/Publikationen/
hedging/markkane/markkane.html accessed
20006 02 02
Malinowski B., 2000. On Phatic Communication. In:
The Discourse Reader ed. by A. Jaworski and N.
Coupland. - London & New York: Routledge.
Short M., 1996. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays
and Prose. - Longman/ Pearson.
Tannen D., 2003. Women and Indirectness. In:
J. Cutting Pragmatics and Discourse. - London &
New York: Routledge.
Wodak R., 1996. Disorders of Discourse. - London &
New York: Longman.
Janina BUITKIENË