Chapter 8
Politeness in Britain: ‘It’s Only a
Suggestion…’
MIRANDA STEWART
Introduction
British English, often referred to, along with the American variety, as ‘old
English’ (see for example, Tupas, 2001) in contrast with the multitude of
‘new’ and post-colonial Englishes spoken throughout the world, is hardly
homogeneous. Great Britain, comprising the three historic nations of
England, Scotland and Wales, is enriched by a vibrant multiculturalism,
especially within its major cities, with London bringing together speakers
of more languages than any city in the world. Therefore, it is unsurprising
that the resources used to convey linguistic politeness and the ways in
which they are used vary considerably.
Simple linguistic conventions, such as a shop assistant asking ‘Who’s
next?’ (in England), or ‘Who’s first?’ (in Scotland) may provide some clue
to the complex ways in which we relate to other people through language.
Here, personal deixis in England places the shop assistant at the centre of
the interaction and the customer is positioned in relation to her. In Scotland,
by contrast, the customer is placed centre stage, a positive politeness
mechanism that may be played out through the ensuing interaction.
Focusing devices, such as the use of ‘see’ and ‘ken’ (know), also provide
speakers of Scottish varieties with positive politeness devices to intensify
the interest of their tale as in ‘See those old houses …. this area was all
houses like that right round’ and ‘ken John Ewan – he breeds spaniels’
(Miller, 1993: 134–5). Similarly, Scots English provides speakers with the
diminutiviser ‘wee’, a powerful politeness hedge as in ‘Could I ask a wee
favour?’ (see Terkourafi, this volume)
Folk linguistic stereotypes of the value given to language can also give
some insight into quite considerable differences between different communities;
for example, in Ireland (whose emigrants have populated large areas
of Great Britain) a high premium is paid to verbal agility and the ability to
entertain (often well over a regard for the prosaic truth) with ‘she’s good
crack’ (from the Irish ‘craic‘) being a compliment of the highest order (see
116
Kallen, this volume). At the opposite extreme, there are communities
within Britain where ‘silence is golden’ and ‘children are seen and not
heard’. The Japanese English writer, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989), provides a
striking portrayal, in his novel The Remains of the Day set in post first World
War England, of archetypal Englishness, albeit inflected for social class. His
characters always say considerably less than they mean and every subtle
nuance and inflection has to be scrutinised for its underlying meaning, and
indeed potential for causing offence, creating an almost ‘paranoid’
(see Kasper, 1990) view of interaction. Negative politeness and nonconventional
indirectness abound and are cast into sharp relief by the
almost brutal directness of the housekeeper, Miss Kenton.
Address forms are often taken as an indicator of the social stratification of
a given society and the English language, with no T/V distinction except
perhaps as an historical relic in Quaker services, could be said to reflect a
more egalitarian society. Yet the use of honorifics in British English mark it
out very much as ‘old English’ in contrast with, say, more innovative
varieties such as Hong Kong English, where Ms has supplanted both Miss
and Mrs, or those countries which tend towards dispensing with address
forms altogether, as reported in the Northern Europe section of this volume.
British English (BE) tends to be presented as essentially an avoidancebased,
negatively-oriented culture. For example, Placencia (1992: 129), in a
cross-cultural study of mediated telephone conversations, focuses on the
prevalence of indirectness in BE in contrast with the use in Ecuadorian
Spanish of both indirect and less indirect strategies accompanied by a
display of deference. Fukushima’s study (2000) of what Brown and
Levinson (1987: 245) conceive of as two negative politeness cultures, the
Japanese and the British, shows that, while both cultures use
conventionally indirect and off-record strategies in requesting, the British
use a narrower variety of strategies avoiding bald-on-record even when the
threat is perceived to be low, and pay less attention to context (mainly
power and distance) in selecting an appropriate strategy. The principal
findings of Márquez Reiter’s (2000: 171–2) study of requests and apologies
by educated males and females in BE and Uruguayan Spanish suggest
that, in the case of requests, users of BE use more conventional and nonconventional
indirectness; they are more concerned with reducing the level
of coerciveness in requests; they endeavour more to avoid naming the
hearer as actor; and they call on a varied repertoire of external modifiers to
accomplish their goals. In the case of apologies, they show a marked
preference for intensifying ‘I’m sorry’ with a whole range of adverbs (e.g.
‘dreadfully‘); they give lengthy explanations; and they show a clear need to
redress the addressee’s negative face. While the interactional style in the
Politeness in Britain 117
variety of English chosen for this study (southern, middle class) is
conceivably not representative of the many varieties available within the
British Isles, what is interesting about Márquez Reiter’s study is that the
variable of language variety and consequently ethnic origin appeared to be
more predictive of behaviour than that of gender given that class was held
constant in both groups studied.
Further, it is the type of Britishness described earlier that is reported on
in the majority of contrastive studies between BE and other languages (for
contrastive studies with German, see House, this volume) and consequently
the one I shall investigate here.
In this chapter I shall report on a micro-study of politeness in written
interaction, looking at two specific features which typify a certain
‘Britishness’. First, a preference for negative rather than positive politeness
strategies (see, for example, Hickey, 1991, Sifianou, 1992, etc.) which is
played out through a number of linguistic strategies, for example, personal
reference, hedging and deictic anchorage. Second, the use of off-record
politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987: 211), also referred to as nonconventional
indirectness, a strategy, not exclusive to British English, but
yet exploited widely, which requires the hearer or reader to draw appropriate
inferences.
The data are naturally–occurring, and, unusually for a case of politeness
studies, written. Here Sell’s (1991) distinction between the politeness in the
text and the politeness of the text is relevant, and is a notion which Hatim
(1998) has usefully applied cross-culturally in the field of translation
studies. For while there are studies of politeness (Sifianou, 1992: 217)
concerned with politeness in texts, that is ‘relationships between personae
and characters dramatised within the world of mimesis’, there are fewer
concerned with the politeness of texts, that is with the relationship between
the writer and the reader(s) and the essential interactivity of the text. Useful
examples of the latter are Myers (1989) and McLaren (2001) who have
applied politeness theory to English language scientific articles and French
and English language promotional literature respectively. In this
connection, Sell (1991: 217) also draws our attention to the fact that it is
frequently tempting to over-emphasise formal differences between speech
and writing whereas there is considerable overlap between the two modes.
Finally, while Brown and Levinson’s face-saving model, within which we
shall broadly locate this study, has generated more studies which focus on
the face of the Hearer, we should also like to bear in mind that linguistic
politeness frequently serves a face-protective function for the Speaker or, to
use Chen’s (2001: 87) term, is used as ‘self-politeness’. Consequently, a
preference for indirectness and non-conventional politeness may stem as
118 Politeness in Western Europe
much from a need to protect one’s own face from potential attack as from
any desire to be ‘conventionally polite’ to others.
The Data
Our data are taken from feedback provided by monitors to tutors on a
high-level Spanish distance-learning course. The remit of a monitor is to
sample the marking and feedback provided by tutors to their students and
to provide constructive feedback designed to enhance the distance-learning
teaching by each tutor. While the feedback was to be given in English (so
that it was accessible to the quality assurance mechanisms of the
institution) in a ‘supportive and constructive tone’ (institutional briefing for
monitors), the vast majority of tutors and monitors were native speakers of
Spanish. The issue which most exercised these Spanish-speaking monitors
was how to adopt an appropriate interactional style in English, which
would maintain the relationship specified earlier while carrying out what
is potentially a face-threatening activity. They felt that there were significant
ways in which the management of face differed between Spanish and
English. This was the starting point for what is a wider study than that
reported here. The speech community we shall essentially be concerned
with is the educated native speaker of English working within a British
Higher Education context and we shall contrast this, where relevant, with
that of educated native speakers of Peninsular Spanish writing in English.
This is not a contrastive study of English/Spanish politeness: the nonnative
speakers are merely used as a control group to cast light on certain
facets of British politeness. The communicative event was the provision of
a dual-purpose feedback: on the one hand, to provide formative training to
the distance-learning tutor; and, on the other, to provide a transparent
quality control mechanism for the institution. In terms of Bell’s (1984)
principles of audience design, there is an ‘addressee’ and ‘auditors’ (i.e.
those known by the writer to read the text but to whom the text is not
addressed). The mode is written.
The corpus for this chapter is drawn from a larger database of feedback
in spoken and written English and Spanish and consists of 15,000 words of
feedback in English by six native speakers of BE and six native speakers of
Peninsular Spanish. The core face-threatening act is one of giving feedback
on the tutor’s performance; this, if negative, is potentially damaging to the
tutor’s positive face; and, if it is designed to bring about changes in tutoring
practice, is potentially damaging to the tutor’s negative face. It also
threatens the positive face of the Speaker (S) in the case of negative feedback
and this may further be threatened if the Hearer (H) decides to
challenge the feedback. If positive, it may maintain or enhance the face of
Politeness in Britain 119
either S or H or both or, alternatively, also contain a threat to face, say, if H
felt that S had no right to make ‘personal comments’ of this nature. While
there are a number of contextual variables which could potentially impact
on the expression of the feedback relating to Brown and Levinson’s contextual
variables of power (e.g. age, gender, status, knowledge), distance (e.g.
whether monitor and tutor had met previously), and the weight of the face
threatening act (FTA (Wx) (e.g. the degree of perceived shortcoming of the
tutor), for the purposes of this study we shall focus principally on the single
variable of native language, that is native speakers of BE and Peninsular
Spanish non-native speakers of BE.
Wajnryb (1998: 531), in studying face-to-face supervision of teaching in
Australia, found that ‘the pressure that face concerns place on participants
is reflected in the language used to negotiate the encounter.
Specifically, supervisors frequently resort to a high degree of mitigation to
ease them through the unenviable task’. She notes a ‘tension between
supporting morale and enabling better instruction’ and argues that
‘(g)oing off-record by clothing criticisms ambivalently allows both goals
to be pursued’ (Wajnryb, 1998: 534). She investigates pragmatic
ambivalence (that is an utterance where the hearer cannot be certain of its
pragmatic force) as a strategy used by tutors in initiating FTAs
(essentially criticisms of teaching technique) and shows how, by ‘testing
the water’ in this way, if the tutor does not meet ‘hearer acceptance’, he or
she has ‘a path open for retreat’. Wajnryb (1998: 541) also points to
evidence which suggests that subordinates are likely to read criticism into
apparently innocent utterances such as fact-finding questions in
situations such as the one we describe, being ‘co-constructors’ of their
own social reality. Of course, when feedback is through the written mode,
there is literally no negotiation of meaning (except on those occasions
where a tutor formally challenges a monitor’s comments) and it might be
expected that clarity will override some of these considerations of
politeness. However, a writer, depending on context, may attempt to
predict and pre-empt possible reader response, a reaction which Bell
(1984), in his theorisation of audience design, refers to as writer ‘initiative’
in opposition to writer ‘reponsiveness’. The latter could, say, be a feature
of an on-line chatroom (where the writer can respond to semi-instant
replies) but it is not an option in this particular communicative event.
In this study we shall look at politeness both at the level of the text and
at the level of the sentence, clause or word. To illustrate politeness at the
level of the text, we could point to a commonly shared textual convention
of this particular type of feedback: the overwhelming tendency in both
native and non-native speakers of BE (in 97% of texts) to engage in
120 Politeness in Western Europe
considerable face-work designed to enhance the positive face of the Hearer
(mainly through commenting on all the positive features of the tutor’s
work) before presenting any criticism or suggestion for improved practice.
This is also observable locally within the text where there is a clear
tendency textually for positive feedback to precede negative feedback.
In Example 1 below, positive feedback precedes marginally less positive
feedback and the parallelism between ‘very useful’ and ‘useful’ acts as a
trigger for the reader to draw an inference, in this case possibly that she
should provide better advice on plagiarism.
Example 1
You give very useful advice to Jones on avoiding an overly descriptive
approach to the essay and useful advice to Smith about ‘lifting’ expressions
from sources. (NS1)
This example illustrates what Sell (1991: 221) would call ‘presentational
politeness’ which operates at the level of the text and where the readers’
awareness of the scenarios or schemata which relate to this particular texttype
enables them to decode the text effectively. Here a reader acquainted
with this genre of feedback might operate on the assumption that typically
positive feedback precedes negative feedback and consequently be
pleasantly surprised if no negative feedback ensues. Nonetheless, the
British reader, like the archetypally English characters of Ishiguro’s novel,
may be primed to read the text closely for any implicature that may
constitute negative feedback.
At the level of the word, we have what Sell (1991: 221) terms ‘selectional
politeness’ where individual FTAs are identified and carried out through
selected linguistic expression. For example, the following FTAs are carried
out either directly (with or without mitigation) or through conventional
indirectness, as in Examples 2 and 3 respectively:
Example 2
Just one small point: Smith’s total score should be 72% and not 73%. (NS2)
Example 3
maybe sections such as p.6–7 could be commented on (NS1)
In example 2 the implicated criticism that the tutor has failed to add up
the marks correctly is minimised by the introductory hedge and the
elimination of the agent which effectively defocuses the tutor. In Example 3
we see similar impersonalisation, the conventional use of hedging (maybe)
and modalisation (could).
Politeness in Britain 121
Finally, at this level too we find non-conventional or off-record FTAs. In
the following example, there is a non-conventional criticism of a tutor’s
failure to give oral feedback (the first set of feedback of the year) where the
monitor takes ‘the initiative’ and actively pre-empts reader response.
Example 4
Lastly, I was a little surprised that you didn’t provide any recorded
comments about TMA2 on the cassette: this seems to be such a good
opportunity to deal with language items – especially pronunciation
ones – and to give the student a model. I apologise if this is something
you normally do – it is a technique that other tutors use very effectively.
(NS3)
Here, after expressing surprise that the tutor has not dealt with
pronunciation, the monitor apologises using a performative verb, thereby
confirming the face-threatening force of the whole previous utterance. He
thus protects his own face from disagreement by offering a pre-emptive
apology and gives the tutor an ‘out’ or ‘deniability potential’ (Weizman, 1993)
as she can claim that indeed her normal practice is to give feedback on
pronunciation (no evidence to the contrary being available). The pragmatic
force of the final utterance is ambivalent; it could be a justification for the
assumption that the tutor might usually give this feedback; alternatively, it
could act as a justification for the implicated suggestion that the tutor adopt
this practice. It is precisely these kinds of off-record indirectness and
pragmatic ambivalence which appeared to characterise the feedback given by
native speakers of BE but were rarely or never used by the non-native
speakers in our sample. In the remainder of this chapter we shall first examine
some elements of conventional indirectness before moving on to examine how
non-conventional indirectness appears to function in this corpus.
Conventional Indirectness
Hedging
A key linguistic resource for face–protection (whether that of the self or
the other) is hedging (see Brown and Levinson, 1987: 145). Brown &
Levinson include hedges as part of the strategies available for both positive
politeness, where ‘intensifying modifiers fulfil the sub-strategy of
exaggerating (interest, approval, sympathy with H)’ (p. 104), and more
normally for negative politeness, where they modify the expression of
communicative intentions (p. 145). As Schröder and Zimmer (1997) show,
hedges have generated considerable research activity.
122 Politeness in Western Europe
The British English data appeared to feature speaker reference
predominantly in the context of hedging and displayed a greater incidence
of first person singular hedging than the NNS data.
Example 5
I felt that they could perhaps have been given more information (NS3)
Example 2
I felt your marking was slightly generous (NS3)
What we have here are examples of the type of negative politeness that
typified a lot of the feedback from the BE native speakers: hedges (in
italics), the use of the modal could, the defocusing of the criticism from the
tutor by foregrounding the students (they) and the evaluative adjective
generous, all of which are protective of the face of both speaker and hearer
and clothe what are essentially criticisms in considerable face-work.
As we have seen, all feedback from tutors paid considerable attention to
the positive face of the addressee. Yet here there also appeared to be
differences between the strategies adopted by native and non-native
speakers of English which serve to point up the more negatively-polite
interactional style of this variety of BE. What was striking was the use of
main clause verbs by non-native speakers as a positive politeness strategy
often allied with the interpersonal use of the first name of the tutor and the
‘vivid’ use of the present tense, reminiscent of the positioning of the
Scottish shop-assistant mentioned earlier.
Example 7
I like your very personal and friendly tone. (NNS1)
Example 8
Overall I am very pleased with your supportive and detailed marking.
(NNS2)
Example 9
María, I’ve enjoyed both your wonderful ‘tutoring‘… (NNS3)
The non-native speaker data showed a greater ‘involvement of S and H’
which is a central element of Brown and Levinson’s positive politeness and
displays a degree of personalisation not present in the native speaker data.
Similarly, the interpersonal use of the second person you or your, as can
also be seen in the data above, was considerably more likely to co-occur
with reference to the speaker in the NNS data than in the British English
data. For example,
Politeness in Britain 123
Example 10
I am sure your students feel very fortunate in having you as their tutor! (NNS3)
This is an approach which exposes the speaker’s face to a considerable
degree; an uncooperative hearer might well respond ‘and who are you to
‘like’, ‘enjoy’ or ‘be pleased’?’ and find such an approach patronising.
Conversely, writers of British English appeared to avoid drawing
attention to their interpersonal relationship with the student. The use of
first person reference in British English essentially for purposes of faceprotection
(as Myers [1989] has argued), that is for detachment from, rather
than commitment to, propositions, is interesting when read against Luukka
and Markkanen’s (1997: 186) (see also Nikula, 1997) claim that Finnish texts
tend to use impersonalisation as a form of hedging, English texts being
slightly more explicit in their personal reference (see also Yli-Yakkuri, this
volume). There may be evidence in a given society’s preference for hedging
and the nature of this hedging of a cline of personal investment going from
more positively polite cultures to the more negatively polite.
Deictic anchorage
It is here that clear evidence may exist of tendencies towards positive
and negative politeness in different cultures. Brown and Levinson (1987:
118–119) draw on Fillmore (e.g. 1971) to develop the relationship of
participant role in the speech act and spatio-temporal and social location
and strategies employed for positive and negative politeness. For example,
‘the normal unmarked deictic centre is the one where the speaker is the
central person, the time of speaking (or “coding time”) is the central time
and the place where the speaker is at coding time is the central place’.
The data suggest that, in the case of the NS, there is a greater tendency
to displace hedges into the past tense, although this tendency did not
appear to correlate overall with the degree of threat inherent in the speech
act. For example,
Example 11
Overall, I think these students were given very effective follow-up to
their work. In assessment, I felt you tended slightly towards
generosity…. (NS3)
Such displacement is a clear example of conventional indirectness as a
negative politeness strategy; not only does it distance the speaker from the
FTA but it also provides the speaker with a greater ‘out’ than the present
tense would; the speaker can always claim the provisionality of his or her
124 Politeness in Western Europe
view, which can be modified in the light of further evidence (I thought x but
now I think y). (For use of the past tense see Fretheim, this volume). Use of
the past tense is a common convention, for example, in politeness strategies
in British English, as in ‘I was wondering whether you could give me a
hand’, or, prior to leaving a room, ‘I didn’t think you’d mind if I just
popped out for a moment’. The data for the non-native speakers showed
that this strategy was virtually never employed.
As we argued previously, the data also suggest that BE native speakers
show a greater tendency to shift from the ‘I’ of the Speaker to the ‘you’ of
the Hearer, particularly in main clauses, whereas the NNS show a greater
tendency to retain the anchorage of the self. Consequently, there is evidence
of greater distancing from the speaker being the central person in the NS
data and it is probable that the cross-cultural use of proximal and distal
deictics is an area of deictic anchorage which could usefully be explored in
future studies of cross-cultural politeness.
In this section we have argued that native speakers of BE tend, through
hedging and deictic anchoring, to detach themselves more from their
addressee, a key feature of negative politeness; conversely, they tend to avoid
positively polite strategies such as the greater involvement of S and H.
Non-conventional indirectness
In the BE data, there was ample evidence of non-conventional indirectness.
For example, in Example 12, the focus is shifted from the tutor (the
text receiver) to the monitor herself (the text producer) with the result that
the tutor might have to work quite hard to reconstruct one pragmatic force
of the sentence, that is an implicated criticism of student performance, and
the intended perlocutionary effect, i.e. that she should impress the need on
the student to give a spontaneous oral presentation rather than read from a
script and check for sound quality on the recording:
Example 12
You give constructive advice on each of the cassettes … . I thought
Brown might have been reading aloud from a prepared script as her
assignment didn’t seem to flow naturally, but this is always difficult to
prove. The sound quality wasn’t too good, either – I had to turn the
cassette player up to almost full volume! (NS2)
Here, after initial, hearer-oriented (you give…) positive feedback to the
tutor about the quality of advice given, two criticisms are implicated. We
can observe the refocusing from the tutor (you) to the monitor (I). The suspicion
that the student was reading aloud is hedged with the cognitive verb
Politeness in Britain 125
think; a reason for this suspicion is provided; and crucially an ‘out’ to the
tutor, as one implicature could be that the tutor has chosen not to comment
on this shortcoming, not due to a failure to notice it, but due to lack of hard
evidence. Similarly, the comment on the poor sound quality is non-conventionally
indirect and indeed pragmatically ambivalent. Is the monitor
commiserating with the tutor over having to mark in such circumstances;
indirectly suggesting that the student should be told to monitor sound
quality; or complaining about the position this has put her in? One benefit
of this degree of non-conventional indirectness is that the monitor has
amply protected her own face in the event, for example, that the student
had in fact given a spontaneous presentation. The use of understatement
‘wasn’t too good’ to implicate ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’ is similar to the Irish
English usages discussed by Kallen (this volume).
In the following feedback, the juxtaposition, at the level of the sentence,
between the first clause where there is positive feedback (the tutor has rightly
instructed the student to work on adjectival agreement) and the second,
where this positive reinforcement is denied, creates an implicature. The tutor
must infer that he or she has failed to tutor her student in the use of written
accents and consequently needs to pay attention to this in the future.
Example 13
Smith has a lot of work to do on adjectival agreements (as you point out!)
and also needs to check his use of written accents. (NS2)
One implicature here is that the tutor has not ‘pointed out’ this misuse of
written accents. As in the previous example, the responsibility for ensuring
that Smith uses accents appropriately is defocused away from the tutor to
the student.
Evidence that the writer is aware of the inherent pragmatic ambivalence
of her feedback is to be found in the following sentence (also attested in
instructional utterances in other settings) where a NS monitor was very
careful to mark an otherwise pragmatically ambivalent utterance (directive
‘It would be a good idea’ or praise ‘It was a good idea‘) as praise:
Example 14
Good idea to direct students, as you do, to specific sections of the course
book for revision and consolidation purposes. (NS2)
Another related strategy is the off-record violation of Grice’s maxim of
quantity (Brown and Levinson, 1987:214) through scalar implicature (see
Levinson, 2000) in the use of adverbial and adjectival hedges as illustrated
by the following NS example:
126 Politeness in Western Europe
Example 15
I felt that you gave quite thorough information, and a lot of encouraging
support to this student (NS3)
Given the propensity already commented on in both the NS and NNS
feedbacks to give praise wherever possible and the positive politeness
feature of prefacing a dispreferred response (i.e. criticism) with positive
feedback, what is striking here is the extent (often marginal) to which the
writers in couching their criticism avoid ‘the lower points of the scale’
(Brown & Levinson, 1987: 218). The reader must be sensitive to British
English conventions of politeness to draw the implicature that ‘quite
thorough’ frequently means not thorough enough, an implicature which is
supported by the juxtaposition of this comment with the fulsome praise of
the support offered to the student. Further examples of this productive
strategy are:
Example 16
You give very useful advice to McArthur on avoiding an overly descriptive
approach to the essay and useful advice to McArthur about ‘lifting’
expressions from sources. (NS1)
The implicature generated by the mismatch between the positive
evaluation ‘very useful’ and the next point down on the scale ‘useful’ could
be read as an off-record suggestion that the tutor improve her feedback on
plagiarism. This, again, was not a strategy which occurred in the NNS data.
Interestingly, in the data there were a number of instances of potential
cross-cultural pragmatic failure (Thomas, 1983) due to the semantic difference
between the English ‘adequate’ (just good enough) and the Spanish
adecuado (appropriate).
Example 17
Your style of marking is adequate and correct… (NNS4)
Here a BE reader might pause to work out what appears to be implicated
criticism (‘adequate’ implicating ‘not good enough‘), either finding that this
interpretation is in conflict with the positive evaluation offered by ‘correct’
or redefining ‘correct’ as in some way deficient. Yet it is highly possible that
no such criticism is intended.
Blum-Kulka (in Wajnryb, 1998: 540) argues that off-record strategies may
be seen as imposing on the hearer by forcing on them an unwelcome
burden of inference; Lakoff (1990 in Wajnryb, 1998: 536), however, points
out that indirectness may suggest intimacy by signalling shared
Politeness in Britain 127
understanding. We would like to suggest that the degree to which on- or
alternatively off-record strategies are acceptable is culture-specific and,
further, that British society is relatively tolerant of the latter. A further area
of study is the extent to which non-native speakers of the language are
skilled in recovering implicatures and decoding pragmatic ambivalence in
BE. Bouton (1994) has argued that while NNS of US English are able to
learn stereotyped implicatures, they find idiosyncratic relevance-based
ones much harder to process. This suggests that the socialization process in
Britain, whereby speakers learn not only to use but to decode this type of
off-record strategy, is complex.
Conclusions
In this chapter we have looked at a certain type of British politeness,
indeed arguably the variety of politeness which Brown and Levinson
largely exemplify. By focusing, on the one hand, on hedging and deictic
anchorage, that is how individuals position themselves in relation both to
the face-threatening act and to the hearer through language, and, on the
other, on non-conventional speech acts which, indeed, may be pragmatically
ambivalent, we hope to have added some more evidence to support
the claim that, in certain circumstances at least, British English tends
towards negative politeness and favours off-record strategies in carrying
out certain face-threatening acts. It seems, at least, that to be British a
healthy degree of paranoia can help.
Acknowledgement
This research was made possible thanks to a Small Research Grant from
the British Academy.
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Politeness in Britain 129
Chapter 9
Politeness in Ireland: ‘In Ireland, It’s
Done Without Being Said’
JEFFREY L. KALLEN
Introduction
The speaker of the line quoted in the chapter title, a female undergraduate
from Cork, is describing the differences between unsolicited
compliments from unfamiliar American males and similar compliments
from Irish males. To her and her friends, American males are insincere. Says
one friend from Mayo, ‘I think American guys anyway they can be nice to
you just for the sake of it and not really mean it’. Agreeing, the first speaker
comments, ‘you know the way in Ireland, it’s done without being said, like
you know if they like you they don’t start describing everything they like
aboutcha, but in America they all do, don’t they?… And if they don’t like
anything at all, they could just pretend’’. This chat, part of the International
Corpus of English (ICE) project for Ireland (see later), articulates a powerful
contrastive insight into politeness in Ireland. In Brown and Levinson’s
(1987) terms, the American approach could be characterised as bald on
record, lacking any of the redressive actions which recognise that
compliments are, as Brown and Levinson (1987: 65–6) say, face-threatening
acts that represent a desire not to allow the listener to proceed unimpeded
and may indicate a desire to obtain something from the listener. Lack of
politeness here is equated with pretence and lack of sincerity, and evaluated
negatively. In Ireland, however, ‘it’s done without being said’: compliments
take place off the record and allow the listener to feel no threat to her need
to go through life unimpeded. The Irish politeness strategy is, in turn,
equated with sincerity, not receiving the unfavourable assessment of
American compliments.
This example is not an isolated or idiosyncratic evaluation but
indicates, I suggest, a broad tendency in Irish politeness. Off-the-record
and negative politeness strategies are elaborated and developed within a
system of discourse that values silence as an integral part of the face
needs that Brown and Levinson (1987) see as central to politeness (on
silence in discourse, see Jaworski, 1993). Yet while high value is placed
130
on negative politeness, salient strategies of positive politeness are
equally ingrained in Irish culture. It is, therefore, the central hypothesis
of this chapter that the full characterisation of Irish politeness must
consider the contradiction between the competing demands of silence as
a face need, which will tend to favour negative politeness strategies, and
the demands of what I term hospitality and reciprocity, usually favouring
positive politeness.
To examine this hypothesis, I rely on (a) the indirect evidence of
published ethnographies and dialect studies, (b) insights from the
unpublished thesis of Skiadaresi (1997), (c) my unpublished fieldnotes
from an ethnographic study of Galway city in 1976–77 and from
recordings and observations in Dublin and parts of the west and north of
Ireland which I have made over the last 22 years and (d) the Irish
component of the ICE project (ICE-Ireland). (For detail on ICE and ICEIreland,
see Greenbaum, [1996], Kallen & Kirk [2001] and Nelson et al.
[2002].) The ICE-Ireland project, co-directed by John M. Kirk and myself,
based in The Queen’s University of Belfast, is still under construction.
The data used here come from raw data files of informal, face-to-face
conversations recorded in the mid 1990s, mostly including college
students from different parts of the Republic of Ireland, their friends and
families. The size of this subcomponent of the corpus is approximately
80,000 words.
The picture of politeness presented here cannot purport to cover all
social groups or be completely up to date. The data are weighted towards
the west and south of Ireland, Dublin, and, to a lesser degree, Belfast and
Newry. The ICE corpus does not include all types of English usage but,
rather, ‘standard’ English – hence some variation will not appear. Social
change, too, is a factor to be considered. Like most of Europe, Irish
society is in a state of rapid change, stimulated in part by increased
European integration and globalisation. Some of the economic basis for
social relationships, described later, has lately yielded to a new, more
impersonal, bureaucratic and globalised commercial basis. Increased
urbanisation has also rendered some of the practices and relationships of
rural life irrelevant and outdated. This report thus aims to capture an
Irish tradition which reaches back several generations and captures
aspects of the present but raises questions for future developments that
cannot be answered now. In the rest of this introduction, I look briefly at
the features of hospitality, reciprocity and silence which, I argue, receive
primary weighting in the structure of Irish face needs and politeness.
Politeness in Ireland 131
Hospitality
Hospitality in the broad sense, of course, can involve more than talk,
although talk may also be a prerequisite. Non-verbal indices of everyday
hospitality in Ireland include the regular sharing of ‘free goods’ with
relative strangers (e.g. an orange in a canteen or workplace lunchroom,
offering cigarettes to a chance interlocutor in a pub or at a bus stop); laying
out a relatively formal spread of tea, brown bread, butter, jam and biscuits
for a casual drop-in visitor (possibly augmented by whiskey or sherry at
festive times); and an elaborated practice of buying ‘rounds’ for others in
the pub. These practices are not necessarily ways of solidifying existing
friendships but of adhering to the values of hospitality even among relative
strangers. We see this principle applied to talk in Elliot Leyton’s description
of ‘decency’ in social relations, based on his ethnographic work in Co.
Down in the 1960s: ‘to be a “decent” man is to carry out one’s obligations
to society in a style characterised by cheerfulness and friendliness, to pause
willingly for a chat and, most importantly, to refrain – regardless of the
provocation – from any display of overt hostility’ (quoted here from
Messenger, 1969: 80). Glassie (1982), writing about a small community in
Co. Fermanagh, explicitly distinguishes ordinary talk ‘about cattle and
dunghills and … the weather’, which he claims is ‘not pleasing, not
beneficial, not entertaining’ and sociable talk. Glassie (1982: 36) quotes a
local man, Peter Flanagan, on the value of sociable talk: ‘when the mouth’s
open, you must give it a wee consideration what you’re sayin. And if it’s
beneficial in any way or respect – that’s great. Entertainment is the greatest
thing’. In other words, talk (like food or drink, I suggest) is not simply for
its instrumental value, but is valued when it brings pleasure to others –
when it adheres to the values of hospitality.
Reciprocity
Ethnographies of rural modern Irish life stress the means used to ensure
reciprocity in social relations. The practice of mutual aid in the activities of
farming (known as cooring, from Irish comhar ‘cooperation‘) has long been
an essential part of the social fabric in rural life. Arensberg (1968 [1937]:
69ff.) describes the practices of reciprocal lending of tools, labour and other
goods for farm work. These cooperative relationships extend to the ties
between small town shops and the surrounding countryside, for as
Arensberg (1968 [1937]: 142) says, ‘the country customer who brings his
trade into the shop does so in response to the ties of kinship and friendliness.
He “goes with” a shopkeeper or publican, most often, as he “coors”
with his country friends. This is not his only incentive but it is his principal
132 Politeness in Western Europe
one’. In the realm of talk, reciprocity requires that a ready means be found
by which the listener’s point of view and positive face needs can be
acknowledged, and by which any potential disagreement can at least be
transferred to neutral footing.
Silence
‘Silence’ here is not simply absence of talk or noise but an interactive
mode in which, roughly speaking, ‘not saying’ becomes a mode of saying
in its own right (see Jaworski, 1993). Silence as part of the construction of
face needs may include complete restraint from speaking; quite commonly,
though, it allows indirect strategies for achieving discourse goals. These
indirect strategies highly value off-the-record utterances (e.g.
understatement, irony, rhetorical questions, ellipsis, etc.) and may even
provide ways for speakers to accomplish certain discourse goals when they
choose not to perform an explicit act of discourse at all. A ‘silent’ way of
asking a face-threatening question arose in my encounter with a Galway
official, who, in the more informal part of a business transaction, sized me
up (accurately, as not native to Ireland) and simply stated: ‘You’re not from
this part of the country’. His tone was not ironic or obscure: the obvious
was being stated, the implicature being that I should state where I was
actually from. But the phrasing of this query is deeply off-the-record. Not
only is the question Where are you from? not asked but the phrase this part of
the country (as opposed to You’re not from Ireland) does not even permit the
implicature you are not Irish – which would have broken conversational
silence on a sensitive topic – to be voiced.
Brody (1973), too, illustrates the operation of negative comment by
deeply off-the-record statements whose implicatures might be overlooked
completely without inside knowledge. Brody (1973: 199) describes a family
(‘the Michaels‘) who have engaged in entrepreneurship in the local
community and achieved economic success beyond the usual expectations.
Some locals support this development, while others are ‘less enthusiastic’.
Says Brody:
Hostile opposition or resentment are not expressed very easily or
openly to strangers. … The first minutes of any conversation
about them [the Michaels] between a local farmer and an
outsider are laden with circumspection and testing. Typically, the
opening remarks involve mention of some success of the
Michaels, some symbol of their style. ‘It’s a fine big house they
have,’ says the local farmer, waiting for the implications of tone
and detail contained in a reply. Behind this cautious beginning lie
Politeness in Ireland 133
both hostility towards the Michaels and a strong desire to enlist
visitors’ support in criticizing.
Conventional Politeness in Contemporary Irish English
Having established some background to the operation of face needs in
the performance of politeness in Ireland, I now consider the linguistic
evidence. I focus here on conversational understatement, hedges,
minimisation, conventional pessimism, reciprocity, reference to common
ground, the use of in-group identity markers and conventional optimism. I
do not imply that other politeness strategies are not found, or that these are
unique to Ireland. Rather, I aim to concentrate on especially salient aspects
of politeness, in particular because they are so well entrenched into
everyday language that they constitute unmarked strategies of
communication, liable to be encountered in everyday social routine.
Understatement
Understatement as a major part of Irish politeness should not be
surprising: as an off-the-record strategy or as negative politeness it is highly
congruent with the silence element of face needs while, as an aspect of
positive politeness, it is highly congruent with reciprocity.
Simple everyday examples of understatement abound. ‘How are you?’
invites not a conventionally neutral reply such as ‘Fine, thanks’ or a more
redressive ‘Fine thanks, how are you?’ but a response which is pitched
further away from stating that the speaker is well. The following examples
are routine replies to the question ‘How are you?’:
(1) Not too bad.
(2) Not the worst.
(3) Can’t complain.
(4) Can’t complain. Sure what’s the use in complaining, no one would
listen anyway.
The phrase not the worst and its companion, not the best, are regularly
used in speech acts such as compliments, receipt of compliments, in
complaints or refusals. Thus, in response to praise such as ‘That’s a great
drawing, Robin’, a common reply might be, ‘Thanks, I suppose it’s not the
worst’; a common polite way of complaining about goods such as a pint of
beer in a pub would be the observation that it was ‘not the best’; and I have
heard a radio traffic report warning motorists that traffic in a certain area
was ‘not the best’. In Skiadaresi’s (1997) ‘butcher’ scenario, respondents
were asked how they would address the butcher in order to express
134 Politeness in Western Europe
dissatisfaction with a particular piece of meat. Example 5 comes from an
Irish informant (p. 83), while Example 6 was my own (successful) refusal in
an actual shopping situation:
(5) Excuse me, but that meat doesn’t look the best.
(6) Eh, it’s not the freshest.
Related to (1)–(4), we might also cite conventional replies to routine
offers such as ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’:
(7) I wouldn’t say no.
(8) I don’t mind.
Utterance (8) is the off-the-record statement par excellence: it neither
requests nor refuses tea, and unlike (7), it carries no ready-made implicature
but rather allows (or forces) the offerer to interpret the response.
Likewise, the comment on winning a game show prize in (9), from the ICEIreland
corpus, falls within Brown and Levinson’s analysis of
understatement, in that it fails to inform the listener fully of the speaker’s
opinion, but creates implicatures that the listener is expected to recover (for
like as a sentence tag, see later).
(9) I wouldn’t say no to it like.
A more extreme example of an off-the-record strategy that shifts the
focus away from the intended implicature without eliminating it occurs in
contemporary conversation, and was noted as far back as Joyce (1910). In
discussing what he refers to as ‘assertion by negative of opposite’, Joyce
(1910: 16–23) relates the rhetorical style to usage in the Irish language, also
citing English examples such as the following (pp. 18–21):
You remark that a person has some fault, he is miserly, or extravagant, or
dishonest, etc.: and a bystander replies, ‘Yes indeed, and ‘tisn’t to-day or
yesterday it happened him’ – meaning that it is a fault of long standing.
‘There’s a man outside wants to see you sir,’ says Charlie, our office
attendant, … ‘What kind is he Charlie? does he look like a fellow
wanting money?’ Instead of a direct affirmative, Charlie answers, ‘Why
then sir I don’t think he’ll give you much anyway.‘
A man has got a heavy cold from a wetting and says: ‘That wetting did
me no good,’ meaning ‘it did me great harm.’
Apart from minor linguistic features, there is nothing particularly out of
date or unrealistic about Joyce’s examples. Phrases like it wasn’t today or
yesterday or not a million miles from here (i.e. ‘close-by‘) are still widespread.
Politeness in Ireland 135
What they demonstrate is the development of understatement as a simple
device for implicature into a regular discourse style based on both set
phrases and the general strategy of stating a point by stating something
close to the opposite but not so close as to fall into irony. In Gricean terms,
while the Maxim of Quantity is flouted by understating the speaker’s
intent, the Maxim of Quality is followed and the speaker can defend the
literal truth of the utterance.
Hedges
The need for silence in discourse may be a motive for the use of understatement
but, of course, the same face need can also motivate a host of
hedging devices. Here, I concentrate on the use of modality and clause-final
like.
In the ICE corpus, we find a number of performative verbs and verbs
with similar structure, e.g. accept, apologise, admit, say, swear, tell and think.
Most dramatic is the comparison between say and think. Both verbs can be
used to express the speaker’s point of view: say is nearly always hedged by
modals or other devices, while think almost never is. Thus, when all nonperformative
uses of say (such as reported and hypothetical speech) are
excluded from consideration, we find that, out of 57 performative uses, 44
(77%) are hedged by contracted would, as in (10)–(11). Of the remaining
uses, seven contain additional hedges, three use the pronoun we instead of
I (examples of positive politeness), and three use progressive aspect as a
hedge. These types are exemplified in (12)–(14). There are no examples of
bald on record expressions of the type I say X.
(10) I’d say that within Fine Gael there’ll be a row about that
(11) I was out of my bed I’d say.
(12) It’s a nice pub now, I’d hafta say.
(13) You’d be surprised how that builds up if they’re not smoking …for the
women we’ll say.
(14) I’m saying we’re all lost.
The distribution for think is almost the reverse of say: while (15) is
analogous to (10), there are only two tokens of this precise type in the
corpus. There are, however, nearly 200 tokens in the corpus of the type in
(16) and (17):
(15) I would think yes, yes there is money in medicine.
(16) I think you should tell us about that.
(17) He could live with that, I think.
136 Politeness in Western Europe
The contrast between say and think is clear in politeness terms: the
former is a bald on record performative verb which conventionally requires
a hedge, while the latter contains enough hedging in its inherent semantic
properties that it is usually hedged no further.
Contrasts between the tag elements of (11), (12) and (17) and matrix
clause uses as in (10) and (16) suggest that syntactic placement may affect
the politeness value of pragmatic elements. Though space limitations
prevent a discussion of this question, we see the importance of syntactic
placement in the Irish use of like, to which we now turn. Quotative like used
with be, as in (18), and the use of like as a focus particle as in (19), both from
the ICE-Ireland corpus, have received much attention in recent years (e.g.
Dailey-O’Cain, 2000; Tagliamonte & Hudson, 1999).
(18) ‘I was soaked, like they were a mess’.
(19) ‘She was like, ‘Ehm, well we’re not. You could’ve asked me’’.
What concerns us here, however, is a tag marker used as a hedge which
has not received attention elsewhere. Examples of tag like are common in
the corpus, which includes roughly 130 tokens in affirmative clauses and 20
in questions. As in (20)–(23), these uses are clause or sentence-final and,
therefore, not to be confused with quotatives or focusers (which introduce
new information, rather than follow it). Just as modals may hedge the
impact of performative or representative verbs, we see here that like can be
used to hedge the strength of whatever proposition precedes it.
(20) It’s such a tragic story like.
(21) He was a pure pole [‘skinny person‘] like, and he’d a belt on him.
(22) That happens so much like.
(23) But are they old fashioned like?
Minimisation
Minimisation of the imposition of a speech act is treated by Brown and
Levinson (1987: 176–178) exemplifying negative politeness, though their
discussion concentrates on particles and nominal minimisations. Irish
politeness shows many verbal uses as well. Sentences (24) and (25) belong
to hospital routine: (24) is a nurse’s instruction to sit or lie on an examination
bed, while (25) is a nurse’s instruction for the listener to go into a
private cubicle, undress and put on a disposable hospital gown. From the
household and friendship domain come everyday utterances in (26)–(27),
while (28) is a directive from a travel agent to a client who wants a travel
brochure. The relevant verbs are italicised for clarity. Though these examples
contain different speech acts, they coincide in their use of verbs
Politeness in Ireland 137
denoting transient motion to minimise the nature of the activity referred to
in the sentence. Such statements are neither understated nor ironic but,
rather, minimisations of the imposition denoted in the sentence.
(24) Now, if you could just pop up here.
(25) Now, if you could just slip this on.
(26) Can I steal a bit of your drink?
(27) I’m just gonna jump into the shower, okay?
(28) You can just reach up there and grab one.
While nouns such as drop, seen in (29) from the corpus, encode respect
for negative face needs by ostensibly reducing the magnitude of the goods
offered or requested, by far the most salient aspect of Irish politeness in the
nominal area is the use of bit applied freely to nouns and adjectives across
a wide variety of speech acts. In (30)–(32), bit is used to reduce, respectively,
the force of propositional content, the threat to the speaker’s general
esteem, and the emotional impact of the utterance. In all cases, bit operates
as a minimisation of force but creates no new implicatures, e.g. that the accident
in (32) was anything other than ‘horrific’.
(29) Will you have another drop of wine?
(30) But you know it’s a bit unfair if you were illiterate you wouldn’t be
able to vote
(31) Oh gosh I’m a bit mixed up now, that’s me, on automation.
(32) It was a bit horrific now.
Other common minimisers include wee (strongest in the Ulster dialect
zone), which, as seen in the non-redundancy of (33), does not necessarily
equate referentially to ‘small’ (although it often does), old (seen in (34), a
request for goods in a second-hand clothes market), and just, which
features prominently in everyday usage. In Skiadaresi’s ‘certificate’ question,
respondents were put in the discourse frame of needing to ask a
professor for a certificate of their student status, triggering the professor’s
response ‘All right, I’ll type it for you now’. In their requests for the certificate,
two of the 20 Irish respondents (but none of the 20 Greeks) used just
as a minimiser of imposition. Sentences (35) and (36), from Skiadaresi (1997:
57), contrast strategies in the placement of just. The free applicability of just
in minimisation is also seen in (37) and (38).
(33) No, I’ve a few wee small potatoes and I have coleslaw and tomato.
(34) Have you any old light slacks?
(35) I just want a certificate …
(36) … to write a certificate for me just saying that …
138 Politeness in Western Europe
(37) I’m just gonna have like a soft drink.
(38) No, it’s just a conference, just goin’ on for a few – a few days
Conventional Pessimism
By ‘conventional pessimism’, I suggest that pessimism acts not only as
Brown and Levinson’s (1978: 173–176) kind of politeness strategy, but that
the frequency of pessimistic strategies and the elaboration of pessimism in
everyday requests in Ireland is especially salient. The exchange in (39) is
from a second-hand clothes dealer to a potential customer: both sides use
minimisation strategies, while the conventional pessimism of the seller in
the last line is a determined attempt to interest the listener in buying clothes
without creating an imposition. Utterance (40) comes from the same
market, this time as a request from a potential customer.
(39) Seller: Good morning sir
Buyer: Good morning
Seller: Any bit o’ money this morning?
Buyer: Well not much
Seller: No. You don’t want this suit or a coat or anything, no?
(40) Hey, gov’nor. You wouldn’t have a nice pair of working boots
for me, would you?
Reciprocity
Though the discussion thus far has focused on negative politeness
strategies, it would be misleading to overlook positive face orientations,
often grounded in hospitality and reciprocity. Even the simple
question–answer adjacency pair in Irish English affords an enhanced
opportunity to engage in conversational reciprocity. Speakers of Irish
English frequently answer questions with phrases or full clauses that repeat
the verb of the question, rather than using a simple yes or no. This pattern
is generally taken to originate in substratal transfer from the Irish language,
which has no word for yes or no but relies on repetition of the verb (see
especially Filppula, 1999; see also Kallen, 1994, 1997). This conversational
pattern may thus originate in the syntax, rather than in politeness, but its
effect is that Irish responses will not appear as bald as simple yes or no
responses. I consider (41)–(43) as examples of reciprocity rather than
agreement, on the basis that agreement or sympathy is not necessarily
inferred from the repetition of the verb: all we can really say is that the
listener has attended to, and used, the speaker’s verb, even to disagree. The
Politeness in Ireland 139
following examples are from everyday home and shop situations. Speakers
of dialects favouring (a) or (b) responses are of course free to add additional
politeness markers but the point of the contrast here is that Irish English
speakers have a mild degree of reciprocity built into the unmarked syntax
of responses.
(41) Would you like some tea?
(a) I would
(b) Yes
(42) Are you going to the shops?
(a) I am
(b) Yes
(43) Have you any greaseproof paper?
(a) I haven’t
(b) No.
Given the cross-cultural differences in the use of words like thanks
and thank you, it is noteworthy that reciprocal thanks in Ireland is
salient. A simple shop transaction frequently involves a high saturation
of thanks exchanges. Handing over goods, money, change, credit or
debit cards, receipts and a bag for goods offers opportunities for both
customer and shop assistant to say thanks: though not all opportunities
must be taken, I have counted 14 utterances of thanks in one transaction
involving a simple purchase.
Common Ground
The search for common ground in Irish conversations very often leads to
talk about the weather. Given the importance of not directly performing a
speech act which could threaten the interlocutor’s face, weather talk often
becomes almost obligatory and may extend over several conversational
turns. The climate contributes to the importance of weather talk, with no
time of the year when rain, wind, and temperature remain unchanged for
long. The comment in (44) contains more reference to shared knowledge
than meets the eye. To my comment ‘It’s a great day today’, the speaker
agrees emphatically, but goes on to point out that this may be only a transient
phase. Agreement with the transience of the good weather –
accompanied by conventional pessimism – can be assumed by this speaker,
and in the event, provided for more common ground in the discussion
which followed.
(44) Tis powerful weather, powerful. I believe we – it’s the best o’ climate in
Europe now, so far. But sure anything can happen. Overnight, yuh.
140 Politeness in Western Europe
In (45), two speakers seek agreement over whether the weather is, in
fact, cold or mild, where the commonly used weather term changeable
allows for agreement.
(45) A: Very cold today
B: Well, at least it’s not raining
A: True. Still, it’s very changeable
B: It is indeed.
Some phrases are particularly widespread in highlighting shared knowledge,
real or assumed (conversational markers are italicised):
(46) As the man said to me, one man hasn’t, another man has
(47) That’ll be a great day, as the fella says
(48) It’s just gone too high, you know yourself.
In-group Identity Markers
The sociology of language in Ireland provides a ready-made source of ingroup
markers of linguistic identity which may figure in the politeness
system. Most English speakers educated in the Republic of Ireland will
have studied Irish throughout their school years, and many will have been
to the Gaeltacht (areas where Irish is the main community language) or
other Irish-speaking settings. Though knowledge of Irish is less widespread
in Northern Ireland, it also functions as an identity marker for some.
For others, the Ulster variety of Scots may provide an in-group function
(see Mac Póilin, [1999] for an overview of language and identity in
Northern Ireland). In (49), the speaker is telling the listener not to go further
into a hallway until bottles are cleared from it. Irish buidéal, ‘bottle’, here has
the English plural -s attached; note the use of we and old as additional
politeness markers. In (50), a mother uses the Irish for ‘wooden spoon’,
lessening the force of chastisement to a child, while in (51), the use of Irish
grá instead of English love builds on an understatement to add a further
level of politeness by using an in-group term:
(49) Wait till we get these old buidéals out of the way
(50) It’s the spúnóg adhmaid for you, missy
(51) I’ve no great grá for her, anyway.
Even within Irish English itself, speakers are aware of the solidarity
functions of well-known features of traditional dialect and urban vernaculars.
Among these we may list, for example, use of /aU/ in old, cold, bold and
a few other such words (conventionally spelled <auld>, <cauld>, etc.),
Politeness in Ireland 141
retention of earlier historical /e:/ in words with Middle English /E:/ now
elsewhere usually raised to /i/ (e.g. please (as a verb), meat, tea, etc), and
sporadic use of what Wells (1982: 370) calls the ‘T-to-R rule’ (shared with
some British varieties), by which words such as excited take on /r/ instead
of /t/ (hence the conventional spelling in (54)). Many speakers regularly
distinguish between old and auld – the former can be minimising, while the
latter can additionally indicate shared status – so that in (52), the effect of
criticism is reduced by the use of auld. Similar effects of in-group marking
are achieved in (53), and (54), where ‘excited and delighted’ is in a conventional
dialect spelling.
(52) That’s only an auld leaf.
(53) Would you e’r [ever] give us a cup o’ tae.
(54) I would be excirrah and delirrah.
Conventional Optimism
Though we have discussed conventional pessimism in Irish English,
we turn now, perhaps paradoxically, to the importance of conventional
optimism. Just as pessimism may relate to silence, optimism may
relate to hospitality and reciprocity. The widespread marker sure is
extremely useful in this regard. Though not all uses of discoursemarked
sure are expressive of optimism concerning positive outcomes
or agreement with the speaker, optimistic uses abound, for example in
(55)–(56) from the corpus. In all these cases, an assertion is made, to
which the consent of the listener or listeners is elicited by clause-initial
sure. Sure in these cases does not hedge or minimise the speaker’s act
of assertion. On the contrary, as seen in the tag usage of (57), it optimistically
assumes agreement with the speaker, even if the facts have
not been explicitly agreed.
(55) But sure, no party likes to be in opposition, anyway.
(56) Sure he’ll be goin home as well won’t he.
(57) You won’t go just yet, sure you won’t.
Conclusion
This discussion is, of course, no substitute for the in-depth ethnographic
analysis needed in order to understand the complex
relationships that unite discourse, language and culture in doing
politeness work in Ireland. Despite the limitations of our current state
of knowledge, however, I suggest that if we accept the idea of hospitality,
reciprocity and silence as salient and distinctive elements in Irish
142 Politeness in Western Europe
politeness, we have the key to understanding the system and the
tensions within it. No doubt there are other factors at work but it is to
be hoped, at least, that this account will draw attention both to the
visible factors that operate in Irish politeness and to those factors which
lie beneath the silent and sociable surface.
Acknowledgement
ICE-Ireland has been supported by the Royal Irish Academy, the British
Council, and the Arts and Humanities Research Board. I am indebted to
John M. Kirk for assistance in using the material, to Mary Pat O’Malley for
work on the ICE transcriptions, and to the students who contributed these
ICE recordings
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