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Summary

Remarks on alternative models

One way of thinking about our enterprise is this: we are attempting a description, in a very limited area, of the principles that lie behind the construction of social behaviour. There can be no doubt that one reason that social theory has never come to ground level is the notable lack of a satisfactory theory of action. The major social theorists (for instance Durkheim, Parsons, Weber), and indeed analytical philosophers, have only made crude attempts at the analysis of the single act. Only cognitive anthropologists (inspired initially by Miller, Galanter and Pribram 1960), cognitive psychologists, and workers in artificial intelligence (e.g. in Schank and Colby 1973) have looked at actions in the context of hierarchical plans which may specify sequences of actions. But how does one generate plans? How does one mentally check their validity? What kinds of reasoning lie behind them? These are questions which, compared to the study devoted to deductive reasoning, have received scant attention since Aristotle (but see for instance Körner 1974). Above all, a satisfactory account of action in an interactional setting has been grossly neglected, despite evidence that very special properties of coordination arise in such settings (Grice 1971, 1975; Lewis 1969; Schelling 1960). Indeed, here our own analysis must be found wanting, dominated às it is by the act-by-act analysis of contemporary philosophy and linguistics; we try to make amends in section 6.3.

Summary

Prologue

This paper has a broad sweep, and a diversity of motives. It will help here at the beginning to extract and formulate pur major aims. The foremost aim is simply to describe and account for what is in the light of current theory a most remarkable phenomenon. This is the extraordinary parallelism in the linguistic minutiae of the utterances with which persons choose to express themselves in quite unrelated languages and cultures. The convergence is remarkable because, on the face of it, the usages are irrational: the convergence is in the particular divergences from some highly rational maximally efficient mode of communication (as, for example, outlined by Grice 1967, 1975). We isolate a motive — politeness, very broadly and specially defined — and then claim, paradoxically enough, that the only satisfactory explanatory scheme will include a heavy dash of rationalism. The bulk of the paper provides evidence of the parallelisms, and demonstrates their rational sources.

But why concern ourselves with this? Is this not a problem for ethology or psychology? We confess to underlying motives of a different sort. We believe that patterns of message construction, or ‘ways of putting things’, or simply language usage, are part of the very stuff that social relationships are made of (or, as some would prefer, crucial parts of the expressions of social relations). Discovering the principles of language usage may be largely coincident with discovering the principles out of which social relationships, in their interactional aspect, are constructed: dimensions by which individuals manage to relate to others in particular ways.

Summary

Exploitations of strategies

Our model would predict a number of possible exploitations of the politeness strategies. We consider these briefly here.

Trying to re-rank R, P, or D. We mentioned in section 3.4.2, in our discussion of the nature of the sociological variables that go into assessing the seriousness of an FTA, that a speaker may exploit the fundamental ambiguity that derives from the compounding of the factors D, P, and R into a single index of risk, and attempt to redefine one of the variables. That is, any FTA utterance will encode the estimated danger of the FTA, but it does not necessarily display which of the social variables is primarily responsible for the assessed weight of Wx . S and H will both have some estimate of these variables, and S may choose to try to re-rank the expectable weighting of one of the variables at the expense of the others.

In trying to re-rank R, S may take advantage of mutual-knowledge assumptions between S and H of their respective social distance D and social power P, and S may choose to act as though R x is smaller than he in fact knows (and knows that H knows) it really is. He can do this by saying, for example, ‘Hey, Harry, how about lending me your new car!’ and hoping that the positive-politeness optimism will convince Harry that it is not a very big or unreasonable request. This is risky, as Harry may decide that it is D or P that the addressee is manipulating, rather than R, and take offence.

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Assumptions: Properties of interactants

We make the following assumptions: that all competent adult members of a society have (and know each other to have)

Summary

The bulk of the material in this volume first appeared in a collection in the series Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology, volume 8. Its reissue will now make it available to a much wider audience. In the years since it first appeared it has come to be accepted as the classic treatment on politeness in communication. As an integrative treatment of phenomena previously dealt with in a variety of disciplines it is now widely cited by linguists, psychologists and students of social interaction. A major reason for this interest is that politeness, as the authors define it, is basic to the production of social order, and a precondition of human cooperation, so that any theory which provides an understanding of this phenomenon at the same time goes to the foundations of human social life.

In addition to their status as universal principles of human interaction, politeness phenomena by their very nature are reflected in language. Societies everywhere, no matter what their degree of isolation or their socioeconomic complexity, show these same principles at work; yet what counts as polite may differ from group to group, from situation to situation, or from individual to individual. If we can find some underlying grammatical and social regularities which account both for this type of variation and for the recurrent patterns, we will have taken a major step in demonstrating and not just claiming the basically social nature of human language.

Summary

Face wants as functional pressures on language

This section describes some interrelations between grammar and face redress. We propose (a) that face redress is a powerful functional pressure on any linguistic system, and (b) that a particular mechanism is discernible whereby such pressures leave their imprint on language structure.

Functionalism in linguistic theory. Before we proceed, a few remarks on some trends in linguistic theory should be made. Recently, after a period of suppression by the methodological presuppositions of transformational generative grammar, there has been a resurgence of interest in functionalist explanation — that is, in the search for a source outside the purely linguistic system that might motivate the bulk of grammatical constraints. Most of this work attempts to locate such sources in the principles of cognitive processing, or in the interaction of language with other mental faculties.

In contrast to what we may call ‘internal’ cognitive functionalist explanation, there are ‘external’ pragmatic theories that seek to link linguistic structures to the organization of communication. The theories of Grice (1971) and Searle (1969) are wholeheartedly of this latter sort, but more tentative partial pragmatic functionalisms are to be found in work stemming largely from the Lakoffs and scattered through issues of the Chicago Linguistic Society papers and in Cole and Morgan 1975.

Summary

This book, written by a non-statistician for non-statisticians, emphasises the practical approach to those problems in statistics which arise regularly in data analysis situations in nuclear and high-energy physics experiments. Rather than concentrating on formal proofs of theorems, an abundant use of simple examples illustrates the general ideas which are presented, showing the reader how to obtain the maximum information from the data in the simplest manner. Possible difficulties with the various techniques, and pitfalls to be avoided, are also discussed. Based on a series of lectures given by the author to both students and staff at Oxford, this common-sense approach to statistics will enable nuclear physicists to understand better how to do justice to their data in both analysis and interpretation. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

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4 - On the nature of the model

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1 - Introduction

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6 - Derivative hypotheses

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Notes

References

3 - The argument: Intuitive bases and derivative definitions

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Contents

Notes

Foreword

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Author index

Dedication

8 - Implications for language studies

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2 - Probability and statistics

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1 - Experimental errors

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Dedication

4 - Parameter fitting and hypothesis testing

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Bibliography

Frontmatter

6 - Monte Carlo calculations

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Appendix 1 - Background subtraction procedures

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