Politeness in increasing degrees of imposition: a sociolinguistic study of politeness in political conversations

This study examines politeness as a face-threat mitigating strategy in increasingly imposing questions. Brown and Levinson (B&L) established politeness as socially determined by rank of imposition, social distance, and relative power. The hypothesis that politeness forms used by respondents will reflect the B&L social factors of rank of imposition, social distance, and relative power, is tested. B&L's model predicts that increasing rank of imposition will lead to increased politeness; decreased social distance will lead to decreased politeness; greater power of interviewee will lead to decreased politeness. I designed a series of political questions concerning the speaker's reaction to Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson's protest of President Bush; both the question and the answers would be viewed as face-threatening acts (FTAs) that increased in imposition as they progressed. Generally, as degree of imposition increased politeness increased. The other social factors examined resulted in a variety of surprising results, which can be attributed to the interactions in the complex factors that contribute to evaluation of relative investment of the speaker. The study suggests that politeness may be better understood as being directly related to the investment of the speaker, where investment is determined by a combination of social and situational factors.