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Politeness theory explains why speakers often say things indirectly, hedge, or apologize when a blunt statement would carry the same information. Building on Erving Goffman's idea of "face," the public self-image people want to maintain, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson distinguished positive face (the wish to be liked and approved of) and negative face (the wish not to be imposed on). Requests, criticisms, and refusals are face-threatening acts, and speakers choose strategies to soften them. How much softening they use depends on social distance, relative power, and the size of the imposition.
Collect several ways to make the same request ("Close the window," "Could you possibly close the window?", "It's cold in here") and rank them by directness and by who could say them to whom. Classify each as bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness, or off record. Role-play the same request to a friend, a stranger, and a boss. Compare politeness norms across languages and cultures to test the theory's claims of universality.
Imagine you need a pen from someone sitting near you. You could say "Give me a pen." Most people instead say something like "Sorry, do you have a pen I could borrow?" The second version is longer and less efficient. Politeness theory explains why speakers go to that trouble.
The key idea is face, a term the sociologist Erving Goffman used for the public self-image that people claim in interaction. In their 1978 study, later published as the 1987 book *Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage*, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson split face into two wants:
Many ordinary speech acts threaten one or both. A request imposes on the hearer's negative face. A criticism threatens the hearer's positive face. An apology can threaten the speaker's own positive face. Brown and Levinson call these face-threatening acts.
Speakers have several strategies, listed from most to least direct:
1. Bald on record: "Pass the salt." Clear and efficient, used with intimates, in emergencies, or by people with power.
2. Positive politeness: stresses friendship and shared values. "Hey buddy, pass the salt?"
3. Negative politeness: stresses respect for the hearer's freedom, often with hedges and apologies. "Sorry, could you possibly pass the salt?"
4. Off record: hints, leaving the request to inference. "This soup could use some salt."
5. Avoid the act entirely.
Which strategy a speaker picks depends on three factors in the model: the social distance between speaker and hearer, the hearer's power relative to the speaker, and the size of the imposition. Borrowing a pen from a friend calls for little softening. Asking a professor for a deadline extension calls for much more.
Politeness theory connects to other parts of pragmatics. An off-record hint works through implicature, since the hearer infers the request. Indirect requests such as "Can you pass the salt?" are classic indirect speech acts.
The theory has critics. Its claims of universality have been challenged by scholars working on Japanese and other languages, who argue that some polite forms follow fixed social expectations about rank and setting rather than choices about individual face. Other researchers focus on impoliteness and on how politeness norms are negotiated in each community. Even so, the concepts of face and face-threatening acts remain standard tools for analyzing everyday talk.