European Journal of Social Sciences Volume 20, Number 1 (2011)

Politeness Principle: A Comparative Study of English and Moroccan Arabic Requests, Offers and Thanks
Sakina M. Alaoui Department of English, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman E-mail: sakina@squ.edu.om Abstract In the following paper I consider the various formats that politeness formula can exhibit in the following speech acts: requests, offers and thanks. I draw on material from English and Moroccan Arabic, making the point that these acts are rather complex, involving potential threat to the speaker and/or hearers face. The analysis indicates that in both languages the speakers primary goal is to minimise any threat to her/his face and to the face of the hearer; however, the method deployed to undertake this objective is different in the two languages. In English, the devices favoured are modals and questions whereas in Moroccan Arabic it is politeness markers and terms of address. Thus to mitigate the impact of the speech acts discussed in this paper, English seems to opt for syntactic downgraders, whereas MA inclines towards lexical downgraders.

Keywords: Speech acts, politeness principles, requests, offers, thanks, face-threatening speech acts.

1. Introduction
To say that somebody is polite would mean that this person shows possession of good manners and consideration for others. And yet, the term politeness nowadays carries a negative connotation touch of hypocrisy, for being polite is associated with saying things which one does not really feel or believe in. However, it is an important part of social conventions since in all cultures, however different they are, politeness in addressing others is a kind of observed code of behavior that one has to adhere to. Politeness involves not only linguistic realizations, but also the broad communicative spectrum including paralinguistic and kinetic detail (Brown and Levinson: 58); therefore, the way a conversation is conducted, for instance, is part of polite/impolite behaviour. Speaking at the wrong time, interrupting a speaker or keeping silent at the wrong time, all are regarded as impolite. Generally speaking, politeness is used to avoid clash or conflict between the persons involved in a situation, i.e. speaker/hearer, or speaker/hearer/third party (though politeness towards a hearer is more important than towards a third party); thus we often find a tendency to exaggerate agreement and mitigate disagreement. The present paper is going to focus on politeness in language usage rather than in non-linguistic behaviour. The first part will try to explain why politeness is an interesting phenomenon, and will advance two reasons: first because of the part politeness plays in the pragmatic side of language study and second because of the difficulties the EFL learners encounter in their desire to be polite. The second and the third parts will introduce and analyse English data (requests, offers and thanks) both on the grammatical and lexical levels. The fourth part will attempt to compare the way English uses politeness to the way Moroccan Arabic does, and from there try to see whether the overall phenomena 7

European Journal of Social Sciences Volume 20, Number 1 (2011) of politeness are the same. As a conclusion, this paper will bring to focus the need to understand politeness if English is to be used as an international language.

2. Why is Politeness Interesting?

2.1. Only in the past few decades have philosophers, linguists and others become interested in the pragmatic study of language, i.e. they developed an interest in the way language is used in communication between people. In 1962, Austin introduced his theory of speech acts, and Searle (1969) systematized it; then came Grice (1975) with his co-operative principles and implicatures as a means to study discourse. Grice himself noted the importance of politeness as a factor in the account of conversational meaning, though he did not deal with it in detail. It is only in recent years that discourse analysts began to investigate the area of polite language usage, and this partly because the Gricean CP1 does not fully explain the use of language. According to Leech, the CP in itself cannot explain (i) why people are often so indirect in conveying what they mean; and (ii) what is the relation between the sense [meaning as semantically determined] and force [meaning as pragmatically as well as semantically determined] when non-declarative types of sentence are being considered. (p. 80). So he introduces what he calls the PP (politeness principle) and shows that both the CP and the PP are needed for pragmatic interpretations. Very often in everyday speech, utterances which flout the Gricean CP are used and are understood. The force of these indirect illocutions can be worked out if the Hearer uses implicatures. Leech illustrates this with the example, Its cold in here as a request to switch on the heater. Surely in producing this indirect illocution instead of a direct one, the speaker intends to fulfill a goal beside just attaining the desired state and that is to maintain a good social relationship with the hearer by being polite and yet at the same time imposing his own will. The choice of one of the different realizations of speech act in part depends on the extent to which the contextual situation requires politeness, for the PP applies differently in different contexts. This is what Leech sets out to study while Brown and Levinson move toward the study of politeness as a universal phenomenon. Brown and Levinson try to account for the observed cross cultural similarities in the abstract principles which underlie polite usage. Though it cannot be denied that there are certain features of politeness common to some languages, if not all (as can be seen later in section 5), yet the use of politeness does alter from one culture to the other, in that, one society can give precedence to one maxim of PP rather than another while other societies would not; for example, the Moroccan society gives preference to the generosity maxim while the English does so to the agreement maxim. In this respect, politeness can be said to be a culture-specific norm. 2.2. The fact that politeness is culture specific probably accounts for the difficulties EFL learners face when they try to be polite in L2. Indeed, even if they master the lexical and grammatical aspects of the English language, they sometimes fail to communicate well at the pragmatic level. In part, second language speakers pragmatic failures have shown to be traceable to cross-linguistic differences in the speech act realization rules, indicating in Widdowsons terms (Widdowson, 1978) that learners are just as liable to transfer rules of use (having to do with contextual appropriacy) as those of usage (related to grammatical accuracy) (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain: 196). Arabic speakers of English, for example, sound phony or lacking sincerity to native speakers because of the excessive usage they make of polite forms. The following illustration will make this point more explicit. If say a Moroccan speaker of English met a person s/he knows, even though this person is not their close friend, a likely greeting he could come up with could be the following:

From now on, I will refer to the Gricean Co-operative Principles as CP and Leechs Politeness Principles as PP.

European Journal of Social Sciences Volume 20, Number 1 (2011) Hello, hello, hello! How are you? Its been such a long time since I last saw you. Where have you been all this time? How is the family, the wife, the children, your parents ? Are they alright? My regards to all of them This is a kind of ritual greeting that one has to go through in an Arabic, or at least a Moroccan society, but a greeting of this sort might shock a native speaker of English who would regard it as overfriendly; perhaps they might consider the speaker as treading on their private territory because s/he (the speaker) is not keeping the social distance usual in the British society.

3. Presentation of English Data

The speech acts involving politeness that I have chosen to present in this paper are: requests, offers and thanks, all of which occur in a situation where a speaker S and a hearer H are participants. In the present data, there are only two parties, S and H, who interact in a social context. It is worth noting that politeness centres around/on H rather than S in that S always tries to mitigate the effect of his/her utterance on H. The degree of politeness and the kind of politeness depend on the type of illocutionary act the speaker is making on H (here they are requests, offers and thanks), as it depends on the social distance between S and H. For the PP used in requests, for example, is distinct from the one used in thanks, and likewise the degree of politeness used by a house owner to the help (i.e. a person of a high social status to a person of a lower social scale) is different from the one used by the help in addressing the owner because of the authoritative status the owner has over the help. Obviously, the appropriate situation that requests involve is that of a speaker asking H for a favour or action or deed, and so S feels him/herself in an inferior position vis--vis H who becomes the beneficiant2. The same holds true for thanks where S is still the beneficiary of the action, the only change being that the action in thanking is already performed whereas in requests it is still to be carried out. This is also the case for offers though in performing an offer it is S who is in a superior position, s/he is the one to condescend, as it were, to give or offer something to H. In these three illocutionary acts, there is a kind of imbalance between S and H, and the use of the PP is an attempt from Ss side to restore the lost equilibrium. Hence the need fro indirectness and optionality in requesting, offering and to some extent thanking an addressee. As an instance of indirect illocutionary act, we may find a yes-no question having the force of a request, e.g. can you tell me the time?, or an imperative having the force of an invitation, e.g. have a seat. Indirectness can be even taken further, when S makes use of the hinting strategies. An example of optionality is the omission of the referent role in a cup of tea would be nice, where S refers neither to him/herself, nor to H in his/her request. This last example will be discussed in more detail in section 4.1.

4. Analysis of Data
4.1. As I have argued earlier, there are various linguistic realizations of the same propositional content (in the data to be presented, it is the desire to have a cup of tea) which have the same force (request) but which reflect the various levels of politeness that a S may use. Generally speaking, requests delimit Hs freedom of choice since S, in some way, imposes his/her will either directly or indirectly on H. to minimize the imposition of his will, S uses different kinds of indirectness, sometimes going as far as hinting his desire instead of putting it in full words. It seems that the more indirect S makes his/her request, the more polite s/he is. A direct form would be: 1. Give me a cup of tea
2

Beneficiant, beneficial and benefit are used in this paper the way leech employs the terms, when he refers in Principles of Pragmatics to the cost benefit scale on which one can estimate the cost or benefit of the proposed action A to S or H(p. 123). See also pp. 124-125.

European Journal of Social Sciences Volume 20, Number 1 (2011) This request sounds very rude and this is achieved through the use of the imperative which expressed Ss belief that H will undoubtedly perform the action. It is a tactless request, i.e. it does not observe the Tact Maxim3, because it risks disobedience. In uttering 2. I want a cup of tea S is still being rude. Here, S uses a declarative plus a volitional predicate want; both of which deny H the opportunity to decline. In both 1 and 2, it seems that H has no choice but obey. 3. I would like a cup of tea, please This sentence could be uttered in a caf, for example, addressed to a waiter. In it, S is being polite and less direct in his/her request than in examples 1 and 2. S/he uses the politeness marker please and the past tense modal would which expresses a hypothetical state or action, and so S does not force anything on H. The same holds true for 4. Id love a cup of tea, The difference being that 3 is formal while 4 is not and each one represents a different register. 5. Lets have a cup of tea Here, to minimize the cost to H, S uses the plural form us instead the singular me. In the next utterances: 6. May I have a cup of tea? 7. Can I possibly have a cup of tea? 8. Could I have a cup of tea? We can notice the use of modals which usually introduce a possibility or permission to do some action. Important also is the use of interrogatives instead of declaratives (2, 3 and 4) or imperatives (1). All three (6, 7 and 8) are yes/no questions which act as requests and so give H freedom of response. To make the request even more smooth and palatable to H, words such as possibly can be added (as in 7). Example 9 below uses the same syntactic strategies as 6-8, 9. Is there any chance of a cup of tea? That is to say, it makes use of an interrogative under the form of a yes/no question. In addition, S has left out any reference to him/herself as beneficiary. A similar process is found in the next example: 10. A cup of tea would be nice, Where the omission of I as subject is enhanced by the passivisation and the exclusion of any cost to H. In examples 6-10 an element of doubt is introduced, so the expression of belief that H will perform the action is weakened. As for the next example, 11. Gosh, Im thirsty It belongs to the non-conventionally indirect level (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain, 1984) in that S does not make a direct reference to his/her desire for a cup of tea, but s/he only hints at it, and it is up to H to understand it with the help of contextual evidence. 4.2. Unlike requests, offers put S in a higher position than H, i.e. S becomes the performer of the action and H the beneficiary of it. In offering to perform a beneficial action for H, S - for the sake of politeness - biases the illocution towards a positive reply - acceptance of the offer. Therefore, in uttering 1. Do you want a cup of tea? 2. I suppose you want a cup of tea S is being impolite because s/he shows that s/he does not or is unwilling to give it. On the other hand, the examples 3. Would you care for a cup of tea? 4. Would you like a cup of tea?
3

On the Tact Maxim, see Leechs Principles of Pragmatics, p. 107.

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European Journal of Social Sciences Volume 20, Number 1 (2011) are fairly polite because of the suppression of Ss part in the transaction. S wants to show that s/he makes no sacrifice in offering tea, and in this respect it becomes easier for H to accept the offer. Also, the use of the pas tense modal would makes it more of an indirect invitation. Consider, for example, the use of will instead of would: 4a. Will you have a cup of tea? The offer here becomes less polite because it leads H into a negative answer since it implies that S presupposes Hs acceptance. However, if the negative form of will is used, the invitation changes into a more polite usage, 5. Wont you have a cup of tea? For indirectness in the use of negation leads to greater politeness in invitations and offers. Another form of indirectness is used in the following example, 6. How about a cup of tea? Since this offer involves ellipsis which is associated with an in-group shared knowledge as it involves impersonal perspective, i.e. the question is neither speaker- nor hearer-oriented. It is in this way similar to example 10 in 4.1. The offer of tea can also take the form of no more than one word, 7. Tea? And its being an offer is shown though the intonation that the utterance takes. 7 would use a rising tone, a tone associated with uncertainty and doubt, in this case, as to the wish of H, so S gives H the opportunity to choose. In example 8, however, this choice is absent, 8. You must have a cup of tea It seems that this example functions as an impositive because of the modal must, i.e. S is trying to impose his/her own will on H, but actually it does not. In fact, it implies that it is to the benefit of H to do the action. Must has a completely different force in requests as is shown in the example below, 8a. you must give me a cup of tea Where it is a command which threatens the face4 of H whereas in8 it is polite because it anticipates a negative answer from H, so by introducing must in the offer, S tries to convince H to accept. This works also for the imperatives in offers: 9. Have some tea, please 10. Do have some tea The imperative, which does not allow H to reject the offer, is a positively polite for of invitation. The positive bias can even be heightened by the persuasive emphasis of do in 10. In both 9 and 10, the utterances implicate that H would do a favour to S in accepting the offer. 4.3. Thanks are one of the speech acts that threaten the face of S, for in expressing thanks, S accepts a debt and in a way humbles him/herself vis--vis H. Thanks always occur after some utterance or event, for S always thanks for something. As Coulmas (1981:70) argues in Poison to Your Soul: Thanks and Apologies Contrastively Viewed that thanks are always preceded (or accompanied) by a certain intervention in the course of events for acknowledgement. Thanks are usually identified by the occurrence of such phrases as thank you, or thanks as in, 1. Thank you for feeding the cat 2. Thank you very much for feeding the cat
4

The term face is used by Brown and Levinson in Universals in Language Usage: Politeness Phenomena with a specific meaning. A person is endowed with a face when s/he is endowed with two particular wants roughly, the want to be unimpeded and the want to be approved in certain respects (p. 63). Brown and Levinson borrowed this notion from Goffman (1967) and from the English folk term, which a they say ties up with the notions of being embarrassed or humiliated, or losing face, and they conclude that face is something that is emotionally invested, and that can be lost, maintained, or enhanced and must be constantly attended to in interaction (p. 66). They also discuss in great detail the notion of FTA, i.e. speech acts which are Face Threatening Acts, such as thanks, commands, apologies, etc.

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European Journal of Social Sciences Volume 20, Number 1 (2011) Or even the more polite form, 3. Thank you ever so much for feeding the cat Unlike requests and offers, thanks have a close relationship between their form and their function since the formulaic word thank is itself a performative verb. There are, however, indirect forms to express thanks, and these make use of the feeling of indebtedness S has towards H: 4. I am very grateful for your feeding the cat Or the excessively deferential one, 5. I am really most grateful for your feeding the cat. As for example 6 below, 6. I dont know what I would have done if you didnt feed the cat for me. It is an indirect form of thanking in that the illocutionary point can be deduced from the semantic meaning of the locution. Furthermore, it is Speaker- and Hearer-oriented (the use of the pronouns I and you). In contrast, example 7, 7. It was terribly good of you to have fed the cat is an impersonal utterance, introduced by the empty subject it. This serves as a face redress to S who is under threat in offering thanks to H. 8. I want to thank you for having fed the cat. Even though this last example uses personal pronouns I and you, thus being S- and H-oriented, it at the same time minimises the facethreatening act (thanking) by the use of the hedged performative I want to which stresses the desirability of the illocution.

5. Comparison with Moroccan Arabic Data

Having analysed the English data of the three indirect speech acts, requests, offers and thanks, now I would like to turn to some Moroccan Arabic data in an attempt to show the similar and dissimilar devices that are used along the scale of politeness/impoliteness. 5.1. To take requests first, the use of imperatives is, just as is the case in English, a sign of rudeness from the part of S: 1. teni atay Give me (some) tea But in example 2, 2. teni wad lkas datay, llah yxellik Give me a cup of tea, may God keep you (safe) Though the imperative is still used, it is quite polite if put in a context where S is in a caf asking the waiter for tea, and the request is attenuated by the use of the politeness marker llah yxellik which is, to some extent, equivalent to the English please. In Moroccan Arabic, politeness markers such as llah yxellik, llah yrdi lik (God bless you) and afak (God give you good health, with ellipsis of God) are very often used in making requests to alleviate the imposition of Ss will on H. 3. b it atay I want tea This utterance is not a polite request because of the use of the volitional verb b it (want) which inflict Ss wish on H. Apart from the use of imperatives, modals also exhibit certain similarities between Moroccan Arabic usage and English usage in that modals in both languages introduce an indirect request: 4. wash ymklli naxud shi kas datay? Can I have a cup of tea? Here S is asking whether there is a possibility of his having a cup of tea. Notice also the use of the yes/no question format which leaves to H the opportunity to choose the answer either by accepting or declining. 12

European Journal of Social Sciences Volume 20, Number 1 (2011) 5. wash ymklli nru bek wad rr iba? afak ila ma tsawbli wad lkas datay Can I ask you for a favour? Please make me a cup of tea In this example, S precedes the act by an utterance that can account as an attempt to obtain a pre-commitment from H. It is a device that is used in English as well, though there was no example in the data discussed in section 4. The next example is a polite, indirect request where S omits any reference to him/herself or to H. 6. wash mujud shi kas datay? Is there any tea ready? It is also an informal request, one which can be made to someones friends or relatives. 7. llah la rit nna na ! What a nice smell of mint! Here I have to make a small digression to explain that Moroccan tea is always made with fresh mint (and green tea), hence the reference to the smell of mint. Example 7 is similar to example 11 in 4.1 in that it is an impersonal indirect request, i.e. S is using the hinting strategy to achieve his end. 5.2. Traditionally in Moroccan offer has to be repeated and declined a number of times before it is accepted. Accepting from the first offer is regarded as bad form, so S/H go through this ritualized behaviour where each one has a defined role. If we look at the manner in which offers can be made in MA (Moroccan Arabic), we can find that they can be direct such as, 1. b iti atay? Do you want (some) tea? Which is the most straight offer one can make in MA. It is not impolite with close acquaintances but is considered as ill-mannered in formal settings. 2. Atay? Tea? Is, on the other hand, an indirect offer which uses ellipsis and which can be addressed only to somebody S knows. Another indirect form would be 3. ash dher lik fshi kas datay? What do you think of a cup of tea? Meaning: how about a cup of tea? In this example ellipsis is still used and despite the fact that it addresses H through the use of the pronoun you, there is no attempt to bias Hs response. Like English, MA can also use a type of imperative to make quasi impossible for H to reject the offer: 4. Wllah tta tshrb kas datay In the name of God, you must drink a cup of tea The only device which differs in its implication from English is negation. To realize an offer with a negative as in the following example: 5. Mataxdish atay? Wont you take some (tea)? Shows that the speaker tries to orient H towards a negative reply and so it is not a polite offer. It is rather a means to make H refuse to accept tea. 5.3. there is a close analogy between the English and the Moroccan approach to thanks, for the performative word thanks and shukran respectively is very frequently found. One can simply use the word 1. Shukran Thanks 13

European Journal of Social Sciences Volume 20, Number 1 (2011) And in that case S is merely thanking H without debasing him/herself. There are more elaborate ways of thanking which still uses the word shukran; for example, 2. shukran al zala diyali thanks my beauty Here S makes use of the address form al zala diyali (my beauty) to convey a close relationship with H, whereas the next example doesnt show the relationship between S and H: 3. shukran bzzaf ad thanks a lot/ thank you very much S and H might be intimate or distant, 3 can be used as a form to express Ss appreciation. S can also show their gratitude without the use of the word shukran. S/he can produce indirect thanks which are neither speaker- nor hearer-oriented: 4. llah ykttar xirek May God increase you goodness/wealth It can be noticed that in the case of English, and MA as well, S always tries to avoid responsibility for the potential Hs face damaging interpretation, so S is socially motivated by the need to play down the cost to H. This, I think, is a universal feature pertaining not only to English and MA but to all natural languages. Another universal feature is the importance speakers give to negative politeness (i.e. seeking concord), so both S and H try in their interaction not to threaten the others face. However, there are disparate cultural preferences along the scale of direct/indirect strategies, for as shown in the analysis of data, though English and MA use on the whole similar lexical and grammatical devices, there is a tendency in each language to use one or two of these devices more often than others. The devices favoured in MA are mainly politeness markers and terms of address while in English they are modals and questions. So to mitigate the impact of the speech acts discussed in this paper, English seems to opt for syntactic downgraders, whereas MA inclines towards lexical downgraders. Of course, the present paper is by no means an exhaustive study of the topic and further discussion will be needed to substantiate the points raised here.

6. Conclusion
Politeness is essential in social interaction whether it is between people of the same culture, the same social status, the same age and level of education or not; and its significance comes more to the fore when we consider the fact that English has become an international language and therefore needs new concepts, new types of pragmatic research and perhaps new teaching strategies. Indeed, English has been acquiring more and more power and status as a native language and more importantly as a second and foreign language since it is the lingua franca used to communicate between people who do not share the same language. Just as Kachru (1985) argued some years ago, by their geographical distribution, numerical strength, and varied uses of English, the second language users have made English, as it were, a window on the world (p. 212). Even though the British, Nigerians and Indians for example might use English as a means of communication, politeness might operate in each of these societies distinctively. Because of this crosscultural and international usage of English, it is important indeed it is necessary to understand the overall phenomena of politeness to conquer the problems of its usage. Finally, to understand politeness is also basic to bilingualism, for nowadays bilingualism is promoted due to the usefulness of language in business and politics. So because of this growing attention to international concerns, interest in and study of politeness in particular and pragmatics in general should itself increase and deepen.

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European Journal of Social Sciences Volume 20, Number 1 (2011)

References
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