Fukushima’s socio-pragmatic approach to politeness stresses situation sensitivity,
cultural specificity, and multi-functionality. Particularly important is Fukushima’s claim
that Brown and Levinson’s face-saving view provides a basic politeness formula for
situational language use (Fukushima 2000:47). Fukushima’s view is that the components
of Brown and Levinson’s three variables are important when observing culture-specific
politeness forms (Fukushima 2000: 99-100). Fukushima claims that honorific use should
not concentrate only on the syntax level when examining discernment aspects of
honorific use. Fukushima’s socio-pragmatic view recognizes that “politeness is not
manifested by those obligatory linguistic choices alone” (2000: 54), because politeness
forms incorporate various dimensions (ideological, mental, cognitive, interactional, and
multi-functional dimensions).
Using the dichotomy of individualism versus collectivism as a starting point,
Fukushima (2000: 79) employs Brown and Levinson’s three variables (P, D, and R) and
argues that the previous socio-pragmatic studies rarely defined these variables in the
examination of politeness. Fukushima (2000: 85) argues, “The degree of importance of
each component may vary from culture to culture or from situation to situation.” Then
she extends these variables to culture-specific variables such as age and gender, which
seem to be predominant in Japanese culture (Fukushima 2000: 85). Fukushima’s culture-
specific viewpoint is that “the factors compounded to estimate the three variables are
certainly culture-specific” (Fukushima 2000: 99). Fukushima goes further, claiming that
people in different cultures may differ in their choice of requesting strategies. In
reviewing requesting strategies, Fukushima chooses off- record (the most indirect
differently to changes of Brown and Levinson’s three variables.
However, despite this, Fukushima’s approach contains a number of limitations.
These include her dependence on artificially controlled data such as written
questionnaires (Fukushima borrowed Blum-Kulka et al.’s CCSARP and DCT) (see
section 2.4.1). These data collection techniques are insufficient for capturing the
dynamic nature of politeness, especially interactional and value-oriented dimensions. As
Fukushima herself admits, only naturally occurring data can provide for in-depth
analysis of the kind of interactional norms she is looking to identify. Written data is
controlled, therefore Fukushima could not observe spontaneous utterances that show
how participants act and behave in normal discourse contexts (2000: 140).
Fukushima’s analytical viewpoint is static, but P, D, and R variables are more
flexible in discourse contexts than in situational ones. The pragmatic meaning exchanged
between the speaker and the hearer can be seen more clearly in local contexts (2000:
210). Fukushima restricts her data collection to written questionnaires, which prevents
her data from capturing the dynamic nature of politeness. Fukushima’s approach fails to
capture the discursive aspects of politeness in a number of ways. This can be seen in her
claim that an off-record linguistic strategy is intrinsically the most polite strategy (2000:
212). Such a statement shows a failure to recognize that the use of any politeness
strategy, including an off –record linguistic strategy, is dependent upon the speaker’s
interactional goals in the discursive context in question. Moreover, her underlying
argument that the speaker’s interpretation of P, D and R influences the speaker’s
selection of politeness forms is indicative of the same oversight (Fukushima 2000: 56,
99; Eelen 2001: 255). In this study’s data, the speaker’s utilization of surrounding
scope of roles and obligations) are motivated by his/her own interests.
Also of note is that the ‘R’ variable is determined by factors that are within the
speakers’ control, such as, control of the magnitude of the FTAs through the use of
honorific devices, mitigation of the imposition to the hearer by deliberately flouting the
normal honorific use, use of culturally shared values and variation in the magnitude of R
that is natural and inherent as the sequential flow of utterances continue. When all these
facts are taken into consideration, it can be seen that Fukushima’s empirical research
cannot capture argumentative and evaluative aspects of politeness, because her culture-
specific level does not see that socio-cultural phenomena have already been crystallized
in conventionalized honorific usages (Pizziconi, 2006: 683). Because she is only
concerned with P, D, and R, Fukushima’s negative and positive politeness view is limited.
Moreover, Fukushima’s negative politeness is associated with social distance, whilst
positive politeness is associated with familiarity. Fukushima’s misunderstanding is that
the speaker’s choice of highly deferential honorific forms (negative politeness strategies)
can threaten the hearer’s positive face.
Fukushima’s distance –closeness parameters are only concerned with social
conventions (discernment) and not with the speaker’s intentional manipulation of
interactional behavior (2000: 87). Regarding the R variable, she does not observe the fact
that a single act6 in a local context displays individual variability rather than simply
conforming to socially appropriate politeness/impoliteness (2000: 90). Whether the
expression is polite or not depend heavily on the local norms, but on a discursive level, it
also depends on the local conditions (2000: 90).
6
Fukushima is essentially correct in her view that acknowledging rank differences
(discernment) can be associated with positive face wants. It seems reasonable to assume
that speakers can feel that their positive face is being threatened when such norms are
not adhered to and that this threat may increase for those of higher institutional status.
However, Fukushima’s view of positive face fails to see the other side of the coin. In
other words, speakers can strategically violate social norms in order to threaten the
hearer’s positive face. Because Fukushima does not employ longer stretches of spoken
data, she cannot see that the most direct linguistic strategies can be perceived as polite in
a particular discursive context.
Another point worth noting is that in an institutional context, positive politeness can
be strategically used to support negative face want. Positive politeness is essentially
required, because institutional talk inherently involves constraints that might cause face
conflicts. Examples include hierarchical power relationships between participants.
Conflicts often occur in the conflict between formal roles and obligations on the one
hand, and personal requests on the other. There are also struggles inherent in power
relationships. In Korea, Confucian thinking, combined with positive politeness strategies
can mitigate any FTAs embedded in negative linguistic forms (Fukushima 2000: 87,
197) (see Chapter 4). For example, although a super-ordinate’s request may greatly
impose on a subordinate’s face, Korean cultural values which focus on mutuality and
warmth within hierarchical power relationships strongly influence the hearer’s
acceptance or denial of the request (see Wierzbicka 2003: 194; see also Chapter 5).
In the naturally occurring data collected here, discernment (understood as
‘pwunpyelseng’ in Korean) acts as a pragmatic indicator rather than a social indexing
that a speaker’s strategic intention can be directly linked to semantic connotations.
Because Confucian vales are inherent in the lexical meaning of honorific devices, lexical
components cannot be sufficiently interpreted without referring to the value oriented
nature of honorific forms (Eelen 2001: 251). Because of this, studies of functional
language use need to integrate the notion of politeness with culture-specific values,
thereby encompassing a more advanced socio-pragmatic approach. Fukushima’s notion
of functional politeness is too limited framework for the speaker’s rational evaluation
accounts for a large array of social linguistic behavior, but lacks any analysis of the
wider social order (Eelen 2001: 251).