Following the broad framework of Brown and Levinson’s model, Pizziconi (2003:
1472-1473) claims that the principles regulating politeness in the Japanese language are
not inconsistent with the notion of face. Similar to Fukushima, Pizziconi (2003: 1473,
1498) presents an approach to politeness that combines both negative and positive
politeness as well as discernment and volition aspects. Pizziconi follows Fukushima’s
argument that negative and positive politeness is intertwined and cannot be separated
from each other.As Pizziconi puts it, “negative strategies are eventually subsumed under
positive strategies” (2003: 1498). The want to be recognized from others can be directly
linked to the speaker’s wish to maintain and/or raise his/her status.
Pizziconi also follows Fukushima in acknowledging that social indexing forms are
used not only to acknowledge absolute social norms, but also as strategic tools for
expressing individual stances vis-à-vis the mitigation of FTAs (2003: 1474, 1496).
discernment can be used as a means of maintaining the face of both speaker and hearer
(2000: 58-59). However, Pizziconi’s functional approach is more comprehensive than
Fukushima’s, because her socio-pragmatic approach associates contextual conditions
with the discursive level. Starting withIkuta’s discursive position, Pizziconi (2003: 1488,
1490) associates contextual variables with discursive level interaction, arguing that style
shifting is one of the functions that help to prevent FTAs. However, Fukushima’s
functional approach is only concerned with the lexical level analysis and only uses
written questionnaires.
Unlike Fukushima, Pizziconi’s framework is concerned with contextual norms in
relation to cultures, and uses the speakers’ evaluation of their own utterances (Pizziconi
2003: 1490). The result is a functional approach that is very different from Fukushima’s,
because the former takes a more discursive stance. An initial example of this is
Pizziconi’s analysis of how identical propositional contents can produce different
interpretations of politeness according to the relevant situational features. Moreover,
Pizziconi also explores how linguistic choices become more complex when current
communicative goals conflict with the corresponding interactional goal (2003: 1494).
When this happens, discernment and volition are integrated into linguistic devices in
order to maintain face (2003: 1494).
In contrast, Fukushima (2000: 87) is concerned with discernment but not with the
speaker’s volition in the use of controlling linguistic strategies. Pizziconi goes a step
farther explaining that discernment cannot always be associated with P and D. According
to Pizziconi, the use of a strategic device is the result of using discernment in a particular
context (2003: 1495). Also, indexed rank differences (discernment) can be combined
1494-1496). On the other hand, Fukushima only associates discernment with social
norms. For Pizziconi, polite behavior is subject to the speaker’s subjective stance
(Pizziconi says that the “speaker’s parameter that is the result of the speaker’s own
experience of socialization”) (2003: 1496) and this is what makes her study so dynamic
and comprehensive.
The crucial difference between Fukushima and Pizziconi is that the latter views
linguistic behavior as contextually variable and dependent upon the speaker’s own
subjective evaluations.However, the former sees linguistic behavior as merely
conforming to social indexing rules. For example, Fukushima deems off -record
utterances to be merely conventional indirect requests (2000: 90). Moreover,
Fukushima’s situational assessment includes only P, D and R, whilst Pizziconi (2003:
1493) links these three variables to individual variability in a wider social world (e.g. the
socio-cultural dimension and discursive interaction) (2003: 1493). Fukushima’s
analytical framework is only concerned with dualistic relationships (e.g. individualism
vs. collectivism) (2000: 126). According to Fukushima (2000: 58) positive politeness is
limited to acknowledging social relationships. Fukushima neglects to distinguish the
interactional dimensions closely interconnected with meta-discourse. In contrast,
Pizziconi stresses the speaker’s subjective, contextual stances rather than only looking at
conventionally appropriate language use (2003: 1496).
Nonetheless, it is quite unfortunate that Pizziconi does not elaborate on functional
politeness because of a lack of longer stretches of actual spoken data. Because of this
lapse, her analysis is limited and she is unable to further elaborate on culture-specific
discursive strategies in the construction of polite behavior and also unable to include
an FTA (2003: 1473). Moreover, though Pizziconi’s notion of strategic politeness (2003:
1494) argues that verbal strategies become strategic when a speaker’s meaning conflicts
with the locally specific interactional goals, she does not demonstrate how the
conflicting contextual features lead to the production of strategic politeness nor does she
illustrate how positive politeness can be created from within locally specific contextual
discourse (2003: 1473). Lastly, the lack of longer stretches of spoken data means that
despite her claims that discernment and volition are not separate, she does not explore
the intersection of these two aspects (2003: 1495).
My notion of strategic politeness is more functional than Pizziconi’s and
Fukushima’s. It encompasses all kinds of interactional dimensions (including shared
cultural values) and explores the relationships between the speaker’s intentions, strategic
use of language and interactional norms. Additionally, the data for this is derived from
longer stretches of natural language data. Based on this, it is clear that the local level
discursive goal is the speaker’s major concern. It strongly influences the use of
discernment in the choice of appropriate linguistic forms (Pizziconi 2003: 1489). Also
clear is the fact that discernment and volition are simultaneously used as a means of
achieving strategic linguistic goals.