Cultural Systems 2: Face and Politeness

Sawatdi krap~!

In today’s seminar, we learnt about politeness in terms of linguistic expressions rather than actions. I believe this week’s seminar content is extremely useful in our daily interactions with people as a mean to establish and maintain positive relationships. In these interactions with the people around us, what you say and how you express your intentions is an “art”, as I would call it, to achieve your goals and to avoid misunderstanding.

Personally I use the Approbation and Modesty Maxim mainly when I speak to most people around me. For example, some friends are upset about certain matters and talk to me about it. I'll be using the Approbation Maxim and say things like "You are just different and so don't let that affect you" or "You are merely trying something new which is good!", depending on what the situation calls for. I think these Maxims are certainly very useful in analysing how others are speaking to you and how a conversation should be carried out.

And then, there's the Negative and Positive Politeness Strategies. I find myself using these two strategies often at times! Like for example, when I’m asking my usual group of friends out for dinner and when one of them says that he/she is not free, I'll be using the positive politeness strategy and try my best to tell the person who's going, where we are heading to, how long have we not met up etc to try and persuade the person to come. As for Negative Politeness Strategy, I do use them when I meet up with people who I am still not very close to or I’m trying to ask for help from people I’m not familiar with, feeling afraid that I might impose too much on him/her.

But in the context of Singapore, when you see no one give up their seats to a pregnant lady on buses or train, would you go up and help the pregnant lady to ask for a seat? How would you ask politely? I’m sure most would say that they would help, but how many have u seen so far? At least till now I didn’t see anyone doing there yet, mostly people would just pretend to be sleeping or busy doing other things. To become a more gracious society, there is still much more for us to work on. So I thought, politeness comes hand in hand with not only the actions and the use of words, but it definitely means much more when it comes from the bottom of your heart.