Politeness in modern Vietnamese, a sociolinguistic study of a Hanoi speech community

grantor: University of TorontoThe purpose is to provide a description of native politeness conceptions of Hanoi speakers, and of politeness manifestations in their directives. The thesis seeks to gain insights into some issues of contention in the existing theories of politeness, namely, politeness functions, its realizations in languages, and the roles of socio-situational parameters in polite behaviour. The thesis adopts a synthetic framework, based on a critical acceptance of the two contrasting theories of politeness--the instrumental theory (Lakoff 1973, Brown & Levinson 1978, Leech 1983), and the normative theory (Matsumoto 1988, Gu 1990). The analysis draws on folk, interview, questionnaire, and natural conversation data. The analytical procedures of Speech Act Theory and Conversation Analysis, as well as statistical techniques are employed. The findings of the thesis highlight that Hanoi speakers consider politeness to be not only an individual communicative strategy, but also an observance of social norms of behaviour. These two functions manifest themselves differently in the two aspects of respectful and strategic politeness. The main politeness devices employed in directives are address terms, indirectness, and other pragmatically supportive moves. However, indirectness is not found to be the most important politeness device. It functions as a strategic politeness device rather than a respectful politeness one; and its use depends primarily on the degrees of imposition of utterances. Address terms, on the other hand, function primarily as a respectful politeness device rather than a strategic politeness one, and their use depends primarily on the speaker-hearer social relationships. The thesis suggests that respectful politeness operates with two main rules, namely respect rule and solidarity rule. Strategic politeness, on the other hand, operates with two main maxims, namely, the tact maxim for competitive directives, and the generosity maxim for convivial directives. These two aspects of politeness and their rules/maxims also have different correlations to the social and the personal sides of the face. Finally, the thesis argues that the social variations of politeness are not only the functions of the speakers' social identities and the parameters of the context, but also, and primarily, the consequences of the competition between contrasting behaviour models in native ideologies.Ph.D