POLITENESS, RELEVANCE, AND GOAL-CONCILIATION: AN ANALYSIS OF “CAN YOU PASS THE SALT?”

Abstract Based on Rauen’s goal-conciliation theory, Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, and Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, we model in this essay the utterance “Can you pass the salt?”-taken as a classic example of a polite request between politeness theorists-assuming the mobilization of a polite or attenuated speech act contributes to the accomplishment of practical goals. Next, we discuss the modeling considering some criticisms produced by second-wave politeness studies and politeness relevance-theoretic studies. We conclude that politeness aspects are part of intentional action plans, affecting the design of the lowest level practical goal superordinating the respective informative and communicative subgoals. We claim the speaker defines-in the scope of that lower-level practical goal-the speech-act, the politeness super-strategy, and the formulation of the polite utterance considering a palette of linguistic possibilities.

本文基于 Rauen 的目标协调理论、Sperber 和 Wilson 的关联理论，以及 Brown 和 Levinson 的礼貌理论，对‘你能给我递一下盐吗？’这一在礼貌理论家眼中视为礼貌请求的经典例句进行建模。我们假设，动员礼貌或缓和的言语行为有助于实现实际目标。随后，我们讨论了在第二波礼貌研究和礼貌关联理论研究中产生的批评，对建模过程进行了探讨。我们得出结论，礼貌因素是意图性行动计划的一部分，影响着高于各自信息和交际子目标的最基本实践目标的设计。我们主张，说话者在该低级实践目标范围内定义言语行为、礼貌超策略以及考虑语言可能性范畴的礼貌话语的表述。