POLITENESS THEORY

Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, two linguists that worked together on frameworks, came up with a theory that combines differing politeness strategies. The strategies they distinguish between are:

*Negative politeness strategies - strategies that are performed to avoid offense through deference.

*Positive politeness strategies - strategies that are performed to avoid offense by emphasising friendliness. 

'Face' is a term coined by sociologist Erving Goffman. In relation to the politness theory, face describes the wish of every member of a community to guard his or her face from possible damage through social interferences. There are two types of politeness 'faces':

*Negative face - the wish to be unimpeded by others in one's actions.

*Positive face - the wish/desire to gain approval of others.

Example:
Person A is reading quietly on a train and person B next to them turns their music on their phone up so much that person A can hear it and is unable to concentrate. Saying something is likely to threaten B's face needs so A as the following choices:
*Threaten face by directly addressing the problem and not caring about what B's reaction may be - 'Turn that music down!'
*Go for a positive politeness strategy that satisfies B's positive face needs. This could be a compliment for example - 'I love that album, it's great isn't it...'
*Use a different negative politeness strategy that will address B's negative face needs. For example, A could apologise before speaking then make the request. - 'Sorry to be a pain but... Could you just turn that down a little bit?'
*Or A could use an indirect request that infers what they want without being explicit, therefore minimising any threat to face. - 'This is an amazing book I'm reading at the minute'