Politeness Analysis

Politeness analysis is the qualitative method of examining how speakers manage face — the public self-image people claim — when they perform acts that threaten it. Anchored in Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's influential face theory, the analyst locates face-threatening acts in interaction, codes the strategy chosen to soften (or not soften) them, and relates that choice to the weight of the threat as a function of social distance, relative power, and the ranking of the imposition. The framework's enduring scheme of strategies — bald on-record, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off-record — gives politeness phenomena a systematic, comparable description.