clew's reviews: a book log

Politeness, Richard J. Watts

This isn't really a book review; other work has swamped me, so I'm returning Politeness to the library and leaving myself this placeholder.

But I did run across something that should be extra entertaining for female, Japanese-speaking, algorithmically minded persons, who are richly represented among my few known readers. This is George and Robin Lakoff's work on pragmatic, polite, linguistic competence, which Watts represents in a nice clear tree diagram:

Pragmatic Competence (PC)

• Rules of politeness
  • Be clear
    • Quantity; be exactly as informative as required
    • Quality; only say what you believe to be true
    • Relevance; be relevant
    • Manner; be perspicuous, not ambiguous, succinct, not obscure.
  • Be polite
    • Don't impose
    • Give options
    • Make the other feel good - be friendly

It's so nice to see the layout of the rules we pretend to be following, in English-speaking computer companies, anyhow. Since the rules can't all be followed in a conversation with an antagonist, it's like living in a city with laws against having dust on your shoes: if the powers want to hassle you, they're guaranteed an excuse.

Obviously being Relevant and Truthful often collides with Don't Impose, especially in a civic world of colliding interests; then one might turn to George Lakoff's recent work on framing political differences, or Robin Tolmach Lakoff's The Language War.

ISBN: 0521794064

So wrote clew in Philosophy. | TrackBack