Dutch Directness and British Politeness: A comparison on directness and politeness in Dutch and British contexts

Abstract

Politeness is important in social interactions. Politeness takes form through language. A specific phrasing of a speech act can have a certain effect on one’s goal. The term politeness in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory is explained in terms of taking care of the face. In interaction, face-threatening acts or FTAs, speech acts that threaten or damage someone’s face, can occur. The damage of a face-threatening act can be limited with the used of politeness strategies. There are five politeness strategies: 1) bald on record, 2) positive politeness, 3) negative politeness, 4) off record, and 5) do not perform. This culture-comparative research examines the use of politeness strategies when performing face-threatening acts in British English and Dutch. The research question is: How are face-threatening acts done by speakers of Dutch and speakers of British English? The current research will look at differences and similarities in politeness in British English and Dutch to examine the stereotype of the “direct Dutch” and the “polite Brit”. It will demonstrate how to conduct non-essentialist culture-comparative research. This research uses a mixed method with a discourse completion task, which are used to do a contrastive discourse analysis of face-threatening of British English and Dutch speakers. The participants are given five discourse situations where they have to perform a face-threatening act. The participants’ responses are coded and categorised one of the five politeness strategies. The responses of the Dutch speaking participants and the British English speaking participants are analysed and compared. The results indicate that in general Dutch speakers and British speakers show a preference of using negative politeness strategies when doing a face-threatening act. Overall a significant difference in politeness strategies between the Dutch and the British group was found.