POLITENESS AS A PRAGMATIC CATEGORY

This article highlights the theory of politeness from the perspective of pragmatic view. Politeness has become an almost international code that facilitates the interactions between people from different social and religious backgrounds. The notion of face as the public self-image plays a major role in every culture. It shapes the character of a speaker as well as how he or she is perceived by others. Therefore, the cross-cultural analysis of face is a crucial field of study in every social science. In this article, the importance of face in Politeness Theory will be discussed. It aims to show the development of the concept first defined by Goffman in 1967 to the further analysis by Brown and Levinson in 1978, which is influenced by Grice's Cooperative Principle and Austin's Speech Act Theory, as well as recent criticism and re-evaluation in post-modernism. Furthermore, the two concepts of positive and negative face will be discussed, which then leads to the devision of negative and positive politeness strategies. These negative and positive face-threatening acts are further subdivided into acts which damage the hearer's and acts which damage the speaker's face.