On the face-threat attenuating functions of Korean com: implications for internal and external dialogic processing in interaction

2.1 Previous studies on politeness phenomena

Early studies on politeness phenomena in Western societies, such as Lakoff (1973), Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987 and Leech (1983), all riding on strong rationalist and universalist views of the 1970s and 1980s (see Sifianou 2010), have provided us with analytical frameworks that have spurred investigations into whether politeness is expressed in similar ways across all languages and cultures. While Lakoff (1973) focused on identifying ‘rules of politeness’ based on linguistic form (grammar) and social function (pragmatics), Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987 turned to Goffman’s (1955, 1967 notion of face-work and introduced the concepts of positive face and negative face. Positive face is defined as one’s desire that his/her wants be approved by others, while negative face is defined in terms of one’s desire that his/her action be unimpeded by others. Acts that run contrary to these desires are seen to be face-threatening, prompting much of Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987 focus on ‘politeness strategies’ that help mitigate potential face-threats.

According to Brown and Levinson (1987), the seriousness of a face-threat is affected by three major social variables, namely, the social distance (i.e. degree of familiarity) between the speaker and the hearer, the relative power (i.e. social status) of the speaker viz-a-viz the hearer, and the weight of imposition of the speech act upon the hearer. Whereas Lakoff (1973) focused on ‘politeness rules’ and Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987 on ‘politeness strategies’, Leech (1983) focused on ‘politeness principles’ and ‘politeness maxims’, the latter comprising of pithy statements that capture general rules of conduct related to tact, generosity, approbation, modesty, agreement and sympathy. Such rules of conduct are more succinct manifestations of his more general principle that one should minimize expressions of impoliteness while maximizing expressions of politeness in order to achieve social harmony.

Despite differences in their approach, there are considerable overlaps between the ‘rules’, ‘strategies’ and ‘principles and maxims’ in these three frameworks. As such, in research on politeness phenomena we often interweave the insights from all three approaches. This pertains to our present study on Korean face-threat mitigator com, which will become evident as we make reference to Brown and Levinson’s positive and negative politeness strategies and Leech’s approbation, tact, modesty and agreement maxims (see Section 4).

Although they have been highly influential in promoting studies on politeness phenomena across languages and cultures, the early approaches introduced by Lakoff, Leech, and especially Brown and Levinson have also been met with a number of criticisms. Among the criticisms is their over-extended, near-universalist claims that have largely focused on individualistic as opposed to collectivist cultures, hence the debate on individual face versus social group face (e.g. Matsumoto 1988, 1989; Gu 1990; Nwoye 1992; Mao 1994; Byon 2006). Questions have also been raised over whether negative face exists as part of the politeness system in all cultures, with counter-examples noted in oriental collectivist cultures such as Japan and China (e.g. Matsumoto 1988, 1989; Gu 1990, respectively). In more recent work, Sifianou (2010: 26) has noted that, barring English-speaking societies, evidence points to a “primarily positive politeness orientation” across many cultures, including western, eastern and Mediterranean ones. As will be shown in this study, however, in Korean there is evidence that face-threat mitigators such as com can serve both positive and negative politeness functions (see Section 4).

Subsequent studies have also criticized Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987 for their disproportionate focus on conflict-avoidance (Kasper 1990; see also Ide 1989, 1990) and on face-threats to the hearer, largely ignoring face-threats to the speaker (Sifianou 2010). More recent studies have begun to redress this shortcoming by advocating an interpersonal pragmatic perspective to politeness studies (Arundale 2005, 2006, 2009; Bargiela-Chiappini 2003; Locher and Watts 2005; O’Driscoll 2007; Terkourafi 2007; Watts 2003). It is against this backdrop that our present study adopts an interactional linguistic analysis along the lines of Du Bois’ (2007) ‘stance triangle’ framework, with additional insights from Linell (2009) and Iwasaki (this issue), in our investigation of how Korean com is deployed as a face-threat mitigating device in disaffiliative contexts.

2.2 Beyond Du Bois’ (2007) stance triangle

Du Bois (2007) proposes a conceptual framework that analyzes how stance operates in the context of conversational interaction, and he identifies three key components of stance, namely, evaluation, positioning and alignment. According to Du Bois, a ‘stance activity’ (or ‘assessment activity’, see Goodwin and Goodwin 1992) is viewed as a single unified act comprising: (i) the ‘evaluation’ action that assigns value to the target of stance, i.e. the stance object; (ii) the ‘positioning’ action that orients stancetakers (=stance subjects) with respect to the stance object; and (iii) the ‘alignment’ action that links the initial stance taker, i.e. stance subject 1 (SS1), and the recipient/respondent, i.e. stance subject 2 (SS2). Incorporating these components of stance, Du Bois (2007) proposes the “stance triangle” as a model of stancetaking as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1:

The stance triangle (Du Bois 2007: 163).

In Du Bois’ stance triangle, two evaluative vectors project from the stancetakers (SS1 and SS2) to the stance object, while a third vector links the two stancetakers to represent their stance relations (i.e. their alignment or disalignment to each other in terms of their respective evaluations of the stance object). The resulting stance triangle thus illustrates that when speakers take a stance, they simultaneously evaluate the stance object and position themselves in relation to it, and at the same time also align themselves with other stance subjects (Du Bois 2007: 163). The alignment could vary from affiliative to disaffiliative (Stivers et al. 2011), and could even be detached or non-committal (see D. Lee, this issue). Adopting the first-person point of view of the stancetaker, Du Bois (2007: 163) summarizes the definition of the stance act as follows: I evaluate something, and thereby position myself, and thereby align with you.

By examining details of ‘stance activities’ in interaction, Iwasaki (this issue) highlights that the stance triangle is never static but evolves dynamically in the course of interaction, with stancetakers often adjusting their footing towards the stance object and their alignments toward each other. This means that the vectors of the stance triangle disassemble and reassemble to form new triangles as stancetakers negotiate their views and manage their relationships with each other. Expanding on the sequential and dialogical analyses found in Du Bois’ (2007) stance triangle framework, Iwasaki proposes that attention should also be given to the ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ layers in the stance triangle if we are to understand details of the triangle in motion. Iwasaki (this issue) highlights that the interior layer is the space where private evaluative subjectivity is registered and processed while the exterior layer is the space where actual verbal (and non-verbal) signs are displayed and negotiated. As noted by Linell (2009), when interacting with others, speakers do not always reveal their inner thoughts and feelings; often, they modulate what is verbally expressed. In Linell’s words (2009: 74), “there is evidently silent thinking going on as well, an internal dialogue accompanying external dialogue.”

This notion that ‘an internal dialogue accompanies external dialogue’ (Linell 2009: 123) is well illustrated in the stance acts of Korean mitigator com. Consider, for example, the following scenario. SS1 is thinking ‘the man is suspicious’ in her interior dialogic space but she utters ku namcan com uysimsulewe ‘the man is sort of suspicious’ in the exterior dialogic space. In other words, SS1 evaluates the stance object the man, and takes a negative stance toward him, but SS1 does not disclose her evaluation as it is. Rather, SS1 employs com ‘sort of’ as a mitigator in order to convey her thought in a less assertive way. This is because when she takes a stance, sociocultural values, reframed as politeness considerations similar to those articulated in Leech’s (1983) Approbation Maxim (‘Minimize dispraise of other’), comes into play and constrains her utterance.^[1] Her use of com indicates that she is aware that once her evaluation about the stance object is verbalized, it may cause some loss of face for herself for violating politeness norms in her culture and/or it may invite disagreement or disalignment from SS2. This awareness prompts SS1 not to disclose in her verbal utterance (i.e. outer dialogic space) what she has in mind in her interior dialogic space. In other words, by using com, SS1 positions herself obliquely in order to mitigate a potential face threat.

To explain the stance activity in interaction where com and other mitigation devices are frequently employed, we expand the definition of the stance act proposed by Du Bois (2007) as follows: I evaluate something, and may sometimes position myself obliquely (to avoid or mitigate face-threats), and thereby align with you.

In Section 4, using naturally occurring spoken data from the Sejong Spoken Corpus, we will show how the expanded definition of the stance act above can be applied in real conversations. More specifically, we will discuss how com helps to attenuate face-threats in two separate contexts, namely, when speakers deliberately wish not to assert their utterances in potentially disaffilitative stance acts and when speakers seek to present their negative evaluations with a sense of detachment. These two cases are manifestations of interlocutors’ efforts to establish and maintain solidarity with each other.

4.1 Presenting negative evaluations with a sense of detachment

In this section, we will discuss how pragmatic marker com can be used as a detachment device to hedge the speaker’s negative evaluation. As can be seen in (2), Speaker A and Speaker B, co-workers in the same company, are having a conversation about Speaker B’s preparation for her wedding. Speaker B is revealing to Speaker A the difficulty she encountered while preparing for her wedding because her boss did not allow her to take a few days off, but instead even made her work the day before her wedding. Upon hearing that, Speaker A criticizes the boss for her lack of consideration (line 06).^[2]

Viewed from the perspective of Du Bois’ (2007) stance triangle, Speaker A is expressing a negative stance toward the stance object, the boss (line 06), and in doing so, Speaker A is aligning herself with Speaker B, who in the preceding utterance has implied that their boss had been unreasonable (lines 02 to 05). Hearing Speaker A’s explicit criticism of the boss, Speaker B herself begins to engage in some negative evaluation of the boss as well. She remarks that the boss is wenlay chan-palam ssayngssayng to-nun suthail ‘naturally cold’ and not someone easy to talk to (line 07), despite her already having two kids of her own (line 08), implying that the boss should be more understanding but is not. The additional information that the boss already has two kids of her own comes as a surprise to Speaker A and intensifies her negative evaluation toward the boss, as can be seen from her confirmation-seeking question with mirative reading kuntey kulay? ‘Well, is she really like that?!’ (line 09). Speaker B then hedges her subsequent evaluation using the expression com kulay:: ‘(She’s) a bit like that::’ (line 10). Vocalic lengthening on the last word kulay:: indicates a slight tentativeness on Speaker B’s part, which complements the mitigating function of com.

Both strategies signal that Speaker B is now distancing herself from her earlier negative assessment of the boss, which is consistent with Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987 negative politeness strategy. This allows Speaker B to attenuate the threat to her face after having complained about her boss’ lack of consideration in not giving her time off from work to prepare for her wedding. In so doing, Speaker B is acting consistently with the sociocultural value (‘one should not talk behind someone’s back’), reframed as politeness norms in her culture that also resonates with Leech’s (1983) Approbation Maxim (‘Minimize dispraise of other’) and Tact Maxim (‘Minimize cost to other’). In addition, because com functions as a distancing and hedging device, the tentativeness of the evaluation also serves to downgrade the face-damage to the absent third party, in this case the boss. Crucially for our present study, we see Speaker B adjusting her footing, using com kulay, from strong to weak assertion. As Iwasaki (this issue) states, degrees of evaluation can change over a stretch of turns to reflect the cumulative and evolving knowledge and attitudinal states. Speaker B’s slightly modified, mitigated criticism (com kulay:: ‘She’s a bit like that::’) comes across as less incredulous to Speaker A.

As can be seen in (3) below, com can also be used to suspend a clause such that the speaker can implicitly express his negative evaluation without completing his utterance. In this stance act, Speaker A (=SS1), Speaker B (=SS2) and Speaker C (=SS3), all of whom are male college students in their 20s, are evaluating a shared stance object, namely, Cinyeng, a female college-mate who left the students club due to conflict with other members. Speaker B tries not to explicitly convey his negative evaluation about Cinyeng by producing the face-threat attenuator com without further verbalizing the details of his negative evaluation. In so doing, Speaker B indirectly invites the other interlocutors to figure out the content of his internal thought.

In the stance act in excerpt (3) above, when Speaker B seeks to disclose his internal evaluation which is rather negative toward Cinyeng (the stance object), sociocultural values such as ‘one should not talk behind someone’s back’ are yet again mobilized and deployed (as in the case of (2) above), and Speaker B chooses not to deliver his negative evaluation verbally (line 05). Instead he suspends his comment with utterance-final com, which allows him to position himself distantly from his unuttered but implied negative evaluation. In so doing, Speaker B manages to protect to an extent the face of Cinyeng (who is the absent stance object), as well as his own face as he stops short of verbalizing a negative remark about a friend. As noted in Iwasaki (this issue), social norms often include the adage that when one denigrates others, it says more about oneself than about the denigrated other. Viewed from the perspective of Linell’s (2009) internal and external dialogical processes and Du Bois’ stance triangle framework, and further within Iwasaki’s evolving stance triangle analysis, Speaker B is negotiating his footing and his relationship with his interlocutors as well as an absent other (i.e. his friend Cinyeng) by using utterance-final com to convey an unuttered negative evaluation in an implicit and detached manner. This resonates with Brown and Levinson’s (1987) negative politeness strategy that helps reduce his responsibility for a face-threatening act.

In this section, we have discussed how pragmatic marker com can be used as a detachment device to hedge speakers’ negative evaluation. Consistent with the sociocultural value that one should not talk behind someone’s back (see also Leech’s (1983) Approbation Maxim and Tact Maxim), speakers often choose to convey their negative evaluation implicitly. Since com functions as a hedging device, its tentativeness helps to attenuate potential face threats to both speaker and others.

4.2 Toning down the speaker’s assertion

Speakers can also use the pragmatic marker com to tone down their assertions when engaging in dispreferred acts such as mock-boasting. In (4), three close friends (Speakers A, B and C) who go to the same college are talking about their daily lives before their class begins. They have not seen each other for a few days due to an extended weekend holiday, and Speaker A notices that Speaker C now looks more radiant after resting a few days. Speaker A initiates a topic about Speaker C’s complexion, which then becomes the stance object being evaluated by all three discourse participants.

Speaker A takes a positive stance as she comments on Speaker C’s face becoming radiant after a few days of rest (line 01). Speaker B agrees with Speaker A’s positive evaluation, uttering the affirmative particle e ‘yes’ (line 02). While Speaker A is realigning with Speaker B as she utters kuci ‘It is so’ (line 03), she at the same time turns to Speaker C and tries to align with her, using e? as a confirmation-seeking particle, equivalent to the English tag question ‘right?’ or ‘isn’t it?’ (also line 03). However, Speaker C indirectly expresses her disalignment with Speaker A by uttering mwelakwu? ‘What?’ (line 04), which is interpretable as her attempt to express modesty rather than a genuine expression of puzzlement. Speaker B, on the other hand, seeks to further align with Speaker A by adding her assessment that Speaker C’s face looks better because she has eaten well and has been relaxing (lines 05 and 07). Speaker C avoids a direct response with laughter (line 08).

Failing to elicit a verbal uptake from Speaker C, Speaker A continues to compliment Speaker C, remarking again that her face is pposyasya ‘radiant’, once again making the skin tone of Speaker C’s face the stance object (line 09). However, Speaker C still chooses not to align with Speaker A’s evaluation, opting instead for a deprecative stance toward the stance object, her own face, uttering modestly that make-up does not blend well into her skin (line 11). Here, consistent with the sociocultural value (‘one should be modest’) similar to Leech’s (1983) Modesty Maxim (‘Minimize praise to self’), Speaker C positions herself in a manner that avoids taking a positive stance toward her own face. Speaker C’s act of taking a deprecative stance toward the stance object (her face) and disaligning with other interlocutors (Speakers A and B) is more acceptable and desirable in light of politeness norms. In response, Speaker B interjects with ayu! ‘Oh no!’ as a playful expression of disbelief (line 12). This prompts Speaker C to change her negative stance into a positive one, and she sportingly joins in the fun and playfully jests by coyly uttering wenlay com ippu-canha ‘I’m a bit of a natural beauty, you know’ (line 13), before bursting into laughter (line 14).

In this stance act, mindful of the need to be modest, Speaker C makes use of the face-threat mitigator com as she jokingly engages in an act of mock-vanity. Her move to sportingly engage in self-teasing allows her to maintain solidarity with her friends (Speakers A and B). This move resonates well with Brown and Levinson’s positive politeness strategy. As a mitigator, com helps to attenuate possible self-induced face loss that may arise from Speaker A’s seemingly boastful stance (line 13) and allows her to finally accept the earlier compliments from her friends in an indirect but playful manner.

In the next excerpt (5), two close friends in their 20s, Speaker A (female) and Speaker B (male), are having a conversation about their family. Upon hearing that Speaker A’s father does all the housework including preparing a meal for her, Speaker B reprimands Speaker A for not helping her father. This reprimand, however, takes the form of playful banter, as can be seen in the laughter of both interlocutors (indicated by the symbol <@@>) in lines 04 to 06. Both Speaker A (=SS1) and Speaker B (=SS2) then proceed to converse about what Speaker A’s father thinks of her (see lines 08 and 09), departing from the preceding topic about Speaker A’s father’s behavior (lines 01–07).

In the above excerpt, although the two speakers each adopt a divergent stance, they skillfully safeguard their friendship through banter and with the help of the face-threat mitigator com. As seen in line 08, Speaker A uses com to playfully attenuate what otherwise would have come across as unabashed boasting. Because of the presence of com, Speaker B’s retort in line 09 comes across as mock-disaffiliation rather than an acerbic rebuke.

Viewed from a cognitive processing perspective (cf. Linell 2009), in line 08, Speaker A could be thinking (in her interior dialogic space) that although she does not help her father, he still adores her. Nevertheless, she hedges and uses com (in her exterior dialogic space) to produce the mitigated utterance wuli appaka nal com yeyppehay ‘My dad sort of adores me’. Here, when Speaker A takes a positive stance toward herself as the stance object, sociocultural values such as ‘one should be modest’ are mobilized. These sociocultural values, reframed as politeness norms, similar to Leech’s (1983) Modesty Maxim (‘Minimize praise of self’), prompt Speaker A not to display her evaluation in an assertive way. In other words, if Speaker A were to outwardly express her evaluation (‘My father adores me’) without any mitigation, she would be violating the modesty maxim, since she would be unabashedly boasting about her father’s affection for her. Crucially, however, Speaker A modulates her evaluation (in her interior dialogic space) and positions herself with the help of a com-mitigated expression (in her exterior dialogic space).

Speaker A could also be anticipating that if she were to verbalize her evaluation about her father’s doting attitude toward her (that is, her belief that her father adores her), it may trigger Speaker B’s disagreement, thus she employs com as a mitigator in order to convey her thought in a less assertive way and thereby avoid potential disagreement with Speaker B. This would be consistent with Leech’s (1983) Agreement Maxim (‘Minimize disagreement between self and other’), and it also resonates well with Brown and Levinson’s (1987) positive politeness strategy to engage affiliatively and non-face-threateningly with others. In response to Speaker A’s face-saving efforts, Speaker B playfully retorts, ‘You are not adored but you are like a nuisance’ (line 09), creating a mock-disaffiliation between them. In other words, there is a semblance of disalignment but no actual disaffiliation between these two close friends. As noted in previous literature (see, for example, Sifianou 2010; Haugh and Bousfield 2012), such mock-disaffiliative responses, comprising impolite talk and violation of politeness maxims, are often seen as a marker of in-group identity and solidarity. In the context of this playful banter between the two close friends, com has been successfully deployed by Speaker A to avert a potential face-threat to herself and at the same time also avert a disalignment with her friend, Speaker B.

In sum, we see that the act of taking a stance invokes an evaluation, in the process of which sociocultural values are mobilized and deployed. The sociocultural values are reframed as politeness norms in one’s culture, often similar to those articulated in Leech’s (1983) Approbation Maxim and Tact Maxim as in (1) and (2), Modesty Maxim as in (3) and (4), and Agreement Maxim as in (4). These politeness considerations prompt the speakers to employ com to mitigate responsibility for socially dispreferred moves and to attenuate potential face loss for both themselves and others. In other words, when engaging in (potentially) disaffiliative stance acts, the speakers often use face-threat mitigators such as com to position themselves obliquely from their disaffiliative stance, and in this way help to establish or maintain a positive relationship (i.e. solidarity alignment) with their addressee (and sometimes also absent others that are the object of evaluation). The speakers adjust their footing to the stance object and their alignment with each other in the course of interaction; as such, the stance triangle is never static but is instead in constant dynamic motion (see Iwasaki, this issue).