Agressieve Beleefdheid volgens B&L

 Brown and Levinson

reden voor politeness: the problem for any social group is to control its internal aggression while retaining the potential for aggression both in internal social control and, especially, in external competitive relations with other groups. (preface, B&L 1987)

politeness [..] presupposes that potential for aggression as it seeks to disarm it, and makes possible communication between potentially aggressive parties. (ibidem)

Goffman calles this virtual offence

Politeness is a precise semiotics of peaceful versus aggressive intentions.

Via face

Three main strategies of politeness: positive politeness (roughly, the expression of solidarity), negative politeness (roughly, the expression of restraint) and off record (roughly, the avoicance of unequivocal impositions)

Het gebruik is bepaald door de relationship between speaker and addressee and the potential offfensiveness of the message content.

nemen afstand van Geoffrey Leech (1983)

Politeness has to communicated, and the absence of communicated politeness may, certis paribus, be taken as absence of the polite attitude. (p. 5)

The mutual awareness of 'face' sensitivity, [..] allows the inference of implicatures of politeness (ibidem, p. 5)

a communicative act is done off record if it is done in such a way that it is not possible to attribute only once clear communicative intention to the act. In other words, the actor leaves himesl an 'out'by providing himself with a number of defensible interpretations; he cannot be held to have commited himself to just one particular interpretation of his act. Thus if a speaker want to do an FTA, but wants to avoid the responisbility for doing it, he can do it off record and leave it up to the addressee to decide ow to interpret it.(p. 211)

[For indirect speech acts] what is involved is a two-stage process:

- a trigger serves notice to the addressee that some inference must be made

- some mode of inference derives what is meant (intended) from what is actually said, this last providing a sufficient clue for the inference

B&L over off record strategies (alle stijlfiguren): are very often actualle on record when used, because the clues to their interpretation (the mutual knowledge of S and H in the context; the intonational, prosodic and kinesic clues to speaker's attitdue; the clues derived from conversational sequencing) add up to only one really viable interpretaiton in the context. 

Goffman's concept of the virtual offence', which predicts that the non-communication of the polite attitude will be read not merely as the absence of that attitude, but as the inverse, the holding of an aggressive attitude. p. 33

Als dit klopt, dan is agressieve beleefdheid, of overbeleefdheid, geen vorm van beleefdheid, want niet beide partners zijn bewust van de beleefde intentie, die is er ook niet (of maar minimaal), maar van sarcasme. Want als de ontvanger weet dat de beleefdheid niet gemeend is, maar tot doel heeft de ander op zijn plaats te zetten (jij bent minder, ik zet je op afstand, jij weet niet hoe het hoort, dus essentieel positief gezicht bedreigt), dan is het off record, maar niet met de bedoeling om opgemerkt te worden, of juist het beleefde dient opgemerkt te worden, want zal niet ontkend worden, maar de agressieve intentie zal ontkend worden. Precies andersom? (in plaats van vragen naar de appropriateness van de taalhandeling als conventionele handeling, nu vragen naar de ervaring van beleefdheid?)