イギリス文化とポライトネス
Sara Mills, English Politeness and Class (2017)
Sara MillsのEnglish Politeness and Class (2017)では、イギリス文化におけるポライトネスのあり方がさまざまな形で紹介されています。ややステレオタイプになっているものも多いですが、文化とポライトネスの関係を考えるきっかけとして読んでみる価値はあるかと思います。
まず、イギリス文化におけるポライトネスの基本がnegative politenessであることが、以下のように述べられています。
Many theoretical accounts of British or English politeness stress that overall it is a negative-politeness system, stressing deference, respect and distance. (p. 61)
実際は命令であるのに”Can you … ?”のような表現を用いる、時制を過去形にすることの効果、などはイギリス文化に限らず、広く観察できる現象でしょう。関連部分を引用してみます。
Conventional indirectness covers usages such as ‘can you’ instead of a direct request – for example, ‘Can you finish this off soon? Rather than ‘Finish this off soon’. ‘Can you’ is conventionally indirect since it uses an enquiry about ability, which has become conventionalized into question about possibility, and it poses this as a question rather than as a command (see Culpeper and Demmen, 2011). (p. 62)
The use of the past tense is also seen as conventionally indirect; for example, when, in a progress report, one of the British teachers in Stewart’s study comments ‘I felt that your marking was slightly generous’, Stewart sees this as deictically distancing the writer from the comment, something which she claims the non-native speakers in the study do not do (p. 62)
少し注意が必要になってくるのは、”Sorry!”が必ずしも文字通りの意味でないこと。以下のように説明されています。
Don’t take the apologies seriously; be aware that sometimes the word ‘sorry’ is not an admission of guilt but an (albeit muted) accusation. (p. 65)
そして、含意を理解していないとあやういと感じるのは、以下になります。
Thus, hints are used in this stereotyped depiction of British-English politeness as a way of implying rather than stating. However, many of the respondents to the questionnaire I distributed were very well aware that hints rather than direct statements could sometimes be used in manipulative or negative ways. One 50-year-old male respondent remarked upon the use of the phrase ‘Let’s have dinner some time’, which for him meant in fact ‘I don’t want to have dinner with you, but because I have said “some time”, we both understand my meaning’. (p. 64)
いずれも想定の範囲ではありますが、これを手掛かりに、言葉と文化についてさらに広げて議論をしてみると面白い発見が出てくるかもしれません。
参照文献
- Culpeper, Jonathan & Jane Demmen. 2011. “Nineteenth-century English Politeness: Negative Politeness, Conventional Indirect Requests and the Rise of the Individual Self”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12: 49-81.
- Mills, Sara. 2017. Englsih Politeness and Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
