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Politeness and characterisation
Task C – Our answer
Captain Biggar says ‘good evening’ when he enters the room,
and it is polite to respond to a greeting with another (often identical)
greeting. Jeeves does not do so in his first sentence, thus flouting Grice’s
maxim of relation and implicating (but not stating, of course) that he
is unwilling to be cooperative. ‘Yes, sir’ is superficially
polite, given that he uses the deferential address term ‘sir’,
but implicates that he wants to know what Captain Biggar is doing in the
room. After all, he has appeared unannounced. In spite of the fact that
Jeeves’s first sentence is a question, his next sentence follows
straight on from the first, not allowing Captain Biggar to respond to
it. This is an attack on Biggar’s negative face. Moreover, the second
sentence itself is an implicature-based FTA on the Captain’s positive
and negative faces at the same time.
Jeeves attacks Captain Biggar’s positive face by indicating that
he is not sure whether he is a social equal (and therefore entitled to
enter the house by the front door), or a lower social being (‘a
tradesman’) who would have had to use the inferior tradesman’s
entrance in stead. He also attacks Biggar’s negative face by implicating
that he should go back out through the window and ask to be let in to
the house via whichever entrance is appropriate for him.
Note that Jeeves does not tell Captain Biggar straightforwardly that
he is unsure about his social status, nor that he should go out and come
back in via the correct entrance. This would be too straightforward for
him. Instead he implicates these face threats, by flouting Grice’s
maxims of manner and relation. We can also see, if we remove them, that
using an interrogative structure and embedding the main import of the
sentence under ‘may I suggest’ (using a polite ‘permission-seeking’
modal and an indirect main verb) are strategies of linguistic mitigation
to tone down the FTAs. ‘The front door is round to the right, the
tradesman’s entrance to the left’ is more rude and abrupt.
So Jeeves is being impolite, but in an indirect and mitigated way, which
makes that impoliteness harder for Biggar to come to terms with. It is
also clear that at the same time Jeeves is breaking Grice’s maxim
of quality. He already knows the identity of Captain Biggar, but is pretending
not to. This is a violation at the character-character discourse level
(he wants to trick Captain Biggar), but is a flout at the author-audience
level, thus generating dramatic irony and humour.
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