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Politeness and characterisation
Task D – Our answer
In turn 6 Jeeves threatens Captain Biggar’s face by implicating
(via a flout of Grice’s maxim of manner) that he should not be in
the room. This indirectly attacks (a) Biggar’s positive face by
implicating that he should be aware of what he is doing, and (b) his negative
face, by implicating that he should leave the room. As we have already
seen in our discussion of turn 2, Jeeves also uses considerable linguistic
mitigation when producing these implicated face threats – he uses
the deferential term of address ‘sir, the non-factive hedging modal
adverb ‘possibly’, formal lexis (‘unaware’, ‘entry’,
‘constitutes’, ‘trespass’) and turns a declarative
grammatical form into a question via his intonation (cf. the use of the
question mark in the text).
When Captain Biggar says ‘That be damned’ in response to
Jeeves’s heavily mitigated impoliteness, he is clearly being baldly
impolite in terms of positive politeness (he is expressing his disapproval
of what Jeeves has said), and slightly more indirectly (via an implicature
that he will not leave) in terms of negative politeness. The swearing
expression ‘be damned’ is mild these days, but would have
been much stronger when the play was written. Biggar continues with ‘When
you are chasing crooks’ which is a threat to Jeeves’s positive
face, as he is implicating that Jeeves and his employer are crooks. This,
of course, is why Jeeves interrupts him with the echo question, apparently
asking for clarification. He is trying to muddy the water.
In turn 9, Captain Biggar first specifies the ‘crookery’
he is accusing Jeeves and Lord Towcester of, and so implicates that they
have stolen his money. Then he implicates a threat to them (via a flout
of the maxim of relation) by saying what he and his colleagues used to
do to crooks in Kuala Lumpur. As with turn 7, Biggar does use implication
rather than a bald on record accusation and threat, but we see none of
the more complex linguistic mitigation we have seen from Jeeves in turns
2 and 6.
In turn 10, Jeeves again considerably mitigates his face threat to Biggar.
For example. ‘You appear to be under some misapprehension’
is much more indirect than ‘You’ve made a mistake’.
The word ‘misapprehension’ is more abstract and formal, and
is also hedged by ‘some’. Moreover, Jeeves’s face threat
to Captain Biggar is nested syntactically under the non-factive verb ‘appear’.
We are thus beginning to see a marked and consistent contrast between
the two men in terms of their use of politeness. Captain Biggar is more
direct (though he could have been even ruder if he had tried!), reflecting
his anger, straightforwardness and ‘man of action’ character,
whereas Jeeves heavily mitigates his impoliteness, apparently for tactical,
reasons, to confuse Biggar and throw him off the scent. This is a pattern
which gets repeated in different ways throughout the extract.
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