Top Girls revisited - with politeness in mind
Task C – Our answer
When Win asks her how old she is, she threatens Louise’s positive
and negative faces at the same time. It is clear from her reaction that
Louise does not want to give the answer, and this is likely to be because
middle-aged women do not like to be specific about their age. Hence in
turn 6 we can infer that she breaks the Gricean maxims of manner and quantity
in an attempt to preserve her positive face. Given that Win already ‘has
her details’ (turn 1) it will be clear to the audience/reader that
this avoidance strategy will fail (as indeed it does in the next pair
of turns). From Win’s point of view, it seems that she was merely
confirming information she already had in order to get the conversation
off to a smooth start, and so probably did not realise that she was attacking
Louise’s face in any way. Evidence for this is that she does not
use mitigation strategies in turns 5 and 7.
Win’s politeness behaviour changes in turn 9, because it is now
clear to her that Louise was unhappy about revealing her age. She tries
to repair the damage by being positively polite, saying that Louise’s
age is not a handicap and that her experience is an advantage:
It’s not necessarily a handicap. Well it is of
course, we have to face that. But it’s not necessarily a disabling
handicap. Experience does count for something.
However, Win clearly feels the need to abide by Grice’s quality
maxim (don’t say what you know to be false), and so ends up hedging
her negative constructions with ‘not necessarily’. Win has
effectively stepped, unknowing, into a bit of a conversational minefield,
and as a consequence is having some difficulty.
From this set of turns we are also likely to hypothesise about Louise’s
character. Her behaviour so far has rather been hyper-sensitive. So she
may well have a brittle personality.
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