TOEIC의 간접 발화 영역에 반영된 폴라이트니스 고찰: Brown & Levinson의 체면 위협 행위와 Leech의 가치 거래 개념의 비교를 중심으로

Abstract

Politeness is a linguistic strategy used to assign value to a hearer by mitigating the face-threatening acts that a speaker commits to the hearer or lowering the self value of the speaker. Using positive and negative politeness are significant strategies to alleviate face-threatening acts, but are not being applied universally throughout all languages. Maintaining the face of the hearer reflects the individualism and egalitarianism that is aligned with a Western view, so it can be challenging to apply that view to some Eastern languages possessing honorific expressions. This is because communication functions not only to exchange information between individuals, but also serves the important role of complying with the order and the roles assigned to each individual in a society. Therefore, certain utterances may be decoded differently according to one's cultural background, or to the extent to which they may offend the hearer. Politeness as a value transaction overcomes the limits of the concept of politeness of face. The most coherent answer to questions in TOEIC's indirect utterance type is not approached from the viewpoint of the speaker-listener's face-threatening level, but from the view of the value of the requested information. Although the correct answer does not seem to consider the speaker’s face, it plays a sufficient role if minimum value to the required information in each question is provided. In this way, politeness can be recognized as a useful device for people from different cultural backgrounds beyond only the problem of courtesy.