Reflection: Do cultures in England orientate to negative politeness?

As just noted, Brown and Levinson’s politeness model is said to reflect the characteristics of politeness in England, notably, an emphasis on individualism (e.g. Matsumoto 1988; Gu 1990; Nwoye 1992; Wierzbicka [1991]2003). Similarly, one might observe of Leech (1983) that it is the politeness maxim of Tact, encompassing indirectness, that receives most attention. The Tact maxim covers the “most important kind of politeness in English-speaking society” (1983: 107) (presumably Leech had in mind British English-speaking societies). More generally in research, the politeness cultures of England are often said to be characterized by off-record or negative politeness (e.g. Blum-Kulka et al. 1989b; Stewart 2005; Ogiermann 2009) (e.g. Could you make me some tea or simply I’m thirsty as requests to somebody to make tea). The emphasis on the individual, privacy and non-imposition fits work in social anthropology. Kate Fox, in her book, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior (2004: 173), writes:

The identification of England as a predominantly “negative-politeness” culture – concerned mainly with the avoidance of imposition and intrusion – seems to me quite helpful. The important point here is that politeness and courtesy, as practiced by the English, have very little to do with friendliness or good nature.

For anybody familiar with the cultural practices of the people of England, there is something that rings true about the claim that they have a preference for negative politeness practices. However, it is a cultural generalization, a stereotype (see Mills 2009, who elaborates on this point during her discussion of culture and impoliteness). For anybody familiar with the North of England, it is likely not to ring so true. Strangers are often met with terms of affection (e.g. love, pet, darling) in conjunction with relatively direct utterances, as well as banter – not the stuff of negative politeness. Unfortunately, empirical research on the intra-cultural politeness practices of England is lacking, so we cannot substantiate these intuitions. Incidentally, it is worth pointing out here that cultures continually experience diachronic change as well as synchronic, though this seems to have escaped the attention of most researchers in cross-cultural pragmatics. The evidence points quite strongly to early politeness practices in England being oriented towards positive politeness rather than negative, the shift from one to the other commencing in the early modern period (see Jucker 2008). Culpeper and Demmen (2011) provide evidence showing that the current most common negative politeness structures for achieving requests – namely, could you X and can you X – were not established as politeness formulae before the 19th century. They argue that Victorian values, with their emphasis on the self (e.g. self-respect, self-sufficiency), did much to drive the rise of negative politeness in the English cultures of Britain.