Theories

• Grice's maxims


  4 basics rules for a successful conversation:

  • Quantity - Not saying too much or too little
  • Quality - being truthful
  • Relevance - keeping to the point and not saying anything irrelevant
  • Manner - speaking in a clear way
• Accommodation theory

  • Howard Giles
  • We make changes to how we speak depending on our environment
  • Convergence - Speaker moves towards another speakers accent, dialect or sociolect (to fit in)
  • Divergence - speaker actively distances self from another speaker by accentuating their own accent or dialect
• Peter Trudgill

  • “Accent, dialect and the school”
  • argued that teaching literacy and knowledge about grammar would be helped by an understanding and use of students own accent and dialect
  • this would increase the students confidence in their own language skills
• Goffman


  • Face - is the positive public image you seek to establish in social interactions
  • Positive face - our need to maintain self-esteem which is threatened when we are criticised
  • Negative face - our self-interest which is threatened when we are asked to do something we don't want to do
• Brown and Levinson

  • Bold on record - where the speaker is blunt (impolite)
  • Positive politeness - speaker takes a more informal approach of showing interest in and agreement with other speaker
  • Negative politeness - more indirect, includes hedges and negative constructions
  • Off-record - not face threatening at all
• Geoffrey Leech

  • The Politeness Principle
  • Tact - minimise cost to others
  • Generosity - minimise benefit to yourself
  • Approbation - minimise dispraise of others
  • Modesty - minimise praise of self
  • Agreement - minimise disagreement between self and others
  • Sympathy - minimise antipathy between self and others