Question Tags and the Sociolinguistic Factors Determining

Linguistic Politeness

 by Nicholas Delleman

Introduction

If you ever start a course of study in Japanese, you will quickly become aware of some distinct differences between female and male spoken discourse in relation to politeness. One example, the honorific ‘o’ is, when prefixed to a noun, a sign of respect and politeness and very often characterizes women’s speech (Shibamoto 1987). Shibamoto explains that where a man would use kane (money), a woman would use o-kane .

While many believe that, in English, women are in general more polite than men (see Lakoff 1975; Holmes 1995; and Bonvillain 1993), it has often be said that these differences are more difficult to substantiate (Brown 1980). Linguists have observed many semantic, stylistic and syntactic devices such as modals (McMillan et al 1977), negation (Lakoff 1973a) and tags (Lakoff 1972; Holmes 1995), which are used in English to express politeness. But does the use of these forms depend on the gender of the speaker? In a study of politeness and gender, Lakoff (1975) and Holmes (1995) both claim for example, that women were more likely to use question tags than men, whereas Dubois and Crouch (1975) observed the opposite in their study of male/ female participation in academic conferences.

In light of these seeming inconclusive observations, I intend to examine, in this article, some of the factors that might influence English speakers’ use of linguistic politeness, comparing my finding to my own results from a small scale empirical study of data from radio broadcasts, to study how these influences affect the participants’ use of question tags.

I intend therefore, in section 2, to present an overview of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory looking more deeply into the contextual issues of politeness. In sections 3 and 4, I will review Holmes’ work on the functionality of question tags and briefly review some of the previous work carried out into the use of question tags and politeness. In section 5, I will present the basis of my own research and data collected on the use of question tags by radio presenters, correspondents, interviewees and other guests on the British Broadcasting Company Radio Five Live’s Breakfast programme, giving conclusions in section 6.

An Overview of Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory

Earlier theories of politeness include those inspired by Lakoff (1973b) which presented subject-maxims used by speakers of a language, guiding their use of politeness. The three basic maxims proposed were of formal politeness (not imposing on others), informal politeness (giving options) and intimate politeness (striving to make the addressee feel good). Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory incorporates Lakoff’s maxims into a much broader theory, giving one of the most influential and comprehensive studies of politeness to date (Fraser 1990 and Thomas 1995). Brown and Levinson base their studies on Goffman’s (1967, cited in Brown and Levinson 1987, 61) notion of face and the phenomenon of losing face, or becoming embarrassed or humiliated. They claim all interactants have a positive image of themselves and a desire for approval (positive face) and negative face, which they describe as ‘the basic claim to territories, personal preserves and right to non-distraction- i.e. to freedom of action and freedom from imposition’ (Brown and Levinson 1987, 61). The theory comprises of five main kinds of politeness strategy based on the minimization of loss of face by face-threatening acts (FTA), such as complaining, apologizing and making requests. These strategies (numbered 1-5) can be observed in the flow chart in figure 1.

                                 Figure 1. Possible strategies for doing face-threatening acts

                                               (From Brown and Levinson 1987, 60)

We will look at positive and negative politeness strategies here, as it is those which will be of principle concern to us in the data analysis, followed by a look into some contextual issues which may arise in deciding which form of politeness would be applicable in given situations.

·        Positive Politeness

This is a series of strategies used to maintain a person’s positive face by showing solidarity or friendship.  Positive politeness strategies include avoiding disagreement, seeking agreement, indicating common ground, being optimistic and intending to communicate that the speaker’s wants are similar to those of the hearer, for example ‘You look thirsty. Let’s have a cup of tea’.

·        Negative Politeness

Negative politeness is used to maintain the hearer’s negative face by minimising imposition or intrusion into their space. Brown and Levinson (1987) note that negative politeness is ‘familiar as the formal politeness that the notion ‘politeness’ conjures up’ (p62). It is characterized by notions of indirectness, hedging and softening. For example, ‘You are a stupid boy’ (acting bold on-record) can be softened by a question tag becoming ‘You are a stupid boy, aren’t you?’ An example of indirectness might involve the use of apologies ‘I’m sorry to impose but would you mind getting me a drink?’

Politeness and Contextual Factors

Let us now take an example that Brown and Levinson provide to demonstrate ‘going off record’:

So, for instance, if I say ‘Damn, I’m out of cash. I forgot to go to the bank today’, I may be intending to get you to lend me some cash, but I cannot be held to have committed myself to that intent (Brown and Levinson 1987, 69). 

Their example given here can be interpreted in numerous ways depending on the identities of ‘you’ and ‘I’.  If ‘I’ was a famous film star and ‘you’ were a taxi driver, having just given ‘I’ a long ride home, would the FTA be avoided? How would the taxi driver deal with that situation? If I asked the same of a security guard who was just locking the door to the bank, how would the security guard interpret that request?

The example just given in this report’s positive politeness strategies could also be ambiguous, even impolite, depending on the contexts in which it is used. In fact Brown and Levinson themselves raise this point in discussing gender and politeness:

                        Thus we need to specify closely some claim of the sort that ‘women are more polite than men’ – more polite than whom, to whom, about what and in what circumstances? (Brown and Levinson 1987, 30)

Though discussing the contextual importance of utterances earlier in their paper, they do little to attempt to apply this principle to their own examples, preferring to rely on, in part, what most people may consider somewhat ambiguous examples.

One could argue that an FTA such as a request from a mother to a child, for example, would be considerably more serious in the company of extended family than if the mother and child were alone. In these two different contexts, the politeness strategies employed by the parent in the formulation of the request would be quite different. As a result, the seriousness of the FTA must be graded taking account of contextual circumstances. 

Brown and Levinson (1987) take contextual factors into consideration, but it seems less clear how the differences in the two contexts above could be accounted for in relation to their social dimensions of relative power and social distance between speaker and hearer, and the ranking of impositions in a particular culture.

Holmes (1995) adds that the FTA may also be reliant on how the speaker normally interacts with the addressee. A formal request made by a speaker who usually interacts with the hearer in an informal manner, given the same context, may cause the addressee to experience loss of face as the request may be interpreted as impolite, polite though the request may be. One’s ‘way’ of interacting with others must therefore be taken into account.

There have been many studies into the role politeness plays in different contextual situations. A study by Culpeper (1996) looks into the discourse in the arena of an army training camp, arguing that acts which directly attack face, rather than lead to communication breakdown, which Brown and Levinson predict, are actually essential in preventing this breakdown, ensuring the efficiency of the operation. O’Barr and Atkins (1980) discuss similar finding in their investigation on ‘women’s language’ in the courtroom. Holmes (1995) refers to the use of ‘challenging’ question tags in the police force to actually ‘boost the force of a negative speech act’ (p80) thus intensifying the loss of face, adding that rather than being a politeness strategy this can be seen as an impoliteness strategy.

We will now consider the use of question tags and some research that has taken place.

Politeness and the Use of Question Tags

One way a language user can express positive and negative politeness is by use of question tags. Holmes (1995) identifies four principle kinds of question tags, and groups them according to their function in spoken discourse.

Epistemic modal tags are those which are used for expressing uncertainty and generally have a rising tone (/). For example:

        1,    A student to another student checking an exam schedule:

The exam’s on the 21^st / isn’t it

A second type of tag is the facilitative tag. This serves as a positive politeness device used to encourage another’s participation into the conversation. For example:

        2.  A group of friends discussing going to Japan:

You’ve been to Japan \ haven’t you, Dave

Facilitative tags generally have a falling tone (indicated by \). Softening tags, on the other hand, are largely negative politeness devices are used to ‘soften’ an otherwise direct face-threatening statement. An example from Holmes (1995):

        3.   Older brother to younger brother who has just stepped on the cat’s bowl and spilled her milk all over the floor:

That was a really dumb thing to do \ wasn’t it?    (p82)

The fourth type is the challenging tag, which is used in confrontational strategies to intensify the loss of face and show that the user has greater power over the addressee.

Previous Studies of Question Tags, Gender and Politeness

As briefly mentioned in the introduction, results from studies into the extent of male and female use question tags have proved inconsistent, both due to the context of the language of the survey and whether they are based on empirical or anecdotal evidence. Lakoff’s (1975) evidence was largely anecdotal, while Dubois and Crouch (1975) based their research on empirical data from academic conferences. After Holmes’ (1984) research into the function of question tags, she found women more likely to use facilitative tags and men epistemic modal tags. This increased use, by women, of question tags as positive politeness devices may, as Holmes (1992) points out, be due to the fact that females generally are more ‘cooperative, facilitative and ‘other-orientated’’ (p131).

The role of a participant in a conversation may also be of significance according to Cameron et al (1989). They found that three of the male participants in their study had discovered they were being recorded and this drastically altered the way two of them interacted with the other participants frequently using more positive politeness devices especially facilitative question tags.  

To summarize, we have discussed many factors that may be involved in determining our use of politeness strategies. Among these are:

1)      Gender.

2)      Our use of syntax (for example, question tags).

3)      The context of the situation in which we are interacting.

4)      The role of participants in the conversation.

5)      The extent of the loss of face to the addressee.

The study below will attempt to examine the above determiners of politeness using empirical data related to use of question tags, gathered from a radio broadcast.

The Study

Bell (1991) offers three decisions that must be made before carrying out research on news media. One must decide the media genre, the media output and the media outlet, briefly outlined below.

• Genre

Taking into account what has previously been discussed that contexts are essential in determining politeness strategies, I have decided to look more deeply    into three genres of exchange in which question tags were used:

a) Political Interviews (PI) with Members of Parliament and the House of Lords (most formal).

b) Non-Political interviews (NPI) with correspondents, sportswomen and men, and other guests (semi-formal).

c) Exchanges between presenters (Ex) (most informal).

• Output

The use of radio, from which to collect data was motivated by the fact that with the advent of the Internet, English language radio has become much more accessible to those living overseas. Thus, it provides access to unlimited amounts of spoken discourse that one would not normally have. In addition, there is a reduced element of observer’s paradox; the phenomenon of subjects altering their linguistic behaviour in the knowledge they are being recorded.

• Outlet

For the outlet, I decided to use BBC Five Live and, more specifically, the Breakfast Show, which broadcasts every weekday from 6 am to 9 am. This programme corresponds well with my genre needs, as the show has wide-ranging interactions from political interviews to informal, light-hearted discussion between the presenters. This programme also enables a balanced gender analysis, as the show is co-hosted by a female and a male presenter. Other in-studio presenters include a sports presenter (female), a weather forecaster (male), a business news presenter (male) and a traffic news presenter (female), all of whom are invited to add to discussions. For the purposes of a small-scale study such as this, I chose to analyse three, three-hour programmes, a total of a nine-hour corpus, broadcast between July 18 2003 and July 24 2003, to provide a representative sample of the politeness device under analysis; tag questions.  

Results and Discussion

From our data in figure 2, it can be seen that the majority of all tags used during the programmes tended to illustrate positive politeness in the form of facilitative tags, used when a participant was inviting another to give their point of view on the subject being discussed. As one of the salient aspects of this programme was the interviewing of BBC correspondents (NPI) with the main objective of providing the listener with information, one could have expected this. Of all tags used by males, 75% were facilitative compared to 69.9% for females.

The contexts in which facilitative tags were used however differed markedly. Female participants were inclined to use them more during in-studio exchanges between the presenters, in less formal contexts, for example:

(1) …and the headline’s good \ isn’t it

(2) they look fantastic \ don’t they

These two examples also include other strategies of positive politeness such as being optimistic (‘good’ and ‘fantastic’) and exaggeration (‘fantastic’) as well as seeking agreement with the use of the tag.

The male participants, on the other hand, tended to use facilitative tags in more formal non-political interviews enabling the interviewers to focus their questioning, and the interviewee to expand on the topic raised in the statement, a positive politeness strategy, for example:

(3) there’s a corner of Grantchester that’s forever Archer \ isn’t there

(4) there’s is touch of that about Archer \ isn’t there

This relates strongly to observations seen by Cameron et al (1989) in regard to the role of the participants. When the presenter’s role was to elicit information from an interviewee then the facilitative question tag was used as a significant tool in doing this politely. However, in more informal settings, women were more inclined to facilitate conversation using tags, as Holmes (1992) suggests.

The question of the participant’s role in exchanges can be highlighted further by one notable three-minute exchange between Nicky Campbell (a co-presenter) and Nick Faldo (a professional golfer). In an NPI concerning the 2003 British Open golf championship, which had finished the previous day, it was observed that three cases of facilitative tags were used by Nick Faldo. These tags were the only ones used by a non-presenter during interviews of a political or non-political nature. This means that of the 23 facilitative tags used in NPI and PI, 86.9% were used by presenters. This indicates that interviewers were much more likely to use certain positive politeness strategies than interviewees, suggesting a strong correlation between these strategies and the participant’s role in conversations.

Another interesting result from that interview was that Nick Faldo’s use of 13% of the facilitative tags in NPI and PI in a  three-minute period represents a more intensive use of these tags than other participants. One conclusion, which might be drawn here, is the tendency by certain individuals to incorporate more positive politeness strategies, such as facilitative tags, into their speech than others. The current state of mind of the golfer could also explain his tendency to use question tags as he had ‘had a few drinks’ the night before.

Negative politeness strategies in the form of softening tags were largely avoided by all participants. One instance where softening tag came in a political interview when the male presenter threatened the face of an interviewee with:

(5) you have an agenda too \ don’t you

Victoria Derbyshire (a co-presenter) provides another example in a non-political interview with a sixteen-year-old male who could not name the current number one record in the popular music charts. She says ‘Luke is sixteen going on fifty, aren’t you, Luke?’. Victoria Derbyshire uses a softening tag (and is indeed slightly indirect by her use of the addressee’s name) as a negative politeness strategy to lessen the effect of the FTA in a comment that could have been largely face threatening considering such factors as social distance and relative power between the boy and the presenter.

A full transcript of all instances of questions tags taken from the nine-hour corpus can be found in the Appendix.

Conclusions

We have seen in this article that many factors must be taken into consideration when determining an individuals or groups of individuals’ use of linguistic politeness. The results are inconclusive and it may not be entirely correct to suggest that politeness may be determined just one of these factors, such as gender. Other factors must be taken into account, such as context and the role of participants.

Another factor observed in the results and not considered in the theoretical sections of this article, was one’s idiolect: an individual’s tendency to use certain language more than another individual. This finding could raise other questions into external factors such as an individual’s state of mind when interacting. Could nervous disposition or a hangover influence one’s use of politeness strategies? Could politeness be influenced by a person’s city of origin or upbringing or the company one keeps?

At face value, one may see that the observations by Lakoff (1975) and Dubois and Crouch (1975), noted in the introduction, seem inconsistent, but one should be wary of comparing such findings, until investigation into the nature of the research has taken place.

Bio-data: 

Nicholas Delleman has been teaching English for 14 years in England, Slovakia, and Turkey, and is currently working at various universities and companies in the Tokyo area, Japan.

References

Bell, A. (1991) The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bonvillain, N. (1993) Language, Culture, and Communication:  The Meaning of Messages. Englewood Cliffs:  Prentice-Hall.

Brown, P. (1980) ‘How and Why women are more polite: Some Evidence from a Malayan Community’. In  McConnell-Ginet, Borker and Furman, 111-149

Brown, P. and S. Levinson (1987) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Cameron, D., F. McAlinden and K. O'Leary (1989) ‘Lakoff in context: the social and linguistic function of tag questions’  In Coates and Cameron 74-93.

Coates, J. and D. Cameron, eds. (1989) Women in Their Speech Communities. Harlow: Longman.

Culpeper, J. (1996) Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 25, 349-367

Dubois, B. and I. Crouch,  (1975) The Question of Tag Questions in Women's Speech: They Really Don't Use More of Them. Language in Society 4, 289-294.

Fraser, B. (1990) Perspectives on politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 14, 219-236.

Goffman, E. (1967) Interactional Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co.

Holmes, J. (1984) Hedging your bets and sitting on the fence. Te Reo 27, 47-62.

Holmes, J. (1992) Women’s Talk in Public Contexts. Discourse and Society 3, 131-150.

Holmes, J. (1995) Men, Women and Politeness. London: Longman.

Ide, S. (1982) Japanese Sociolinguistics: Politeness and Women's language. Lingua 57:357-385.]

Lakoff, R. (1972) Language in Context. Language 48,907-927.

Lakoff, R. (1973a) Language and Woman’s Place. Language and Society 2,45-80

Lakoff, R. (1973b) Logic or Politeness: or minding your P’s and Q’s. Papers from the ninth Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society 9, 292-305.

Lakoff, R. (1975) Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper & Row.

McConnell-Ginet, S., R. Borkerand and N. Furman, eds. (1980) Women and Language in Literaure and Society. New York: Praeger.

McMillian, J.R., A.K. Clifton, D. McGrath, and W.S. Gale. (1977) Woman’s Language: Uncertainty or interpersonal Sesitivity and Emotionality? Sex Roles 3,545-559

O'Barr, W. M., and B. K. Atkins. (1980) ‘'Women's Language' or 'Powerless Language'?’ In McConnell-Ginet, Borker, and Furman 93-110.

Philips S.U., S. Steele and C. Tanz, eds. (1987) Language, Gender and Sex in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge UP

Shibamoto, J. S. (1987) ‘The Womanly Woman: Manipulation of Stereotypical and Nonstereotypical Features of Japanese Female Speech’ In Philips, Steele and Tanz, 26-49

Thomas, J. (1995) Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics. London: Longman.

Appendix

Instances of question tags observed during three, three-hour shows of the Breakfast Programme on BBC Five Live broadcast between July 18 2003 and July 24 2003.

Key

Participant’s Gender (far left)

M- Male Participant                                        

F- Female Participant

Category of Tag Question (second from right)       

(F)- Facilitating tag

(S)- Softening tag

(E)- Epistemic modal tag

Genre of Interaction (far right)

PI- Political Interview

NPI- Non-Political Interview

Ex- Exchanges between presenters

Intonation

            / - Rising intonation of tag

            \ - Falling intonation of tag

For example:

             M:                  huge number              \                     isn’t it                 (F)              NPI

Participant’s gender         statement       intonation mark          tag         Category of tag    Genre

Fri 18/7/03

M: you’ve been speaking to a family \ haven’t you (F) NPI

F: this was supposed to be you know a huge public private partnership flagship / wasn’t it (E) NPI

F: people used to think they were so cool \ didn’t they (F) NPI

F: huge number \ isn’t it (F) Ex

F: he’s now becoming a figure of fun \ isn’t he (F) NPI

M: is he on the back pages everywhere / is he (E) Ex

F: you’ve got an answer / have you (E) NPI

F: they woke you up / did they? (E) Ex

M: it’s all going to look a bit empty / isn’t it (E) NPI

F: you have a very different perspective on this \ don’t you (F) NPI

M: there’s a lot families of servicemen in America beginning to say the same sorts of things \  aren’t they (F) PI

M: there’s different rules and stuff \ isn’t there (F) NPI

Mon 21/7/03

M: the Atkins diet is huge \ isn’t it (F) Ex

F:  you’ve got to stick with it right to the end \ haven’t you (F) Ex

M: there’s touch of that about Archer \ isn’t there (F) NPI

F:  there’s a whole new Craig David song here \ isn’t there (F) Ex

M: you have an agenda too \ don’t you (S) PI

M: there’s a difference between a customer and an investor though \ isn’t there (S) NPI

F:  bigamists don’t usually get caught out on their wedding day \ do they (F) Ex

M: it’s good stuff \ isn’t it (F) NPI

F:  by this morning we seem to be back in feeding-frenzy mode \ don’t we (F) Ex

M: but your son () was fighting for the Taliban \ wasn’t he (S) NPI

F:  he still retains his title, now he’s free on parole \ doesn’t he (F) NPI

M: it was a hell of a week \ wasn’t it (F) NPI (Nick Faldo)

M: his swing remained lovely and smooth \ didn’t it (F) NPI (Nick Faldo)

M: it’s unbelievable \ isn’t it (F) NPI (Nick Faldo)

M: you could be like Nick and Fanny in future \ couldn’t you (F) NPI

F:  he’s got a lot to live up to John, \ hasn’t he (F) NPI

M: you took his call / did you (E) NPI

F:  So the changes seem to be working, \ don’t they (F) NPI

M: there’s a corner of Grantchester that’s forever Archer \ isn’t there (F) NPI

M: he wrote the lines didn’t he there’s a corner of England a corner of a foreign field that is forever England \ didn’t he (F) NPI

Thurs 24/7/03

M: there seems to be a lack of trust about this, Steven \ doesn’t there (F) NPI

F: the initial reaction of some Iraqis was was celebration \  wasn’t it (F) PI

M: there minds were not on the job when they were making the film \ were they (F) Ex

F: …and the headline’s good \ isn’t it (F) Ex

M: it makes you wonder \ doesn’t it (F) Ex

F: they look fantastic \ don’t they (F) Ex

M: it sounds more like the train platform at Paddington station \ doesn’t it (F) NPI

F: but you can do that anyway / can’t you (E) PI

F: you will be able to hear the gongs in your head and that will get you in the zone / will it (E) NPI

M: if there is postponement of work between Glasgow and Liverpool that’s a possibility \ isn’t it (F) PI

M: it’s a difficult one this \ isn’t it (F) NPI

F: it’s a reference to your old days on wheel of fortune \ innit (F) Ex

F: Tony Blair as the Prime Minister would never authorize a leaking / would he (E) NPI

F: but before that the MOD and to some extent the Downing press office had given clues about who this person could be \ hadn’t they (F) NPI

F: Luke is sixteen going on 50 \ aren’t you Luke (S) NPI

© Nick Dellman 2008. All rights reserved.