Self-politeness: A proposal

Research in linguistic politeness in the past two decades has been fruitful but incomplete: it has focused exclusively on other-oriented politeness while no attention has been paid to the fact that speakers' need to save their own face also has a bearing on their linguistic behavior. In this paper, I build a model of self-politeness within the framework of Brown and Levinson's (1987) theory. This model includes a set of superstrategies, each of which has its output strategies. I will also discuss factors that influence speakers' choices of strategies and illustrate these strategies with examples. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.