example, friends, employer-employee, teacher-student, etc. On the other hand, participants having a distant relationship are, for example, a customer-a shop
assistant, strangers, police-motor driver, a show host- guest, etc.
b. The Relative ‘Power’ P of S and H
As the name suggests, this is related to the power of interlocutors. What is meant by power here is that what interlocutors have which enables him to be
superior to the other interlocutors or vice versa that is what makes interlocutors be inferior to or less powerful than the others. Having high power P:SH, a speaker
can impose what he wants to a hearer. An example of this is that an employer is absolutely superior to hisher employees, and heshe can ask the employees
whatever heshe wants – regarding job assignments – without feeling guilty or
unpleasant because heshe has the authority to do so. On the other hand, the employee is considered to have lower power because heshe works for the employer
P:SH. Furthermore, there are two more possibility i.e. two people have the
same power or are socially equal to each other e.g. friends P:S=H and two people having no power over each other i.e. strangers P-None. Strangers cannot impose
what their wants to other strangers because that will make the situation become awkward since both have not met frequently and are not close in relationship.
c. The Absolute Ranking R of Impositions in the Particular Culture
Brown and Levinson 1987:77 define this as “A culturally and situationally defined ranking of
imposition by the degree to which they are considered to interfere with an agent’s wants of self-
determination or of approval i.e. hisher face wants. “
Thus what is meant by the absolute ranking of imposition here is that the level of imposing someone else’s face wants. There are in general two things
that are identifiable for interfering someone’s negative face. They are the
expenditure of services including time and of goods including non-material goods like information. People can
impose someone’s face wants very high because he has some specific rights or obligations to perform so.
From Brown and Levinson’s 1987 definition, there are at least two ranks of imposition i.e. low rank of imposition R-low and high rank of imposition
R-high. Low rank of imposition may occur when someone asks requests someone else to perform actions without interfering the requestee’s face wants, for
example, a tourist asks a tour guide to explain about the history of particular objects. This request cannot be considered to have a high rank of imposititon because it is
the tour guide’s job to provide information and to explain anything to the tourist. This way, the tour guide does not get interfered or feel bothered because it has been
his job to do so. Another example of R-low is a customer and a shop staff. Even if the customer asks the staff to show many things heshe wants, it cannot be
considered to be R-high because that is what a shop staff does i.e. to serve customers. On the other hand, an example of R-high is like when an English
education department student asks his senior of the same department about computer problems. The request is not related to what an English education
department student deals with every day, and this can be considered as a high rank of imposition.
In addition, the social distance and the relative power can be the factors of the imposition, for example, the speaker and hearer
’s roles in the society can be one
factor in the rank of imposing someone’s face wants. Nikula 1996, in Soler and Jorda, 2007 proposes five types of
contextual information that may affect the appropriate use of peripheral modification devices. They are in the following.
a.
Power: those who have more power can express themselves without
employing modifiers for example, boss-employee. b.
Social distance: those who are strangers will tend to use more modifiers.
c.
Ranking of imposition: how demanding the request is implies that more or
less modification will be used. d.
Type of interaction: whether the interaction is for transactional or
interactional purposes will have an impact on the use of peripheral modification devices.
e.
Type of speech act: the more the speech act is face-threatening, the more
modifying devices are needed.
7. Related Studies
