2.1.2. Supportive Facework
When one of the interactants is about to fall out of line, or immediately after she has fallen out of line, that interactant may take
measures to indicate to the other participants that the overall attribution of face for the interaction is still valid. This action called supportive facework
because it contributes towards the overall facework of the interaction. Supportive facework aims at avoiding conflict and aggression and, if
possible, at creating comity amongst the participants, but it does not automatically involve politeness.
2.2. Politic Behavior
Watts Watts 2003:144 introduces the concept of politic behavior, i.e. that behavior, linguistic and non-linguistic, which the participants
construct as being appropriate to the ongoing social interaction, to mediate between facework and politeness. He strongly emphasizes that his politic
behavior is not equivalent to what is called polite behavior, which says nothing about how members evaluate it. He argues that politic behavior is
consistent with the dispositions of the habitus in accordance with the social features of the situational context.
Politic behavior: this is related to the habitus in Bourdieu’s theory of practice in that it accounts for the knowledge of which
linguistic structures are expectable in a specific type of interaction in a specific social field. It encompasses the
objectified structures pertaining to expectable behavior as well as the incorporation of those structures into an individual habitus.
Behavior which is not part of the politic behavior of an interaction type is ‘inappropriate’ and open to classification as
‘impolite.’ Watts 2003: 161
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Politeness is one of the means by which participants in verbal interaction interactants are able to adapt behavior to that which is
appropriate to the social interaction type in which they are involved. Thus, each interactant should have knowledge about what forms of behavior are
appropriate and inappropriate to that type of situation. This knowledge is gained from previous experiences, constructed through their own personal
history and the way it has been linked in the past with objectified social structures.
Watts Watts 2003: 164 argues that interactants can only know what the appropriate behavior in a particular social situation is by virtue of the
interaction between the objectified structures of the social field and the habitus that the individual has internalized by virtue of the capital she has
acquired in that field. And, since there is no objective means to measure the feel for politic behavior, there are only two ways in which one can become
aware of the appropriate politic behavior: 1 When the values it symbolizes are withdrawn in an instance of social
practice 2 When more values are provided than are felt to be necessary
The evaluation remains individual and can at best become interpersonal and intersubjective, but can never be objectively verifiable. Based on this theory,
there can never be objective criteria for deciding on what is or is not politic behavior except for the past experiences of the individual and the perception
of similar experiences in the interactive partners.
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Watts Watts 2003: 167 acknowledges, even that politic behavior is a predictive theory and the specific forms of consideration might differ from
one culture or subculture to the next, they are still understood as governing all forms of social interaction since individuals may have acquired fairly
similar forms of habitus. He gives an example that in highly institutionalized forms of social interaction, routinized forms of language will form part of
the politic behavior of the social interaction reciprocally shared by the participants, e.g. forms of deferential language such as terms of address,
greetings, and leave-taking. However, he argues that such routinized forms of linguistic expression are not instantiations of linguistic politeness.
2.3. Linguistic Politeness
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