Revisiting Brown and Levinson's Theory of Politeness

This paper aims at revisiting Brown & Levinson framework in order to reduce the total number of positive politeness strategies from fifteen to seven high order Pos Pol strategies, and the number of negative politeness from ten to five high order Neg Pol strategies. This reanalysis ultimately builds up a self-consistent and coherent picture of polite usage that is intuitively satisfactory and economical. We end up with a general frame of reference which presents an organized analysis and theory of politeness, the main point of which is that it purports to be a general explanation of the particular phenomenon of disparity of usage and universality of use of politeness.