"Yoroshiku onegaishimasu" - koncepcja "twarzy" czy "stanowiska"? : rodzaj grzeczności w japońskiej formule grzecznościowej

Abstract

Brown and Levinson (1987) described politeness as a face-saving strategy and distinguished between its positive and negative variety. Supposedly universal, their model of politeness does not seem to be fully applicable to the way politeness is realized in the Japanese culture. For instance, it cannot completely account for the Japanese politeness formula yoroshiku onegaishasu. The way it is translated into other languages is heavily affected by the context of its use and researchers do not agree on how to describe the kind of politeness that the formula is meant to convey, describing it as a “form of dependence” (Matsumoto 1988), a “concept of a situation” (Fukushima 2000), “positive face behavior” (Pizziconi 2003) or the “tachiba concept” (Obana 2010). By examining selected examples of its use and contrasting them with the relevant Polish equivalents the article attempts to describe the formula at semantic-pragmatic and meta-pragmatic levels.