Politeness strategies in question formulation in a UK telephone advisory service

Abstract

Politeness is of particular importance in health care contexts, where a number of international agreements and consensus statements formulated by policy makers demand that accord should be maintained, agreement should be solicited, and an attitude of respect be sustained especially when burdensome or intimate matters are being discussed. This paper explores the patterns of politeness in a corpus of material from a UK study of telephone encounters between NHS Direct health advisers and callers presenting with a need for advice over medication. In the opening sequences of interaction the questions that advisers asked the callers often included multiple politeness markers, for example through terms such as "may" and "just", as in "may I just ask you?". Politeness markers were often multiply layered, falling into three part structures which occurred when mundane information such as callers' names and telephone numbers were being elicited. Where more intimate matters were at stake, advisers minimized imposition and, arguably, undertook rapport building by means of preambles to the question such that the impending intrusion is accounted for, explained or mitigated. A potentially problematic question could also be followed up by further relational work and humour. There are important implications here for understanding politeness itself, especially where it is displayed by an institutionally more powerful or symbolically credentialed interactant towards one who is less advantaged.

Politeness in Professional Contexts

“…Politeness research that has been carried out in relation to talk observed in medical settings draws upon different theoretical and analytical frameworks devised by politeness theorists. Among these, studies influenced by Brown and Levinson's (1987) now seminal work (Lambert, 1995(Lambert, , 1996Spiers, 1998;Grainger, 2002;Backhaus, 2009;Brown and Crawford, 2009), the theory of politeness premised on the idea that 'a wilful fluent speaker of a natural language, further endowed with two special properties -rationality and face' that will typically act in such a manner as to not threaten one's or other people's face. With the latter being defined as 'the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself [or herself]' (Brown and Levinson, 1987: 58-61) and associated with the way the term is commonly used metaphorically, for example, in the phrase 'to lose face', for Brown and Levinson (1987: 60), politeness is concerned with conflict avoidance.…”

“…The aim of the chapter is to demonstrate the ability of linguistic research -and politeness research specifically -to have practical application in the healthcare setting. As asserted by Mullany (2009) and then Locher and Schnurr (2017), there is still a real need for healthcare communication research to be more 'applied', with a relatively limited number of politeness scholars and studies (Lambert, 1995(Lambert, , 1996Spiers, 1998;Grainger, 2002Grainger, , 2004Jameson, 2003;Delbene, 2004;Woolhead et al, 2006;Backhaus, 2009;Brown and Crawford, 2009;Graham, 2009;Harrison and Barlow, 2009;Mullany, 2009;Zayts and Kang, 2009) addressing communicative issues pertaining to that sphere.…”

The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness

“…In addition to the emails and postings on online discussion boards that they looked at, other studies have conducted research on telephone interactions (e.g. Brown & Crawford, 2009), and a range of other computer mediated forms of communication, such as an online discussion forum for doctors (Gallardo & Ferrari, 2010), and a range of different healthcare related websites (e.g. Locher, 2006Oh et al, 2012).…”

(Im)politeness in Health Settings

“…In addition to the emails and postings on online discussion boards that they looked at, other studies have conducted research on telephone interactions (e.g. Brown and Crawford 2009), and a range of other computer mediated forms of communication, such as an online discussion forum for doctors (Gallardo and Ferrari 2010), and a range of different healthcare-related websites (e.g. Locher 2006Locher 2010Oh et al 2012).…”