A Performative Perspective of Flouting and Politeness in Political ...

A Performative Perspective of Flouting and Politeness in Political
Interview*
Songqing Li

This paper examines in the perspective of performance how politicians in political
interviews rely on linguistic strategies to grapple with the conflict between being un-
cooperative and being polite. Three pairs of question-answer regarding North Korea
nuclear crisis between the spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry and the reporters
were illustrated. As the illustration shows, the spokesman did not simply answer the
questions as commonly anticipated, but rather flout frequently and draw on the
information already raised by the reporters. It argues that to better understand how
opinions and attitudes are expressed by politicians in reply, it is essential to study
carefully their verbal acts as performance for particular interpretation.

Key words: cooperative principle, flouting, nuclear crisis, performance,
politeness, political interview


1. Introduction

In talk exchanges, the relationship of politeness to cooperation, and vice versa, is entwined
with one another (Brown & Levinson 1987; Grice 1989). However, as Bavelas et al. (1990)
explicate, politicians in political interviews habitually equivocate and their utterance by
nature is always ‘ambiguous’, ‘vague’, ‘wishy-washy’, ‘indirect’, and ‘obscure’. The
equivocal attribute of utterance by politicians naturally raises a question of how politicians
deal successfully with the conflict between being un-cooperative and being polite in the
language game of political interviews. A rich and varied body of literature has investigated
interactional features of political interviews from a range of perspectives of, for instance,
pragmatics (Wilson 1990), discourse analysis (Blum-Kulka 1997, Chilton & Schaffner 1997),
conversation analysis (Heritage & Greatbatch 1991, Clayman & Heritage 2002),
communication and cognition (Chilton 1987, 2004), and social psychology (Bavelas et al.
1990, Bull 1998, Hamilton & Mineo 1998). These studies, though, focus almost exclusively
on the cooperative dimension, overlooking or ignoring that of politeness. On the other hand,
scholars like Bavelas et al. (1990), Bull et al. (1996) and Chilton (1987) usually provide an
underlying rationale for politicians’ equivocation in interview by drawing upon the concept
of face in politeness theory (Brown & Levinson 1987). Nevertheless, in addition to keeping
different faces of those involved, the gap is equally evident of giving an adequate answer to
the question of how politicians tackle strategically the incongruity of being un-cooperative
with being polite.
This paper attempts to fill these gaps by examining empirically how politicians
relying on linguistic strategies grapple with the dilemma of being un-cooperative and being
polite, and how they save and enhance the face of the party or country they represent while
avoiding bringing face-threatening acts (FTAs) (Brown & Levinson 1987) to the interviewer
and the third-party concerned. To this end, the paper proposes to look into the flouting of
conversational Maxims and politeness by politicians at discoursal level within the theoretical
and analytical framework of performance. Performance is here meant to understand uttering
as a special mode of situated communicative practice. The theory of performance is believed
32

---

analytic powerful for a comprehensive interpretation of the flouting by politicians and their
way of handling politeness phenomena in interview. The findings show that the purpose of
violating certain conversational Maxims is not merely to generate an implicature as Grice
(1989) claimed, but rather, as a linguistic strategy, to serve particular goals or purposes by
individual politicians of, such as establishing politicians as the agent, saving and enhancing
their positive image and that of party or country that they represent, highlighting attention for
the audience, and constituting a particular interpretive frame. It is concluded that strategic
practices of flouting and politeness provide good means and opportunities for politicians to
distinguish their identification, maintain a positive image for their country, and transform an
interpretative frame.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, the argumentation is developed to
explain why the Cooperative Principle (CP) and the concept of face are not adequate for
analyzing the flouting by politicians in political interviews as one particular activity type.
Section 3 introduces the theory of performance. It is suggested that a focus on the
performance of verbal practice promises a more comprehensive account of the flouting and
politeness phenomena by politicians. After that, the background of the political interview as
the data on North Korea nuclear crisis becomes the main concern of Section 4. Section 5
moves forward to a detailed data analysis within the proposed theoretical framework of
performance, bringing into light the analytic power of this perspective for expounding
flouting and politeness phenomena in political interviews. Finally, a number of conclusions
are drawn in Section 6.


2. Political Interviews as Activity Type

In his discussion of the CP and Maxims, Grice (1989: 29) claims that ‘people do behave in
these ways’ and ‘most do in fact follow’ in communication. This construal of a social basis
for the CP to apply appeals to the intuition that political interviews are idealized as the one
free of influence or interference by any internal factors, for instance, communicative
competence of the interviewer or the interviewee, as well as external ones, such as topic,
occasion, and time. Political interviews as a particular social interaction, however, are neither
“the totally prepackaged activity” nor “the largely unscripted event” (Levinson 1992: 69).
Levinson (1983: 279) critiques speech act theory, particularly as developed by Searle (1969),
and suggests that what counts as a speech act of a particular type fundamentally depends on
the activity type (Levinson 1992) that the act is embedded within. This suggestion seems also
applicable to our discussion of the flouting and politeness phenomena in political interviews.
Political interviews as an activity type have its own distinctive features, of which one is
the stereotype of politicians’ vagueness and evasiveness in expression without reference to
communicative situations (e.g., Harris 1991; Bavelas et al. 1990). For Bavelas and his
associations, the motivation to equivocate can be explained by ‘avoidance-avoidance’
communicative conflict situations in which politicians find them being caught between two or
more incompatible aspects of the situation, but where a reply is still nevertheless expected.
More specifically, equivocation happens most frequently in situations when the information
necessary to answer the question is unavailable, or the information is available but cannot be
provided under current circumstances, or to do so would be somehow inappropriate under the
circumstances (Chilton & Schaffner 1997: 212, Clayman & Heritage 2002: 264-269).
33

---

Inferably, utterances by politicians in interviews are more complex and unstable than as
expected as usual.
Practices of equivocation by politicians, though, still operate within the constraints
that govern communication in general. A lack of adherence to the norms may give rise to the
likelihood that the politician is intentionally exploiting some maxims to generate an
implicature (Blum-Kulka & Weizman 2003: 112). This aspect of verbal features in political
interviews bears an intriguing resemblance to Grice’s Maxims of conversation and
implicature in that the generation of an implicature can only be achieved through the flouting
of certain Maxims. Unless otherwise indicated, both the interviewer and the interviewee work
with the assumption that the lack of adherence to the norms is intentional (Grice 1989: 31).
It needs to be underscored, however, that the flouting of Maxims through
equivocation by politicians sets its intimate connection to their power in interview. Yet, while
acknowledging the social basis of the CP, Grice (1989) oddly rejects social equality as a
precondition for cooperation. According to Fairclough (1989), for the CP to apply in the way
Grice defined it, communicators must be socially treated as equals. Specifically, what is even
more important for the present purpose is that politicians and interviewers must have equal
control over what counts as ‘truthful’, ‘relevant’, ‘adequate’, and ‘sufficient’ (in Grice’s
words) information for interactional purposes. Thus, the indeterminacy and complication of
politicians’ utterance can be further grounded in terms of power of politicians in
transgressing and re-evaluating for their own purposes the very existence of hegemonic
norms in their active production of meaning. Furthermore, the goals of the interviewer and
the interviewee in political interviews are commonly incompatible. While the interviewer
generally seeks from a politician as much information as possible, the politician often takes
this opportunity to promote public image of his party or country and, simultaneously,
calumniate his political opponents or related parties. For this reason, although interviewers
are universally perceived as possessing considerable control over the agenda of an interview
(Heritage & Greatbatch 1991), politicians with their authority often exert some control over it
by means of shifting agenda shift, topic selection, relation positioning, assumption, and so on.
In a word, the agency of politicians in producing the flexible and creative responses to
interviewers must be highly valued in discussing the flouting by politicians in interviews.
The power factor is also incorporated as one of specific components weighing a FTA
which is often dependent on individuals’ volition in context. As face is a want that every
individual has, in political interviews the face factor is frequently both exploited and
challenged by politicians (Chilton 1990: 204). Here must be pointed out, however, that
political interviews may appear to be taking place between just two participants, whilst they
are presumed as a talk designed also for an overhearing audience potentially of millions
(Heritage 1985). For Bull et al. (1996; cf. Tracy 1990), politicians must defend three
superordinate categories of face – their own personal face, the face of the party which they
represent, and the face in relation to supporting significant others. Plainly, a prime objective
of politicians is to present the best possible face both for themselves and for the party or
country they represent, while also seeking to enhance their face at the expense of their
political opponents’ face. Nevertheless, the individual face of a politician during political
interviews is not as usually thought of as important as that of the state he or she represents.
This is the truth especially when politicians are asked to give the attitude of their state
towards world-concerned issues. The complexity of world-concerned issues themselves and
the complex relations among countries involved contribute to the complication of politeness
phenomena in political interviews. There is the consensus that failure to make a direct and
34

---

explicit reply to the world results in a loss of face of the country for which the politician
stands rather than that of the politician’s individual face. When facing such cases, politicians
commonly equivocate when a direct and explicit reply becomes impossible. Conversely, the
individual face of interviewers is much more important. The main reason for this is that
although interviewers are supposed to be neutral for the topic being touched, their opinion
and attitude actually stand for those of certain opinion community. Thus, if the individual
face of interviewers were offended, the face of the whole opinion community would be
damaged to some extent.
The complication of politeness phenomena in political interviews regarding
international issues leads us to the simple corollary that acts of face-threatening and face-
saving or –enhancing by politicians need to be understood on the basis of the context of
politicians’ utterances rather than their illocutionary force (Kallia 2004: 147). It means that in
order to examine how politicians equivocate in reply, we need to concern ourselves with the
flouting and politeness phenomena at discoursal level which stresses the importance of
viewing the concerned issue as a whole, rather than separate utterances, towards the
regulation of politeness (Usami 2001). This proposal to interpret the conflict between being
un-cooperative and being polite at discoursal level, coupled with the agency of politicians in
interviews, naturally raises the requirement for a dynamic, powerful analytic approach to
investigating the verbal strategies by politicians to grapple with the incompatibility of being
un-cooperation with being polite.


3. The Theory of Performance

Theorists have long asserted that we must attend to how and what institutional language does
as much as to what it says. With specific regard to the flouting of Maxims by politicians in
question, one approach that holds promise of an alternative perspective on it is the theory of
performance. I have to make explicit at the onset that the notion of performance adopted here
deals, instead of with Chomsky’s ‘use of the linguistic system’ or Austin’s ‘doing of things
with words’, but with that largely comes from linguistic anthropology where special attention
is given to the ways in which communicative acts are executed. As will be illustrated in
Section 5, examining linguistic practices of politicians with the theory of performance reveals
thoroughly how they grapple with the conflict between being un-cooperative and being polite.

Specifically, one distinctive feature of this notion of performance is its emphasis that
not only do verbal acts ‘conform(ing) to the conventions that govern their success’, but also
‘constitute it’ (Hall 2001: 181). While underlining the conventions to which communicators
have to adhere, this notion of performance at the same time acknowledges clearly the
emergent creativity (Palmer & Jankowiak 1996) and improvisation (Sawyer 2001) in any
communication. Thus conceived, ‘performance becomes constitutive of the domain of verbal
art’ (Bauman 2001: 169, italics original). In this sense, the status of an utterance itself as act
must not be confused with the act that is likely to result from it, or with the interpretation that
is drawn from it by a listener. This realization is fundamental for the analysis of the act of
flouting by politicians since what it counts is not its perlocutionary effect, nor its felicity, but
the way performance occurs in the actualization of the linguistic system and the creation of
subjectivity in the language use. On such an account, the flouting of itself is no longer the
most important variable in determining the contribution to generating an implicature, but
rather the use to which it is repeatedly put. For an investigation into the incongruity of being
35

---

un-cooperative with being polite, the advantage of this notion of performance lies in its
capability to ground our claims in more concrete, contextualized accounts of verbal
communication.
The potential creativity and improvisation of verbal communication occurring in
social interactions entail that performance is highly deliberate and self-aware. Thus, to
subscribe to this notion of performance also means that we need to take performance as a
type of social display that is opened up to interpretive scrutiny and evaluation by an audience
(Bauman & Briggs 1992: 73; Bauman 2001: 169). But Bauman simultaneously makes the
note that success of performance is largely dependent upon the accountability to an audience
for the way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content.
The point to be emphasized here is that the notion of performance gives licence to us to
examine the act of flouting by politicians in interviews at discoursal level.
In line with a focus on creativity and improvisation, this notion of performance has
the following implication that performance potentially challenges or subverts dominant
ideologies. This insight is useful in helping us highlight the central role of agency and
individual action of politicians in interviews. The ideological associations of performance are
significant for explaining several things about the relations between violations of Maxims and
being polite. Bauman (2001: 171) provides a list of verbal devices for a diversity of
performance, but the processes of decontextualization and recontextualization in texts are
equally crucial in the force of performance (Bauman & Briggs 1992). One reason for this is
that such verbal acts are intimately connected to the exercise and assumption of power, given
the factors of the variable degrees of access to texts, legitimacy in claims to and use of texts,
competence in the uses of texts, and values attaching to various types of texts. The arguments
so far make explicit the point of the accountability of the theory of performance for the
exercise and construction of power by politicians in interviews by examining in details their
verbal communication. The perspective of performance is therefore a productive line of
inquiry to which we need to subscribe for the present purpose.


4. Data

The data for the illustration of flouting and politeness phenomena was composed of three
question-answer pairs derived from a political interview on the North Korea nuclear crisis
taking place between the spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry and news reporters. As
usual, after the spokesman made some brief announcements on the current domestic and
international affairs, around ten minutes was left for the journalists and reporters in the
presence to ask questions freely. This interview occurred at the end of the press release of
China’s Foreign Ministry on 22 October, 2002. At that time, the North Korean delegation
was visiting in China. It was also the time after North Korea had just suddenly declared to the
world that it had a secret nuclear weapons development program, and when there was hearsay
of Pakistan’s assistance in this nuclear program, which was well known among the opinion
community of the United States, South Korea, and Japan.
The North Korea nuclear crisis was referred to the one started in early twenty-first
century when North Korea suddenly announced to the world its decision to withdraw from
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and recommence nuclear program. The declaration
posed great threat to its traditional enemies South Korea, Japan and the Unites States.
Scenarios for the resolution of the crisis generally lay in two diametrically opposed categories
36

---

of sanctions and engagement. However, the United States had had limited success in the
application of either approach in dealing with North Korea. Alternative options included a
greater role of China, given it has vital strategic interests at stake, or the use of multilateral
negotiations, perhaps including Russia, Japan, and South Korea, to resolve the crisis. But
both options had been rejected by North Korea, which sought a bilateral resolution of the
crisis with the United States.
One feature of the data set is the range of countries this world-concerned issue
involves. The interview in this regard was in most part a mediated conversation between
governments and governments. The principled position of China on this issue, that is, the
denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula, was often reiterated to the world. But because of
the long-term good relationship of China to North Korea, the concerned parties and the world
were more interested in and sensitive to China’s would-be measures especially taken for the
issue. When interviewed on the crisis, the spokesman was certainly faced with a large number
of challenges in light of the sensitivity of questions and the anticipated consideration for the
face of at least four different parties – the interviewer, China, North Korea, and the opinion
community.


5. Data Analysis

This section is to investigate how the spokesman, when making a reply, violated certain
Maxims for specific purposes besides the reasons of generating some implicature and
politeness considerations. It also illustrates how the spokesman achieved a balance in
replying between China’s positive and negative faces in terms of face-threatening acts posed
by three different interviewers, and simultaneously mitigated face-threatening acts to the
interviewer and concerned parties. The three question-answer pairs were dealt with in their
original sequence, and given the intimate connection of being cooperative to being polite,
they were not individualized in the very analysis, but, rather, sometimes combined when
necessary. In essence, a performance framework is argued to provide a useful insight into a
pragmatic account of violation of the CP and politeness phenomena in political interviews.
The first question in Extract 1 was raised by a Western journalist. It is asked directly
of whether China was aware of the Pakistan’s assistance in North Korea’s nuclear program.
From the very beginning, the interviewer plainly tried to get the spokesman either confirm or
deny the awareness of China on Pakistan’s assistance through the yes/no question (Q1). The
question was tactful in the presupposition of the hearsay, implicitly face-threatening to both
North Korea and Pakistan. This question is surely a challenge to the spokesman, since
whichever the reply might be it would indicate an acknowledgement of the presupposition,
potentially threatening the negative face of North Korea and Pakistan.

Extract 1: (IR1: the first interviewer; IE: the spokesman; Q: Question)

IR1: Regarding the North Korean nuclear issue, (Q1) is China aware of Pakistan’s
help in North Korea’s nuclear development program?

IE: I am not aware of what you have said. But I have noticed that the Pakistani denied
this.


37

---

Perhaps more importantly, the truth of the hearsay itself was not necessarily the case capable
of being demonstrated by substantial evidence either in the presence or in the future. If so, a
simple YES or NO reply may also pose a potential threat to China’s positive face and hamper
China’s future freedom of action. Meanwhile, even if it were to be proved as the spokesman
claimed, the most possible inference would be that China indeed has possessed some
evidence of its own. This evidence having not yet thus far been exposed to the world would
surely evoke for the world a negative image of China. Confronted with such a situation, the
spokesman had an obligation to protect China’s face against even the possibility of threat
(Goffman 1967).
In addition, because of the traditionally close relationship of North Korea to China, it
was presumably most likely for the audience to assume that China on this special occasion
must have been informed by North Korea of the fact. This question was undeniably raised on
the basis of both this assumption and the presupposition of Pakistan’s assistance. Therefore,
to make a YES reply would potentially threaten the negative face of both China and North
Korea inasmuch as it implicitly acknowledges this particular intimacy. So would to deny, just
due to a corresponding inference that their relationship was being, or had been, changed.
Besides, a negative reply would probably make the audience deduce that China was
insensitive to the hearsay. This equally brings China negative image, for this fairly
contradicts China’s long-term stand of denuclearization on the Korean Peninsular.
Despite this, the spokesman was still expected to be able to give a reply since his
failure might result in a loss of China’s face. The reply, however, did not provide any
information pertinent to the question anticipating a definite confirmation or denial with some
further elaboration. Specifically, the question was ‘is China aware of Pakistan’s help in North
Korea’s nuclear development program?’, but the utterance ‘I am not aware of what you have
said.’ bears nothing on the question. This apparently violates the Maxims of Quantity and
Relevance. The spokesman explicitly confessed his ignorance of what the interviewer had
said and, by doing so, his personal face was damaged, but the presupposition was set aside or
cancelled. Moreover, through the conjunction ‘But’, the spokesman further shifted the topic
toward the Pakistani response to the hearsay, which being not expected definitely flouted the
Maxims of Quantity and Relevance once more. The utterance of his free-standing assertion
(‘But I have noticed that…’) of the Pakistani declaration also to some degree violated one
sub-Maxim of Quality, because it was only one side of the story and its truth had not yet been
sufficiently demonstrated. Clearly, with exception to his confession of no idea of ‘what’ the
interviewer had said, the spokesman did not offer any relative information of his own as
expected.
An account by Grice might be that the spokesman was engaged in a classic example of
maxim exploitation, flouting a maxim to produce certain conversational implicature.
Assuming the CP was adhered to, the reply as a ‘response’ could be read as a deliberate
design for implicature. The former utterance showing his ignorance implicates his
incapability to approve or disapprove of the presupposition, to such an extent that he had no
obligation to confirm or deny the hearsay. The latter indicates that the information he knew of
the current situation is a sharp contrast to the former, producing the conclusion that China
knew nothing but thus only. An inference based on the Gricean CP is that what the
spokesman tried to convey was twofold: to North Korea and Pakistan, China did not say to
the world that Pakistan had helped North Korea; to the opinion community, China had no
idea of it.
38

---

In terms of politeness theory, one may argue that in addition to making a reply to
protect China’s face, the way the spokesman replied is to avoid any FTA to both communities
holding different opinions. It is fairly sensible that the spokesman was trying to lower the
commitment of his utterances to protecting China’s negative face in the future. The first
utterance ‘I am not aware…’ based solely on what the interviewer had said circumvents his
responsibility for the truth or false of the hearsay, resulting in the cancel of potential threat to
China’s negative face. The other Quality hedge ‘But I have noticed that ….’ dependent
exclusively upon the Pakistani side also shows the intentional escape of any responsibility for
its truthfulness. Both Quality hedges could be taken as a kind of strategies of negative
politeness to satisfy the negative-face want of the interviewer and the opinion community
believing the hearsay, as well as those to avoid potential threat to China’s negative face in the
further. Compared with a direct and explicit reply, say, ‘No. China does not think that
Pakistan has helped North Korea.’, or vice versa, the spokesman’s utterances definitely soften
possible impoliteness and are indeed a form of politeness to the relevant opinion community.
Yet, these are by no means a thorough interpretation. In the perspective of
performance, the reply of the spokesman first decontextualizes or suppresses the
presupposition in the question and follows the recontextualizing of the Pakistani declaration
by citation. For Butler (1997), when referring to or citing an utterance is referred to or cited,
it is often appropriated and infused with new meanings whereby communicators can
constitute themselves as agents. In this context, the spokesman actualized the system of
language in a unique instance of flouting, converting both the presupposition of the
interviewer and the Pakistani declaration into subjective utterances. The hedged performative
‘I am not aware of what you have said.’ equating ‘I state that I am not aware of what you
have said.’ indicates the entailment of his denial to the presupposition; the hedged
performative ‘(But) I have noticed that…’ doing the work of ‘I know that….’, or further of ‘I
state that….’ explicates his acknowledgement of the Pakistani declaration, an implicit denial
again. Such an account apparently reveals that the spokesman was rejecting in an implicative
way twice the interviewer’s presupposition that Pakistan had helped North Korea. In terms of
‘communicative presumption’ (Bach & Harnish 1979, cited in Buck 1997: 103), when the
spokesman uttered what was not expected and what might be false or wrong, it is mutually
known that the spokesman intended for the audience to recognize his illocutionary intent and
consider why. The flouting in the reply is a recognizable signal, by means of which the
spokesman conveyed something special. Convincingly, the flouting functions to draw the
audience’s attention away to set up an alternative interpretive frame. The social pressures
against doing FTAs yield a set of interpretations too. In this case, the hedged opinion
performs to avoid a precise conveyance of his attitude and soften FTAs to the opinion
community. It is through these ways that not only was China’s negative face protected, but
also the positive face of the opinion community was maintained.
This illustration tells us that when analysing certain practices of flouting to probe
what, and how, a real implicature is generated, the Gricean CP does not work as properly and
effectively as the perspective of performance. It is also observed that a conversational
implicature at discourse level does not necessarily mean working merely for the purpose of
being polite to the listener as Brown and Levinson (1987) expounded at length, but also to
avoid any potential face threat to the country for which the politician stands. Thus it is
advisable to direct our attention to considering under what condition(s) of the discourse level
communicators violate certain Maxims and what their purposes are.

39

---

Extract 2: (IR2: the second interviewer; IE: the spokesman; Q: Question)

IR2: The principled position of China on the North Korean nuclear issue is to support
the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsular and China and North Korean has a
good neighbourly friendship. Under the current situation that North Korea has
admitted its nuclear program, (Q2) what measures will the Chinese government take
to create a favourable atmosphere on the Peninsular to peacefully solve the issue?

IE: We learned the North Korean nuclear issue that you have mentioned from the
news report and we are not aware of the details. The Chinese side has all along
supported the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsular and has made its own efforts
for the maintenance of peace and stability on the Peninsular.

The next question (Q2) in Extract 2 belongs to the WH-question type. In contrast with the
above yes/no question, this WH-question expresses an incomplete proposition, indicating the
anticipated answer to be its completion. If the spokesman gave the information in response to
the question as specified, then the response was coded as a reply and the spokesman was
cooperative and polite. If failed, then the spokesman non-cooperative and impolite. The
question itself seems not challenging except for the implicit presupposition of the crisis.
However, the strategy of the interviewer in asking tells that it is not so simply assumed.
More precisely, before raising the request for specific information, the interviewer
introduced a couple of contextualizing propositions. They are a positive element (‘to support
the denuclearisation’), which providing the spokesman with the opportunity to popularize the
China’s long-term positive policy is a face-enhancing act, and a negative element (‘a good
neighbourly friendship’), which is face-threatening due to its implication of the potential bias
of China towards North Korea. Besides, because whatever measures to be taken by China
would reflect China’s position, this question actually to a degree confines the reply to China’s
attitudes towards the current situation. When faced with such a challenge, the spokesman
might not be able to lay his hands on a specific. Nevertheless, given the spokesman being
regarded as the person having some knowledge of it, he was still expected to at least give
some general information rather than to simply evade or even refuse it (Gaylard & Ramsay
2004).
However, neither specific nor generic information desired regarding measures to be
taken was provided in the reply by the spokesman, although it seemed still within the
question’s topic parameters. Also, the spokesman did not acknowledge or deny the current
crisis having been presupposed by this interviewer. Through the hedge ‘We learned the North
Korea nuclear issue that you have mentioned from the news report…’, the spokesman
avoided a precise response of his disagreement with the interviewer, which in this context
mitigates the FTA to the interviewer. This reference as part of the reply meanwhile implicitly
subverted the precondition for questioning specific measures, which, it must be noted,
potentially brings along with it threat to the interviewer’s positive face.
The reference further constituted tactically the condition for his agency to continue
the reply by uttering ‘we are not aware of the details’. This verbal strategy as a means by
which the spokesman legitimised himself to dodge the question on measures must be
considerably appreciated. This line, however, did not serve to work only as thus explained,
but also to imply that information of measures was so far unavailable in the light that any
action would not be taken until the news report was confirmed and detailed. In this sense, this
evasive maneuver drawing the attention of the audience away from the question facilitates,
40

---

and conceals, the shift of the agenda. Precisely because the spokesman was presumed to be
cooperative, proceeding with the talk by answering the question, the audience were naturally
obliged to follow his words accepting the shifted agenda. I would argue that this way of
evading the question and transforming the agenda actually reflects the spokesman’s
consideration to minimize potential threat to the audience’s negative face. This analyses show
that not only positive politeness but also negative politeness to the audience was carefully
considered by the spokesman. What is interesting is the co-presence in the same utterance of
features of positive politeness and negative politeness.
We also notice in this case a subtle change of verbal tense whereby a new topic was
formulated and the reply continued. More specifically, the WH-question was about what
measures the Chinese government would take; the spokesman, however, deliberately shifted
present tense to present perfect rather than to presumed future tense (‘The Chinese side has
all long supported…and has made its own efforts…’). According to the Gricean CP, the
spokesman seemed have tried to implicate conversationally a generally favourable attitude of
China that China would be devoting its own efforts to solving the current crisis as before. The
fact, however, might be the opposite in this context based on the features of inadequate
information uttered. One of arguments is that this reply being quantitatively inadequate in
information to the needs or interests of the interviewer is also presumably most probably
qualitatively misleading (Chilton & Schaffner 1997: 213). If so, the spokesman’s reply
concerning general measures having been taken in the past does not necessarily implicate
China’s intention to make its efforts as before.
The spokesman recontextualized as part of the reply what the interviewer had uttered
for the preface to the question. Therefore no new information was provided in the reply. The
repetition, though, was a kind of positive politeness strategies to show the spokesman’s
agreement with the interviewer in the point of the position of China. If it is so interpreted, the
reply violated the Maxims of Quantity and Relevance but maintained the interviewer’s
positive face. The most reasonable explanation for the repetition as a reply might be that the
spokesman had no intention to tell the audience of something regarding either specific or
general measures to be taken for the crisis. On the contrary, he was in a sense taking
advantage of this opportunity to popularize the contributions of China to the maintenance of
peace and stability on the Peninsular. Tellingly, the utterances consistent with China’s long-
term principled position on the issue serve to enhance the positive image of China as a
responsible and influential country to the world. Meanwhile, China’s negative face was
successfully protected since no sign of China’s bias towards North Korea was observed in the
reply. In short, the spokesman through this reply not only protected China’s negative face in
the future, but also promoted its positive face. Based on this realization and the spokesman’s
consideration of positive politeness for the interviewer, we may argue that the feature of
positive politeness to the audience co-exists with the performance of intentional protection of
China’s negative face and the enhancement of its positive face.
Unfortunately, this evasive maneuver does not escape the attention of other journalists
at the press. One of them called the spokesman to account for his failure to provide explicit
answers to the preceding questions (‘You have just said that … and China is not quite aware
of ….’) and pressed for an explicit answer with the question composed of two sub-questions
Q3 and Q4 (Extract 3). This was a further FTA directed to the spokesman and the Chinese
government as individual.


41

---