Facework, social politeness and the Alzheimer's patient

A recent paper by (Temple et al., 1999) investigating the politeness abilit ies of Alzheimer's sufferers has suggested that the sufferers they worked w ith were capable of employing politeness strategies towards their interlocu tor. Given that politeness, according to (Brown and Levinson, 1987) revolve s around face and that attending to another person's face requires the abil ity to take the other's role or perspective, Temple et al.'s findings would seem to contradict the findings of (Hamilton, 1988) who made the claim tha t Alzheimer's sufferers are unable to take the role of the other. Our propo sal is that a more sophisticated view of politeness is required in identify ing what the Alzheimer's patient is capable of. A refinement of the notion of politeness would also allow us to reconcile these two views. This refine ment may be usefully achieved through employing the subdivision made by (Ja nney and Arndt, 1992) who propose that social politeness be distinguished f rom tact. In this approach, it is tact that involves facework while social politeness is more conventionalized or routinized. The distinction between tact and social politeness allows us to recognise certain politeness behavi ours as not involving facework. Applying this distinction to our data, we r nd that our subject does engage in social politeness but, as one would expe ct from Hamilton's assumptions, she does not appear to be able to attend to the face of her interlocutors with much show of tact. However, in relation to facework, whilst she does not demonstrate much awareness of the need to protect the other's face, she does, in fact, engage with some sophisticati on in saving her own face. In this paper, we aim to examine not whether Alz heimer's Disease sufferers have the ability to be polite or not but which a spects of politeness remain after other aspects appear to have been lost.