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7. Impersonalize the speaker and the hearer: Avoid the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ In order to indicate that the speaker does not wish to impinge on the hearer, the speaker may articulate the FTA in such a way that neither the speaker nor the hearer is explicitly addressed. The speaker should thus avoid using deictic pronouns of the 1st and 2nd pr. sg. Brown and Levinson present eight substrategies how to achieve this:
1. Performatives—in common communication the speakers often avoid overtly using highest performative verbs such as in (25);
2. Imperatives—in imperatives the speakers avoid using 2nd pr. sg. as an addressee of the FTA such as in (26);
3. Impersonal verbs—agent deletion in verb forms that are intrinsically Face-threatening (dative agents in English) such as in (27) or (28);
4. Passive and circumstantial voices—agent deletion allows avoiding references. (29);
5. Replacement of the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ by indefinites as in (30);
6. Pluralisation of the ‘you’ and ‘I’ pronouns (31);
7. Address term as ‘you’ avoidance—the speakers generally avoid using 2nd pr. sg. In attention-getting phrase, and replace it with honorifics such as in (32);
8. Reference terms as ‘I’ avoidance—the speaker attempts to distance his point-of-view by replacing ‘I’ with forms such as in royal/academic ‘We’ (33), or by 3rd pr. sg. Furthermore, employing remote past tense (34) or proximal demonstratives (35) may also lower the imposition conveyed by the FTA.
(25) I ask you to do this for me. > Do this for me.
(26) Take that out! compared to: You take that out!
(27) It appears/seems (to me) that...
(28) It broke. Compared to: I broke it.
(29) I expect. Compared to: It is expected.
(30) One shouldn’t do things like that. As compared with: You should do things like that.
(31) We regret to inform you...
(32) Excuse me, sir/miss. Compared to: ?Excuse me, you.
(33) King: His Majesty is not amused.
(34) I was wondering whether you could do me a little favour. / I was kind of interested in knowing if...
(35) Could I borrow a tiny bit of that/this paper?
