The basic position that Brown and Levinson take is that politeness can be seen as a rational strategy for

handling face-threatening acts.

They derive their notion of "face" from Goffman and mean by it the public self-image every member of a society wants. Face can be either
lost or enhanced. Generally speaking, it is assumed that everyone within a society finds it best to help each other maintain face. Brown and
Levinson assume that the strategies people use in maintaining face or at least minimizing the threat of its loss will be guided by reason.
Needless to say, the judgment of the seriousness of a face- threatening act is crucial in determining precisely what strategy one should
take; the authors early on provide a formula for calculating the "weightiness" of such an act, the precise measures of which will take into
account cultural variationincluding such considerations as the social distance between the speaker and the hearer, the power that the
hearer has over the speaker, and the extent a face- threatening act is deemed to be an imposition in a particular culture.
A remarkable number of linguistic phenomena are considered. One that figures prominently is the development of politeness pronouns
that involve the dimension of plurality, for example, French vous (historically "you plural"). Rather than explaining the proliferation of such
usage in the many languages that use it as an instance of diffusion which some scholars have played upBrown and Levinson see the
plural developing because, in effect, by using it the speaker gives the hearer an "out": the hearer could opt to interpret the pronoun as not
specifically pinpointing him/her. Or else (and this would apply in particular to kin-based societies where status derives from membership in
a group), by addressing the bearer in the plural, the speaker acknowledges the bearer's social standing. This sort of explanation permeates
much of their discussion and it is not intended to account for historically petrified forms alone but rather to be seen as representative of the
processes generally at work at all times in all cultures.
The authors present detailed evidence for their theory from English, Tamil, and Tzeltal, and occasionally from other languages as well.
From the point of view of anthropologists trained in massive cross-cultural testing of hypotheses, the number of languages considered is
hardly impressive. But the detailed comparisons offered and the specificity of similarities considered are impressive. These include even
intonational gestures as well as such devices as hedges, the use of in-group identity markers, the tactic of impersonalizing both speaker
and hearer, and the like.