Politeness can be found in different cultural and languages all over the world, and because of that, people from different culture might have different point of view when speaking of politeness. Throughout history, there have been studies and research on politeness, and one of the most significant and influential research on linguistic politeness would be Brown and Levinson's politeness theory. Even though Brown and Levinson's politeness theory of "face" has become a foundation of politeness study, some researcher who are from the tradition Eastern culture, have criticized Brown and Levinson's theory, saying that B&L's theory does not fit well in collectivistic eastern culture societies. In this paper, I am going to focus on politeness of Japanese honorific. Also I am going to review articles about eastern language politeness, and discuss about different authors' perspective, and try to examine the question: Is B&L's politeness theory suitable for Eastern language politeness?
Articles Review:
Meyehroff
According to Meyehroff, Brown and Levinson's theory is based on Erving Goffman's notion of "face", with that, they developed two types of faces, which are positive and negative face. Negative face is the desire of one's action be unimpeded by others. And the positive face is the desire to be acknowledge by everyone else within the community. They also suggests that in order to protect and express face wants, people use different politeness strategies, also known