dissertation on politeness

Researching Politeness: From the ‘Classical’ Approach to Discourse Analysis … and Back

Published: 09 June 2020
Volume 4 , pages 259–272, ( 2020 )

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Fabienne H. Baider 1 ,
Georgeta Cislaru 2 &
Chantal Claudel 3

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Im/politeness has been subject to societal recommendations for centuries, and to academic studies for decades (Leech 1977 ; Lakoff 1973 ; Brown and Levinson 1978 ), maybe because politeness has been identified “as a key motivation for leaving things unsaid” (Norrick and Illie 2018 : 7). Politeness may be roughly defined as a frame of coded communicative norms embodying social conventionality, and impoliteness as a transgressional behaviour. This now well-established field of research provides researchers with a number of tools that have circulated widely in linguistics and beyond (intercultural studies, language teaching and language acquisition, etc.).

Different approaches to the topic have been identified along traditional divides in the field of pragmatics between on the one hand ‘Anglo-American and European pragmatics’ and on the other hand ‘micro and macro approaches’ (see Haugh and Culpeper 2018 : 213). Im/politeness may be seen as a kind of test-laboratory for numerous pragmatic concepts. The concepts of face (Goffman 1959 ), Grice’s principle of cooperation ( 1975 ), Brown and Levinson’s theory ( 1978 ), or Leech’s principle of politeness and maxims ( 1983 ) Footnote 1 are massively exploited for studying im/politeness. Therefore, several definitions and frameworks of im/politeness analysis compete in the field. An early conceptualization of politeness can be found in Leech’s notion of politeness as conflict avoidance, or Brown and Levinson’s ( 1978 ) formulation of politeness as avoiding or reducing face-threat, while more recent conceptualizations include politeness defined as the ‘interactional management of face needs’ (Grainger 2011 ) or im/politeness seen as social practice (Haugh 2015 ). Im/politeness can also be defined as a linguistic and/or paralinguistic/extralinguistic competence—non-verbal modalities such as prosody, kinesics, gesture and facial expressions (cf. Brown and Winter 2018 : 32–33), accompanying verbal rituals—to manage interpersonal relations. People develop and/or learn to master various strategies allowing them to structure/shape communication and relationships (Watts 2003 ; Locher and Watts 2005 ; Spencer-Oatey 2005 ). Some of these strategies are part of culturally shared norms, some are shaped by more local norms/cultures, within specific communities, in relationship with language genres and registers.

Im/politeness: Linguistics and the Social Turn

Across various theoretical frameworks and alongside developments in pragmatics, the concept of im/politeness and the related methodologies have continuously evolved. Culpeper ( 2011 ) and Grainger ( 2011 ) identified three “waves” in im/politeness research (see also Culpeper and Hardaker 2017 for a review). The first wave is anchored within early pragmatic theories and linguistic pragmatics, focusing on the micro-level of interactions, i.e. the utterances; thus, it works with speech act theory and conversational implicature. Lakoff’s approach ( 1973 , 1977 ) is an example of the first wave, which favours a quantitative dimension in the research. Taking into consideration the social motivations for language use, the second wave integrates the sociocultural dimensions of im/politeness strategies, making use for instance of Bourdieu’s ( 1977 , 1991 ) concepts of ‘symbolic capital’ and especially of the ‘habitus’ defined as “the dispositions [which] generate practices, perceptions and attitudes which are ‘regular’ without being consciously co-ordinated or governed by any ‘rule’” ( 1991 : 12). Fónagy’s ( 1982 ) concept of énoncé lié , defined as a stance-situation module, illustrates this new turn and anticipates contextual views.

Within this second wave, a more discursive approach has emerged since the 2000s, emphasizing these broader societal dimensions and challenging the use of concepts such as “appropriate” behaviour (Mills 2011 ), warning against general conclusions about situated behaviours and focusing on the hearer’s interpretation of the speech acts (as within Relevance theory, Watts 2003 ) since the meaning of speech acts is co-constructed between the participants. In that respect, Jary ( 1998 : 13) observed that “the relevance of polite behaviour to observers should not be taken to entail its relevance to participants”.

This social turn entailed the use of analytical frameworks that have been interpreted as ‘post-modern thinking’ (see Mills 2011 , who challenges this label). Such a shift in research on impoliteness led to the development of new theoretical frameworks (Eelen 2001 ; Kádár and Haugh 2013 : 5; Mills 2011 ), handling contextually situated polite and impolite strategies in order to counteract conversational moves (Culpeper 1996 , 2016 ). These new developments are also at the origin of the merging of the two terms into a single one, that of ‘im/politeness’. Interestingly, while one of the earliest studies devoted to the field focused on the topic of impoliteness within the classical model of analysis (Lachenicht 1980 ), it was politeness that attracted much more interest for quite a while (Culpeper and Hardaker 2017 : 206). It was only in 2008 (Bousfield 2008 ) that impoliteness was analyzed as “strategic, systematic, sophisticated and not uncommon” (ibid) and not as “some kind of politeness failure” (ibid). Impoliteness studies are then grounded both in the classical and the discursive approaches (Locher and Bousfield 2008 ).

These second-wave approaches have opened up towards corpus pragmatics since 2010 (see Romero-Trillo 2013 ; Rühlemann and Aijmer 2015 ), with the evaluation of appropriateness (cf. Fetzer 2007 ) entailing data/corpus observation and contextualization. Based on corpus linguistics methodologies, corpus studies of im/politeness strategies rely on more massive data, discuss the relationship between form and function, assess the pragmatic value in context and foster a renewal of pragmatic categories and data preferences (see, for an example, the study of criticism in academic book reviews by Diani 2015 ).

Im/politeness in Situated Interactions

In line with these developments, and still narrowing the focus, interaction pragmatics borrows approaches and tools from various fields of research such as discourse analysis, conversational analysis (Sacks et al. 1974 ), interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz and Hymes 1972 ), or micro sociology (Goffman 1959 , 1967 , 1981 ) to put them to the test of authentic data. The objective is to identify the rules for organizing exchanges (Béal and Traverso 2010 ; Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1987 , 2001 : 59). In that regard, two levels of politeness have been acknowledged in im/politeness research (Watts et al. 1992 ; Eelen 2001 ), echoing the divorce between theory and praxis. On the one hand, the so-called Politeness 1 (or first-order Politeness) refers to everyday folk-notions or perceptions of what polite behaviour is: it is defined as behaviours “deemed to be socially and culturally appropriate in any given social activity” (Watts et al. 1992 : 48). On the other hand, the so-called Politeness 2 (or second-order politeness) refers to conceptualizations formulated by researchers, and labelled by Watts ( 2005 : xx) as a ‘theoretical construct’ uncoupled from ‘praxis and being’.

Putting the hearer, as well as the speaker, in the foreground, and considering them as full members of the exchanges places him or her in the position of assessors of im/polite behaviour. Thus, “(im)politeness becomes not only a matter of speakers producing behaviour but also of hearers evaluating that behaviour” (Eelen 2001 : 110). In the field of linguistic pragmatics (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1984 ), the study of the illocutionary value of speech acts (ordering, advising, encouraging, etc.) is associated with revealing the impact of the parameters of the situation in which they are performed (conditions of production, the relational status of the instances involved, etc.). It can also be extended to the examination of the form in which they are carried out, since an act can be performed directly or indirectly, “under the cover of another language act” (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2001 : 52). At a more specific level of analysis, research questions on the functioning of speech acts may concern, in particular, the place given in statements to indirection (Blum-Kulka 1987 ), to supportive moves and/or to the internal modifiers they are composed of (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989 : 281–289).

Im/politeness: Conceptual Stakes

Since analytical approaches do not aim at identifying linguistic patterns but at recording the deployment of speech acts in context, second wave approaches have been criticized for their lack of generalization (Terkourafi 2005 : 102). The so-called third wave strives to find a compromise between formal and discursive approaches. Leech ( 2014 ) advocates integrating “pragmalinguistic aspects of (im)politeness alongside sociopragmatic dimensions” (Haugh and Culpeper 2018 : 216). Indeed relational approaches (e.g. Spencer-Oatey 2001 , 2005 ), the frame-based approach to im/politeness (Terkourafi 2001 , 2005 ), and the interactional approach (e.g. Arundale 2010 ; Haugh 2007 ) focus on specific linguistic forms and presuppose stable meanings while taking into account the context and including both speaker and hearer perspectives.

Thus im/politeness involves numerous issues and interfaces, depending on the viewpoint adopted. Ideology, power, face and identity are involved as expected dimensions of the hierarchical and tensional organization of society. Conventionality, norms, rituals and morality are involved as aspects of a regulated and tending-to-homogeneity social organization, but also as tools for the hierarchical organization of society (Baider and Constantinou 2014 ). Variation and exploitation of specific contexts (workplace, legal and healthcare settings, gender, digital communication, etc.) are involved as aspects of the epoch, genre and register sensitivity (Claudel 2015 ). Emotion, prosody and socialization are considered dimensions of the implication of im/politeness in sociality, relationality and identity construction (see Culpeper et al. 2017 ).

Normativity appears to be the driving force underpinning im/politeness (see also Haugh and Chang 2019 ). The impact of normativity on im/politeness is addressed through such issues as conventionality (Terkourafi 2008 ), morality (Kádár 2017 ), or implicit versus explicit knowledge. Kádár ( 2017 ) pointed out that politeness is often “mechanical”, and thus we can consider that it is neutral, not directly intentional. This is due to long-acquired moral norms and may explain the variability in perception and prescription. Obviously enough, it also explains the salience of impoliteness—Kádár ( 2017 ) calls it salience by default—as a transgression of what is expected and appropriate. Impoliteness may also function as a norm-controller, inasmuch as “some relationally destructive ritual actions are necessary to establish or restore the moral order and the normative flow of an interactional event, but on the evaluative level, they might not be clearly impolite” (Kádár 2017 : 9). Between politeness and impoliteness, Kerbrat-Orecchioni ( 1992 ) proposes three other categories: hyper-politeness, non-politeness and “rudeness politeness” ( polirudesse ). Hyperpoliteness is characterized by the massive presence of politeness markers, non-politeness (or apoliteness) by the “normal absence of any politeness marker” such as, for example, when an order is given during military training (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2014 : 300–301), and rudeness politeness through the use of im/polite behaviour not devoid of brutality (a scornful smile) whose function is “to reinforce the act of speech rather than to dampen it, and to increase its impact rather than to attenuate it” ( 1992 : 224).

To sum up, im/politeness issues engage assessing the appropriateness of the strategies deployed in communicative situations. Expectations are fixed in conjunction with deep-rooted moral norms—taken in a broad, context-sensitive perspective—and with the “common ground” (Stalnaker 2002 ) negotiated between language speakers. This viewpoint naturally leads to cross-cultural and intercultural studies, either corpus-based or experimental.

Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Im/politeness

The concept of common ground is central to Intercultural Pragmatics, but less so to Cross-cultural pragmatics which is concerned with the functioning of speech acts from a contrastive perspective (cf. Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1984 ; Blum-Kulka et al. 1989 ; Herbert 1989 ; Sifianou 1992 ; Katsiki and Zamouri 2002 ). The same act, generally identified as similar in the two or three languages and cultures compared, is observed in the light of the parameters of the situation in which it is formulated (Watts 2005 ; Ogiermann 2009 ; Bargiela-Chiappini and Kádár 2010 ; Ruiz de Zarobe and Ruiz de Zarobe 2012 ). In that respect, Diani’s study of mitigation devices in English and Italian book reviews ( 2015 ) found that the use of verbs and downtoning adverbs were the commonest hedges. Such studies could be of interest for translators or language learners.

The aim of the contrastive approach is to uncover meeting points and differences between the communities under study and, in so doing, to identify universal rules (cf. Béal 2010 : 32–33). It is also an opportunity to question the transcultural meaning of the speech acts under study, whose conceptual features are often considered as specific to English (Wierzbicka 1991 ). Contrasting research is also interested in routine formulae or, in Coulmas’ own words, “sets of lexical items which are being used for the enactment of routines” ( 1981 : 13). However, Haugh and Kádár ( 2017 : 1) point out that most research involving several languages and politeness has adopted this cross-cultural approach in intracultural settings. Thus, many questions arise: when the corpora come from languages other than the one used to present the research, is there a loss of meaning in the translation of the corpus data or in the interpretations which are made? The issue of data translation is even more crucial when the idioms involved are far apart (cf. Claudel and Felten 2006 ). From a methodological point of view, these corpora raise the tricky question of their collection because of the multiple steps to be taken to obtain the necessary authorization for their recording and/or, when the supports are written (letters, e-mails, etc.), for their processing. These data also raise questions about the level of comparability of the documents or interactions concerned, the descriptive categories to be retained, and the value of the speech acts to be compared. Do these speech acts really have the same meaning in the languages being compared? While the question may seem trivial when the comparison concerns languages and cultures that are close to each other (e.g. Italian and Spanish), it is certainly not self-evident in the case of distant languages and cultures (e.g. Japanese and French or Persian and French) (Claudel 2015 ). This points to the need for reflection on defining the invariant of the comparison, i.e. the tertium comparationis or common platform of comparison (Connor and Moreno 2005 ; Krzeszowski 1990 ; Traverso 2006 : 40–41).

Studies adopting an intercultural pragmatics and politeness approach focus on encounters between interactants with different cultural backgrounds such as L2 learners. When researching the linguistic behaviour of L2 speakers—which is the case when working in Interlanguage pragmatics—generalizations ignore the fact that variations inevitably occur in the way members of the same speech community define and practice im/politeness. On the other hand, in any analysis of (im)politeness the language(s) should consider the influence of the language a person speaks or where they have grown up. If there is not yet an intercultural theory of politeness (Haugh 2010 ; Kecskes 2013 ), this can be explained by the complexity of analyzing and theorizing (im)politeness from an intercultural perspective (Haugh and Kádár 2017 ).

Despite the complexity of the task, researching the pragmatic competence of L2 speakers, and in particular, the learning and teaching of polite behaviour, is a very well established field. However, in the earliest studies in Interlanguage pragmatics, social categories were generally reduced to the nationality or the ethnicity of the participants and considered as stable. The methodologies focus on testing the use of speech acts such as requests, complaints, compliments, refusals, etc. (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig and Salsbury 2004 ; Félix-Brasdefer and Cohen 2012 ; Rose 2005 ). The study of such speech acts can be anchored in classic first-wave politeness theory, focusing on linguistic forms such as those we find in discourse completion tasks. Corpora can then be exploited within quantitative approaches. Researchers may adopt a more discursive and relational approach, i.e. investigating im/politeness as a co-constructed speech event, uncovering the forms of appropriation of the language practices of learners through the study of differences in pragmalinguistic and sociolinguistic behaviours between native and non-native speakers (cf. Thomas 1983 ; Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993 ; Kasper and Rose 2002 ).

Methodological Issues: Discourse Analysis, Experimental and Historical Pragmatics

The approaches used to capture the forms of realization of im/politeness, whether from a monolingual perspective or a comparative perspective, are closely dependent on the units of analysis selected, which can encompass larger or smaller discourse segments. Researchers in contrastive pragmatics can orient their work towards discourse analysis or contrastive pragmatics as such (Péry-Woodley 1993 : 43). While the first trend stems from work in the ethnology of communication and the analysis of spoken discourse, the second is found in studies of speech acts along the lines of Searle ( 1975 ). These approaches are similar in that they both address the notion of speech act but from different angles. Whereas in contrastive pragmatics the speech act is the input that will describe how the act is performed in discourse situations, from the perspective of discourse analysts, the starting point is discourse, which is conceived as being the basis for the performance of language acts. The latter perspective is now at the heart of approaches claiming to be the ‘second wave’ of politeness research which, without necessarily adopting a comparative perspective, advocates situating itself on the level of discourse (cf. Kádár 2017 : xiii).

In this context, capturing phenomena of social reality, and more specifically of im/politeness, through the study of the functioning of language leads to methodological choices which, in relation to the theoretical background favoured, select linguistic and pragmatic categories of analysis. In contrast to these orientations, discourse can be put under scrutiny. In this case, the functioning of linguistic markers (deixis, enunciation markers, lexical entries, etc.) becomes crucial inasmuch as they frame the speech acts to be analyzed.

The fact that politeness often passes unnoticed (Culpeper 2011 ) and that transgressions like impoliteness are more tangible explains the success of these transgressions in recent years. It also challenges approaches to politeness and their methodological choices. The perception of im/politeness and its underpinnings, such as moral norms (Kádár 2017 ) or cultural conceptualizations (Sharifian 2011 ) became a major concern for pragmatic studies. The development of experimental pragmatics (Sperber and Noveck 2004 ) enhanced methodological opportunities to measure, from the speaker’s point of view, the perception, assessment and affiliation to moral and cultural baselines for various populations. The variability in individual perceptions has also become an issue for the pragmatics of im/politeness, and compels the theoretical conceptualization of linguistic strategies and their historical, social and cultural underpinnings (see also Haugh and Chang 2019 ). Evaluation involves forms of agency exercised in two ways, according to Haugh and Chang ( 2019 ): “(1) making different contextual assumptions about the event in question, and (2) drawing on different rationales to ground their respective classifications.” Methods such as questionnaires or discourse completion tasks (DCT), derived from experimental psychology, raise the questions of:

The non-homogeneity related to variability in the interpretation of the question formulated;

The difference between perception and expectations, between perception and what we may call “cultural recommendations”;

The status of implicit or explicit knowledge exploited for various im/politeness strategies—for instance, some speech acts are spontaneous and unconscious, while others like apologies or requests are most of the time prepared in advance (on this last point see Labben 2016 : 74).

Many studies have underlined the difficulties encountered by research in linguistic pragmatics, and this has led to the development of new methodologies, especially in the last 20 years: experimental pragmatics, corpus or discourse pragmatics, etc. Corpus linguistics can be used, for example, to research address terms or hedges, as illustrated by Diani’s study of mitigation devices within a contrastive perspective. Combining methodologies might be an exciting choice for the study of (im)politeness. However, pragmatic annotation as far as politeness is concerned (Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. 2013 ) is a complex task, since most pragmatic phenomena display a form–function ‘mismatch’ (Rühlemann and Aijmer 2015 : 11). This is the reason why automatic tagging does not give good results, and most often researchers resort to labour-intensive manual tagging (Rühlemann and Aijmer 2015 : 11), as is the case in most of the articles in the present volume. Semi-automatic tagging is a compromise which may bring about results, as Weisser’s ( 2015 ) Speech act annotation system DART suggests. However, most corpus pragmatics research adopts a hybrid approach, integrating qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

As for work on authentic or situated data, it is often the result of research into “discourse in institutional settings” when it involves non-native speakers because of the regularity and predictability of the interactional formats involved, which are largely dictated by the context of the encounter (Kasper 1999 : 73). The study of verbal exchanges between native speakers covers many other contexts, whether in the same community or in several cultural communities. Research on colloquial conversation (Traverso 1996 ) or interactions in commercial settings (Traverso 2006 ; Kerbrat-Orecchioni and Traverso 2008 ) are some examples.

Last but not least, as shown by Culpeper and Demmen ( 2011 ) with the rise of the individual self in nineteenth century Britain, historical evolutions change pragmatic baselines, and help in explaining contemporary im/politeness strategies The upturn of historical pragmatics in the last 10–15 years is indisputable and sustains already established or newly formulated issues (Bax and Kádár 2012 ). The place and the impact of norms and other cultural frames and availability may thus be challenged and recontextualized (Jucker 2012 ). The lack of experimental data in historical pragmatics on the perception and assessment of im/politeness strategies leads to a very fertile “discourse analysis” methodology, articulating the reconstruction of social context and a fine-grained study of linguistic strategies.

This Special Issue

This special issue focuses on the im/politeness and intercultural communication interface and explores several crucial areas such as Historical pragmatics, Forensic discourse, Impoliteness, etc. The authors’ choices of analytical frameworks range from a Frame-based Approach to Experimental Pragmatics, to mention but two. The shared aim is to understand the functioning or value of certain pragmatic or linguistic units in different interactional and situational contexts, taking into account the forms of circulation of discourse and/or phenomena related to what is at stake in the exchanges. Whether from a comparative angle or from monolingual perspectives, the contributors deal with the way im/politeness manifests itself in diachronic and/or synchronic contexts.

Maria Paola Tenchini and Aldo Frigerio’s paper takes a theoretical turn to deal with the value of insult and pejorative terms in reported discourse. The authors draw on the class of words and expressions called pejoratives, which are characterized by their negative connotative component, in order to question the responsibility of the one who reports an offensive term, and consequently the maintenance or semantic loss of these terms in the reported context. Tenchini and Frigerio’s study revisits the theoretical explanations which argue that the pejorative component has to be interpreted as impolite. They investigate in particular whether reporting a slur is labelled as an offensive strategy. The approach is sociolinguistic and makes use of questionnaires to test the speakers’ intuition; the results show contradictions with what some theories would have predicted as far as the offensiveness of the slurs in reported speech is concerned.

Katalin Nagy’s paper is situated in the field of historical pragmatics, one of the most recent branches of pragmatics. This field can shed light on phenomena of present-day languages and in particular, can challenge conclusions based on contemporary data. Nagy’s work examines the evolution of the formula ( no ) plàcia/plagués a Déu ‘may it (not) please God’ in a corpus of medieval Catalan texts belonging to different genres that circulated from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. The author explores the imperative and subjunctive moods used to give polite (or indirect) directives. The author contextualizes the study by recalling that in medieval times, the vision of the world was dominated by the place accorded to divine powers. This conception explains why, in constructions with the verb ‘plaure’, the position of the beneficiary is attributed to God as it was derived from formulas associated with his will. Identified as belonging to two distinct speech acts—the directive and the expressive—the construction with ‘plaure’ is posed as being either a wish coupled with a request to carry out the desired act or a simple wish. However, the question arises as to how to interpret the act performed in the statements analyzed. To evaluate their illocutionary force, the author notes the importance that should be given to subjectivity and uses grammatical markers (pronouns; verbal mode and tenses) as well as external, encyclopedic knowledge relating to the belief that in the Middle Ages everyone granted God power over their acts. Based on Brown and Levinson’s theory ( 1978 ), the author demonstrates that the speaker urges the addressee to have the willingness to do X. This finding challenges Searle’s ( 1975 : 72) statement that the speaker can only ask the hearer whether H wants or wishes to do X but not order H to want or wish to do so.

From a methodological viewpoint, the contrastive approach combining form-to-function and function-to-form perspectives, and comparing uses of speech act verbs in dialogues vs descriptive parts of the texts open avenues for renewed perspectives in pragmatic analysis.

In her article, Marianna Varga focuses on politeness strategies in a monolingual context, working on the concept of impression management in courtroom discourses. She puts under scrutiny two components of impression management (impression motivation and impression construction) used by judges, defendants and witnesses in ten Hungarian criminal and civil trials, recorded with a dictaphone and completed by written notes from direct observation and strategies of all the participants (judges, defendants, and witnesses). Five types of impression management are investigated in detail: tactical self-descriptions, attitude expressions, attributional statements, social associations, and conformity-compliance. The aim is to report on the “types of language impression management strategies” mobilized according to the profile of the protagonists, based on the assumption that accused persons will produce more of them than witnesses because of the need to reduce their sentences. It is thus shown that, if compared to what witnesses produce, the accused develop more strategies for managing the linguistic impression, particularly through politeness and respect, it is because the stakes are higher for them, so making a good impression can help to reduce their sentence. As for judges, it is above all the preservation of faces that they ensure by using various verbal behaviours (politeness; inclusive ‘we’…), in order to encourage cooperation with witnesses. One of the main strengths of the paper is the complex and very complete approach to the parameters influencing im/politeness and determining its social functioning; indeed, the analysis takes into consideration the characteristics of the Hungarian culture, language, and legal system and demonstrates the crucial importance of the politeness strategies mobilized for a successful courtroom interrogation.

Elena Nuzzo and Diego Cortés Velásquez compare the pragmalinguistic strategies of Italian and Colombian speakers during last-minute cancellations. The aim is to understand, from the point of view of politeness, the meeting points and differences at work in the communities under study, on the hypothesis that in languages and cultures dominated by positive politeness, as is the case in Colombia, it is not as essential to soften the act of last-minute cancellation as it is in communities where negative politeness is exercised. From a methodological point of view, the examination of the responses to the questionnaires submitted to the informants led the authors to adjust what were considered as sub-acts of justification, appeal to empathy, gratitude, etc. alongside internal modifiers (Evaluation, Intensifiers and Terms of Endearment). The statistical analysis they undertook enabled them to reveal the predominance of three sub-acts common to the Italian and Colombian corpus: annulment, explanation and remedial move. Other sub-acts report significant differences between Italians and Colombians, the former preferring the call to empathy, while the latter prefer gratitude. At a more precise level of analysis, the study shows that, although shared by both communities, the explanation takes more vague forms among Colombians than among Italians, the latter tending to clarify the reasons for their last-minute cancellation.

Moreover, the Italian data quantitatively contain more internal modifiers than the Colombian sub-corpus. After analyzing sub-acts by the situation (dinner, party and drink) and the effect of social distance (low, intermediate, high) on the distribution of internal modifiers, the authors conclude that there are standard practices between groups in the choice of sub-acts. However, these are mobilized differently and lead to distinct pragmalinguistic behaviours. The desire to maintain negative face leads Italians to prefer certain acts (apology or expression of regret) and to resort to detailed explanations to justify their last-minute cancellation. At the same time, their Colombian counterparts attach more importance to positive face through, in particular, the use of the act of gratitude. The choice of modifiers also shows differences between the practices. The use of intensifiers ( tanto ; terribilmente ) or modalisers ( purtroppo ) on the Italian side stresses the desire for reparation, whereas on the Colombian side, this approach is rarer.

Evgenia Vassilaki and Stathis Selimis’s article combines corpus linguistics and qualitative analysis to study pragmatic competence in an intercultural context. They focus on the use of the speech act of request in daily interactions and examine the frequency and distribution of supportive moves (SMs) used by 51 children (8- and 11-year-olds) of different linguistic backgrounds learning Greek. The data were elicited via an Oral Production Task, and the focus is on the use of pre- or post-positioned modifiers to mitigate the imposition of the request. Such a sociopragmatic feature has been found in early stages of L2 proficiency. The quantitative and qualitative results highlight sociopragmatic awareness in a more frequent, more appropriate and more native-like fashion than reported in previous research, even though comparisons still have to be carried out with caution. The claim put forward is that one should also take into account L1 pragmatic abilities, and therefore that the development of children’s general socio-cognitive abilities should also be considered in analyzing request performance studies.

The nature of the data exploited in this special issue offers different entry points and serves several purposes. Corpora can be used to collect points of view or judgements regarding certain linguistic-pragmatic behaviours. The results thus obtained through research conducted on corpora collected by DCT (Discourse Completion Test/Task), by online questionnaires or by tasks as illustrated in this volume can constitute a springboard for the development of subsequent studies based on targeted behaviours from real situations of communication.

‘A constraint observed in human communicative behaviour, influencing us to avoid communicative discord or offence, and maintain communicative concord’ (Leech 1983 : 7).

Arundale, R. (2010). Constituting face in conversation: Face, facework and interactional achievement. Journal of Pragmatics, 42 (8), 2078–2105.

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Baider, F.H., Cislaru, G. & Claudel, C. Researching Politeness: From the ‘Classical’ Approach to Discourse Analysis … and Back. Corpus Pragmatics 4 , 259–272 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-020-00088-8

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Exploring Brown and Levinson's Politeness Strategies: An Explanation on the Nature of the Politeness Phenomenon

REiLA : Journal of Research and Innovation in Language

This study aimed at reviwing brown levinson politeness strategies purposed in their book (1978) entitled "POLITENESS (Some Universals in Language Usage)". Over the past three decades, there has been a significant increase in research on politeness strategies from social and linguistic aspects. This is evident from the many papers that appear on this issue in international journals and monographs. Brown and Levinson (1978) developed a theory to explainphenomena related to the Politeness on verbal communication and non-verbal. This article For methods using a content analysis approach as a qualitative in research. Which has been studied in the book Brown & Levinson This article is interested in focusing on the types of politeness strategies put forward by Brown and Levinson (1978). This present study sees politeness stretegies proposed by brown and levinson still can be used in current situation related politeness both verbal and non verbal communication.

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Linguistic politeness has occupied a central place in the social study of language; even it has been the subject of intensive debate in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. A lot of linguistic scholars have carried out studies on linguistic politeness in a wide range of cultures. As a result, several theories have been proposed on linguistic politeness and have been established as scholarly concept. The major aim of this paper is to review the literature on linguistic politeness as a technical term. It will present some of the most widely used models of linguistic politeness in literature. It also tries to gloss the basic tenets of different theoretical approaches, the distinctive features of one theory versus another. There are some concepts of politeness that will become the subject of discussion of this article. These concepts are proposed by (1) Robin Lakoff, (2) Penelope Brown and Steven Levinson (3) Geoffrey Leech.

Mi My Nguyen

– In recent years, communicative competence has received special attention in the field of second/foreign language teaching and learning. Hymes (1972, cited in Al-Tayib Umar, 2006) asserts that to achieve communicative goals, second language learners must learn to speak not only accurately but also appropriately. Acquisition and learning politeness strategies as a part of learning L2 pragmatics have attracted a lot of attention in the second language acquisition (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Karatepe (1998, cited in Kılıçkaya, 2010) suggests that even high proficiency EFL learners of English have difficulty in performing some speech acts appropriately. Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984) claim that despite having linguistic competence, second and foreign language learners may not always be successful in communicating effectively and even they may make pragmatic mistakes. It is most likely that non-native speakers deviate from native speaker form of speech act realizations (Cohen & Olshtain, 1993). Due to misunderstanding among people from different cultures, people often fail to have successful communications. Although being polite is a universally acceptable concept, the meaning of politeness might vary across culture, gender, and power relations (Guodong & Jing, 2005). For that reason, researchers need to investigate the denotation of politeness in different cultures and try to identify the different patterns and discourse strategies. According to the Kılıçkaya (2010), social, cultural, situational, and personal factors, which shape the eventual linguistic output of the L2 learners, complicate the situation for language learners in selecting and using certain kinds of speech acts.

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This article deals with politeness theory which is of great importance in interpersonal communication. Politeness is characterized from the pragmalinguistics point of view, examples are given to demonstrate the presence and absence of politeness in the Hispanic discourse. Suggestions are provided on how to teach students politeness strategies in Spanish as a foreign language class. The necessity of correlating the categories of politeness with grammatical categories and context has been substantiated. This technique will allow foreign students to learn the rules of language behavior that exist among the Hispanic population.

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One of the prominent issues in pragmatics is politeness. Politeness can manifest in two actions, verbal and non-verbal communication. This study aimed to analyze the lecturer's and the students' non-verbal communication (NVC) in supporting the realization of Brown & Levinson's politeness strategies in English classroom interaction at Universitas Muhammadiyah Purworejo. This study explains the lecturer’s and students’ NVC in supporting the realization of bald on record strategy, positive politeness strategy, negative politeness strategy, off-record strategy, and don’t do the face-threatening act (FTA) strategy in English classroom interaction. In this study, the researchers applied qualitative research. The subjects were one English lecturer and students. The objects were the lecturer's and the students' utterances during the English learning process. The methods the researchers used to analyze the data were Brown & Levinson's (1987) politeness strategies theo...

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The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics

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30 Politeness

Thomas Holtgraves is Professor of Psychological Science at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. He conducts interdisciplinary research into multiple facets of language and social psychology. He is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Language and Social Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2014) and author of Language as Social Action: SocialPsychology and Language Use (Erlbaum, 2002).

Published: 09 May 2019
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This chapter reviews the major experimental approaches to politeness and considers the theoretical implications of these approaches for the domains of semantics and pragmatics. After a brief overview of the major theoretical orientations to politeness, a detailed review of empirical research on Brown & Levinson’s (B&L) politeness theory, as well as the issues raised by this research, is provided. Major critiques of the B&L model, and alternative situated and interactional models, are then noted. The implications of politeness for more recent research examining the role of politeness in reasoning and the communication of uncertainty is considered, followed by a review of the cognitive and neural processes involved in the processing of politeness.

Research on politeness has grown steadily over the past several decades and represents a truly multidisciplinary (if not interdisciplinary) field. Linguists, social psychologists, cognitive psychologists, communication scholars, sociolinguists, and others have all made important contributions to this endeavour. Experimental research on politeness, the focus of this chapter, represents a relatively small subset of this work. It has, however, made important contributions, particularly in terms of evaluating theoretical proposals. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a relatively broad overview of experimental research on linguistic politeness, describing both methodological techniques as well as some of the major findings and their theoretical implications. I provide first a brief overview of the major theoretical orientations to politeness. This is followed by a review of early empirical research on Brown & Levinson’s (B&L) politeness theory as well as the issues raised by this research. I then consider more recent research examining (1) the role of politeness in reasoning and the communication of uncertainty, and (2) the cognitive and neural processes involved in the processing of politeness.

30.1 A brief overview of politeness theories

Although there is a long history of scholarly interest in politeness (e.g., see Watts, 2003 ), experimental work on politeness followed the appearance of maxim-based models in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Two of these models, those of R. T. Lakoff ( 1973 , 1979 ) and Leech ( 1983 ), adopted the Gricean ( 1975 ) view of communication, but expanded Grice’s set of conversational maxims to include a set of politeness maxims designed to account for why some linguistic forms were preferred over others. Both theorists proposed a Politeness Principle (PP) that worked in conjunction with Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP). For Leech, the PP included the maxims of generosity, tact, approbation, modesty, agreement, and sympathy. Lakoff’s ( 1973 ) politeness maxims included: give options, don’t impose, and make the other feel good. Politeness occurs, according to these models, because speakers are constrained by these politeness maxims.

The most popular maxim-based theory, of course, was B&L’s politeness theory. Their theory, published first as a chapter in a volume on Questioning in 1978, and then later as a stand-alone book in 1987, continues to be the standard approach, against which all new theoretical developments are compared. The unique contribution of their theory was the inclusion of face-work as a universal motive for regulating politeness. Borrowing the concept of face from Goffman ( 1967 ), and merging it with Durkheim’s ( 1915 ) positive and negative rites, B&L postulated the existence of two universal human desires: negative face (desire for autonomy) and positive face (desire for approach by others). Humans are assumed to be oriented to both positive and negative face, and politeness is the linguistic (and non-linguistic) means for symbolically attending to these two dimensions. Equally important in their theory was the inclusion of broad social variables (power, distance, and act imposition) designed to influence the perceived weightiness of an act, and hence the politeness with which that act is performed.

Although popular and generative, numerous criticisms of the B&L model resulted in the development of discursive or post-modern approaches that began to gain currency in the 1990s (Watts, 1992 , 2003 ; Eelen, 2001 ; Locher, 2004 ) and today remain a vibrant alternative to the B&L approach. Fundamental to these approaches is the distinction between politeness as a lay or folk concept, termed first-order politeness (politeness 1 ), and politeness as a technical, sociolinguistic variable, or second-order politeness (politeness 2 ). Researchers taking a discursive approach generally argue that there is a fundamental divergence between first- and second-order politeness, and that it is the former rather than the latter that should be the central concern for sociolinguists. On this view, there are no universal motives or mechanisms for politeness; rather, politeness is completely situated. More recently, there have been attempts to articulate a middle ground between an overarching politeness model (à la B&L) and situated discursive views of politeness. These middle-ground or interactional models (Terkourafi, 2005 ; Arundale, 2006 ; Haugh, 2007 ) view politeness less as a strategy and more as expected behaviour, but behaviour that nonetheless is partially a function of more general interactional constraints.

30.2 Tests of Brown & Levinson’s model

Early experimental work on the B&L model focused primarily on two issues: the proposed ordering of politeness strategies and the role played by social variables in determining politeness levels. In terms of the former, B&L proposed the existence of four linguistic super-strategies that constituted a universal continuum of politeness. The ordering was based on the degree of face-threat associated with each of the following strategies; bald-on-record (no face support) was the least polite (and hence most face-threatening), followed in ascending order by positive politeness (emphasize solidarity with hearer), negative politeness (indicate respect for hearer’s autonomy), and off-record (maxim violation with deniability) politeness (the least face-threatening). Experiments designed to test this ordering focused primarily on requests and the general research strategy was to have participants rate tokens of the four super-strategies in terms of politeness and related interpersonal constructs (e.g. liking of the speaker). Partial support for the theory’s predicted ordering of the super-strategies was reported by several researchers (Fraser & Nolan, 1981 ; Hill et al., 1986 ; Blum-Kulka, 1987 ; Bauman, 1988 ; Holtgraves & Yang, 1990 ). More fine-grained politeness orderings were examined as well. Clark & Schunk ( 1980 ; see also Holtgraves & Yang, 1990 ) examined the perceived politeness of a set of negatively polite requests and found perceived politeness to vary as a function of the implied cost (i.e. threat) to the hearer. For example, ‘Could you x?’ was perceived as less costly, and hence more polite, than ‘Would you x?’

This research, however, raised several issues regarding this ordering. First, a consistent exception to the predicted ordering was that negatively polite forms were often ranked higher in politeness than off-record forms (Blum-Kulka, 1987 ; Holtgraves & Yang, 1990 ). Some researchers suggested that off-record forms carry a cost because the recipient must make an effort in order to infer the speaker’s meaning (Leech, 1983 ; Blum-Kulka, 1987 ). Others have argued that off-record forms may give the impression of manipulativeness on the part of the speaker (Lakoff, 1973 ). This issue is part of a larger question regarding the extent to which politeness should be equated with indirectness. If politeness is viewed as any deviation from maximally efficient communication (i.e. not in accord with all Gricean maxims) then there is a rough correspondence between politeness and indirectness. However, indirectness can occur for reasons other than politeness. Pinker and colleagues (Pinker et al., 2008 ; Lee & Pinker, 2010 ), for example, have argued that off-record forms are motivated by attempts to negotiate the nature of the relationship between interactants, and that the use of off-record forms accomplish this by providing speakers with a means of achieving plausible deniability. In this view, then, politeness and indirectness do not reside on the same scale.

A related issue concerns the proposed ordering of negative and positive politeness strategies. B&L, following Durkheim ( 1915 ) and Goffman ( 1967 ), argue that positive politeness (an approach-based strategy) is inherently less polite than negative politeness (an avoidance-based strategy), due to the presumption of closeness inherent in the former. However, some researchers argued that these forms are qualitatively different and hence cannot be ordered on a unidimensional continuum (Scollon & Scollon, 1981 ; Baxter, 1984 ; Tracy, 1990 ; Lim & Bowers, 1991 ). Still, for directives (threats to the hearer’s negative face) the proposed ordering makes sense theoretically (negative politeness grants the hearer greater autonomy than positive politeness) and is supported by empirical research (Holtgraves & Yang, 1990 ). On the other hand, for acts that threaten primarily the hearer’s positive face, research suggests that positive politeness may be perceived as more polite than negative politeness (Lim & Bowers, 1991 ; Holtgraves, 1997 ). It is possible that there may be a specificity principle at work here such that strategies orienting to the specific type of face threatened will be regarded as the most polite strategy. Thus, negatively polite strategies would be more polite for acts threatening the hearer’s negative face, and positively polite strategies would be more polite for acts threatening the hearer’s positive face.

Finally, several researchers have argued that B&L’s set of super-strategies is incomplete due to its overemphasis on politeness at the expense of impoliteness (Craig et al., 1986 ; Culpeper, 2011 ). That is, the least polite strategy in the B&L model is bald-on-record, a strategy which is simply the absence of any face support. No doubt aggressive attacks on others’ face occur and are not handled well within the B&L model.

30.3 Social interactional determinants of politeness

One of the most important features of the B&L model is the specification of links between politeness and the major social dimensions of power and distance. Their theory assumes that increasing hearer power, relationship distance, and act imposition will increase the overall weightiness of the act (i.e. degree of face-threat), and increased weightiness is expected to result in increased politeness. Researchers have used relatively straightforward role-playing scenario techniques to manipulate power, distance, and imposition in order to examine their predicted impact on the perceptions and production of politeness. Fairly consistent support has been reported for act imposition, with increasing imposition associated with increasing levels of politeness, an effect that has been reported for requests (Brown & Gilman, 1989 ; Leichty & Applegate, 1991 ; Holtgraves & Yang, 1992 ), expressions of gratitude (Okamoto & Robinson, 1997 ), recommendations vs. reports (Lambert, 1996 ), and accounts (i.e. explanations for untoward behaviour; McLaughun et al., 1983 ; Gonzales et al., 1990 ), as well as other speech acts (Brown & Gilman, 1989 ; Leichty & Applegate, 1991 ). Null findings have been reported (Baxter, 1984 ) but are rare. The power variable has also received experimental support. In general, greater politeness occurs or is expected as a function of increasing power of the recipient relative to the speaker (and hence decreasing power of the speaker). This effect has been reported with requests (Holtgraves & Yang, 1990 , 1992 ; Leichty & Applegate, 1991 ; Lim & Bowers, 1991 ), including observational studies of actual requests (Blum-Kulka et al., 1985 ), messages conveying bad news (Ambady et al., 1996 ), teasing (Keltner et al., 1998 ), reminders and complaints (Leichty & Applegate, 1991 ), criticisms (Lim & Bowers, 1991 ), accounts (Gonzales, Pederson et al., 1990 ), and questions (Holtgraves, 1986 ). Some of these effects have been replicated cross-culturally (Holtgraves & Yang, 1992 ; Ambady et al., 1996 ).

Finally, the results for the effects of relationship distance on politeness have been mixed. Consistent with the theory, some researchers have reported greater politeness as a function of increasing distance between interlocutors (Wood & Kroger, 1991 ; Holtgraves & Yang, 1992 ); others have reported the exact opposite (Baxter, 1984 ; Brown & Gilman, 1989 ). And some (e.g. Lambert, 1996 ) have reported no relationship between distance and politeness. Distance, of course, is a multifaceted variable and it has been measured and manipulated in a variety of ways. Slugoski & Turnbull ( 1988 ) (see also Brown & Gilman, 1989 ) argued that researchers sometimes confounded distance (i.e. familiarity) and affect (i.e. liking). Higher levels of politeness have been found to be associated with greater interpersonal distance (i.e. interactants are more polite with people with whom they are less familiar) but also with greater liking (people are more polite with those whom they like).

More recently, the relationship between distance and politeness has been investigated in terms of a popular social psychology theory termed Construal Level Theory (CLT; Trope & Liberman, 2003 ; Liberman & Trope, 2008 ). For CLT, something is psychologically distant (temporally, spatially, or socially) when it is not part of one’s direct experience. Psychologically distant stimuli are typically represented at a higher, more abstract level of construal while stimuli that are close are represented at a lower, more concrete level of construal. Stephan et al. ( 2010 ) argued that higher level construal is generally more polite than lower level construal. In eight experiments they found increasing politeness to occur as a function of increasing spatial and temporal distance, and increasing politeness to result in inferences of greater temporal and spatial distance. For example, in terms of temporal distance, participants produced more polite messages directed at someone in the distant future relative to someone in the near future. And conversely, the use of more polite forms led to judgements of greater temporal distance than the use of less polite forms. This represents an important extension of politeness theory because it both demonstrates the bidirectional relationship between distance and politeness, and expands the notion of distance to include spatial and temporal distance.

One issue that has been raised regarding the B&L model is the manner in which power, distance, and imposition interact. The model (implicitly) assumes that their effects are additive. Empirical research suggests otherwise. Many researchers who have examined the simultaneous impact of these variables on politeness have reported interactions between them, including Power by Distance interactions (Blum-Kulka et al., 1985 ; Holtgraves & Yang, 1990 ; Lim & Bowers, 1991 ), Imposition by Distance interactions (Leichty & Applegate, 1991 ; Holtgraves & Yang, 1992 ), and Imposition by Power interactions (Gonzales et al., 1990 ; Holtgraves & Yang, 1992 ). The existence of these interactions simply means that as the effects of one of the interpersonal variables become very large, the effects of the other two variables become much smaller. For example, a person who makes an extremely large request (i.e. high imposition) will tend to be polite regardless of power and distance.

A second issue is whether politeness is influenced by variables other than power, distance, and imposition. Obviously it is. It is important to note, however, that power, distance, and imposition are high-level, abstract variables that should subsume more specific variables. For example, ethnicity, gender, occupational differences, and so on are variables that feed into power and distance, and ultimately, politeness. Even mood states may be incorporated in the model in this way. For example, Forgas ( 1999a , b ) demonstrated that people in sad moods prefer to use greater levels of politeness than people in happy moods, possibly because a person’s mood influences their perceptions of the interpersonal context (power, distance, and imposition). Hence, people in a sad mood may perceive themselves as being relatively low in power, or perceive an act as being relatively more imposing, and it is these perceptions that affect their level of politeness. It may also be possible to use the model to explore individual differences in politeness, an area that has seen relatively little research. Introverts, for example, may perceive relatively greater distance between themselves and others, and hence produce higher levels of politeness. Extraverts, on the other hand, may perceive relatively less distance and hence favour the use of relatively less polite but more approach-based strategies (i.e. positive politeness).

On the other hand, Terkourafi ( 2001 , 2005 ; Vergis & Terkourafi, 2015 ) has argued for a frame-based approach to politeness in which different situational contexts, over time, come to be associated with expected politeness forms (i.e. they become conventionalized). Although these expectancies can be overridden by the context, the default meanings of these terms become part of their lexical meanings and the terms do not intentionally convey (im)politeness. This alternative offers a more granular approach, one in which power, distance, and imposition can play a role in politeness, but not the overarching role theorized by B&L.

A third issue concerns the direction of the relationship between power, distance, and politeness. For B&L, relative power and distance are often viewed as determinants of politeness; that is, speakers’ estimation of these variables determines act weightiness and hence the politeness strategy to be used. However, as many have noted, this is a static view and it is likely that the relationship is bidirectional. Specifically, if the use of a particular linguistic form is affected by power and distance, it follows that the use of a particular linguistic form will be informative for observers (including the hearer) regarding the speaker’s perceived power and distance. For example, because high-status speakers use less polite forms than lower-status interactants, the use of less polite forms should result in perceptions of higher speaker status, other things being equal. In a cross-cultural study using participants from the United States and South Korea, Holtgraves & Yang ( 1990 ) found that less polite request forms were associated with perceptions of greater speaker power. And there is a fairly substantial literature on what is termed powerful (vs. powerless) language. In general, this research suggests that the use of powerful language (essentially less polite language) results in perceptions of relatively greater power, credibility and persuasiveness (Erickson et al., 1978 ; Bradac & Mulac, 1984 ; Gibbons et al., 1991 ; Hosman & Wright, 1987 ; Burrell & Koper, 1998 ; Holtgraves & Lasky, 1999 ; Blankenship & Holtgraves, 2005 ), although there is some evidence that these effects may be moderated by speaker gender (Carli, 1990 ).

The relationship between politeness levels and perceptions of the speaker can be quite complex. For example, when a high-status speaker is extremely polite to a subordinate it will often result in perceived sarcasm (Slugoski & Turnbull, 1988 ). Moreover, this bidirectional relationship allows people to strategically vary their politeness as a means of negotiating and/or altering the interpersonal context; it is, in effect, an important component of impression management (Goffman, 1959 ). So, a higher-power person (e.g. a boss) can move from negative politeness to positive politeness in an attempt to negotiate a closer relationship. Similarly, a person in an established relationship may begin to use less politeness as a means of negotiating higher power in the relationship, and so on. This possibility can obviously result in interpersonal misperceptions or misunderstandings. A speaker may assume his politeness level reflects one dimension (e.g. closeness), but his interlocutor may assume it reflects a different dimension (e.g. power). This negotiated nature of politeness-based person perception awaits further empirical investigation.

30.4 Politeness, reasoning, and the communication of uncertainty

A new line of research has developed over the past decade that examines the role of politeness in reasoning and the communication of uncertainty (Bonnefon et al., 2011 ; Bonnefon, 2014 ; Juanchich et al., Chapter 21 in this volume). This research has demonstrated how politeness can influence the interpretation of probability terms (e.g. possible ), connectives (e.g. or , and ), and quantifiers (e.g. some , all ). Consider first probability terms. Their use can convey varying degrees of uncertainty (e.g. It’s possible you’ll flunk the course ). There are, however, other motivations for their use. Specifically, probability expressions can function as a politeness strategy (e.g. as a hedge on an assertion) and used as a means of managing face. Rather than saying ‘You’ll never finish it in time’—an expression that might threaten the recipient’s face—a speaker can hedge his opinion with ‘It’s possible you won’t finish it in time’.

The existence of multiple motives for the use of probability terms can influence the manner in which they are interpreted. This was demonstrated by Bonnefon & Villejoubert ( 2006 ) who asked participants to imagine that their family doctor told them they would ‘possibly’ develop either deafness or insomnia in the upcoming year. Participants judged the probability of the more severe disease (deafness) to be significantly higher than the probability of the less severe disease (insomnia). This occurred because participants judged the doctor to be using ‘possibly’ as a face-management device significantly more frequently when the condition was deafness than when it was insomnia, and they adjusted their estimates accordingly. In this experiment it was the hearer’s face that was being threatened, although it is possible for the speaker’s face to be threatened as well, with a similar impact on the interpretation of probability terms (Juanchich et al., 2012 ).

This effect has been demonstrated also with certain scalar expressions. Scalar expressions can be ordered on a scale with respect to their strength (e.g. < some , all >) (Levinson, 1983 ) and it has been argued that the use of the weaker, more inclusive, term (e.g. some ) implies that the stronger term (e.g. all ) does not hold (Levinson, 1983 ; Horn, 1984 ). Hence, the scalar implicature for ‘some’ is ‘some but not all’. Bonnefon et al. ( 2009 ) demonstrated that face management can influence the likelihood that a scalar implicature is generated, in much the same manner that it influences the interpretation of probability terms. When a situation is face-threatening, ‘some’ can be used as a hedge to politely indicate ‘all’. Consistent with this reasoning, Bonnefon et al. ( 2009 ) found that estimates of ‘some’ in ‘Some people hated your party’ were higher than estimates of ‘some’ in ‘Some people enjoyed your party’; people were more likely to assume that ‘some’ was being used in the service of face management in the former situation, and they adjusted their interpretations accordingly. More recently, Bonnefon et al. ( 2015 ) demonstrated that this effect varies as a function of the discourse context such that the effect is more pronounced when the scalar term is preceded by a brief silence, a dispreferred marker signalling that bad news is forthcoming (Holtgraves, 2000 ).

Finally, just as scalar expressions can be ordered on a scale according to their strength, so too can connectives (e.g. < or , and >). And just as with scalar expressions, the interpretation of these terms can be influenced by politeness considerations. Feeney & Bonnefon ( 2013 ) manipulated the content connected by ‘or’ such that it was either positive or negative (i.e. face-threatening). They found that exclusive interpretations (i.e. ‘one or the other but not both’) were significantly more likely for positive content than for negative content. There is a potential face management motive for the term when the content is negative, and because of this, people are less likely to generate the exclusive interpretation and instead assume that both interpretations are possible.

This research demonstrates that politeness can influence the interpretation of connectives, probability expressions and scalar terms. Is the production of these terms similarly affected? It appears so. Juanchich & Sirota ( 2013 ) asked participants to choose the probability expression that they would use in order to convey a particular outcome, and they manipulated the speaker’s communicative goal such that they were instructed either to be informative, to avoid blame (i.e. speaker face management), or to avoid upsetting the hearer (i.e. hearer face management). As expected, when the outcome was negative, participants chose expressions that conveyed less certainty under face management instructions (both hearer-face and speaker-face) than under instructions to be informative, an effect that was reversed when the outcome was positive. In a follow-up study, Sirota & Juanchich ( 2015 ) asked participants to choose probability expressions that they would use to convey negative information, and then assessed their communicative motives (rather than manipulating them) for choosing those expressions. Participants frequently (41.6%) indicated face management as their motive, and when they did so, they were more likely to choose an expression that conveyed a lower probability, relative to when they indicated that their motive was to be informative.

More recently, Holtgraves & Perdew ( 2016 ) examined both production and interpretation in the same study. Participants in these experiments were presented with situations that varied in terms of face-threat and were asked how they would communicate potentially threatening information. Both hearer threat (Experiment 1) and speaker threat (Experiment 2) were examined, and participants either chose from a pre-existing set of utterances or responded in an open-ended manner. In both experiments a second set of participants read these utterances and provided judgements as to the degree of uncertainty conveyed by the utterance. In both experiments, messages in the face-threatening condition conveyed greater uncertainty than messages in the non-face-threatening condition, and the probability estimates made by the second set of participants varied as a function of the conveyed uncertainty. This research demonstrates that when examining speakers and hearers together, severe events may be judged less likely (rather than more likely), because speakers tend to hedge the certainty with which they communicate the information.

30.5 Processing politeness

Variations in politeness can have a range of social and cognitive effects. But how, exactly, do these effects occur? Several different lines of research examining the processing of politeness have been pursued. One line of research has examined the extent to which people encode and retain the wording that conveys politeness. This is an important issue because it is relevant for the claim that at least some forms of politeness are expected, normative behaviour and hence non-salient (Watts, 2003 ). A frequent finding in the memory literature is that people typically forget the exact wording of an utterance but retain the gist of what was said (Sachs, 1967 ). One important exception to this is that wording will be remembered well when it has interpersonal implications (Keenan et al., 1977 ; MacWhinney et al., 1982 ). Politeness, of course, has clear interpersonal implications and research suggests that politeness wording is spontaneously encoded and retained. For example, Holtgraves ( 1997 ; see also Slugoski, 1995 ) examined incidental memory for wording that varied in politeness and found that people remembered politeness wording at levels exceeding chance. Interestingly, even when the specific wording was not remembered, people appear to have encoded the overall level of politeness and recalled wordings consistent with that level of politeness. In other words, if participants heard an impolite request, when asked to recall that request they tended to recall an impolite (rather than polite) form, even if they could not remember the exact wording. It was also the case, however, that memory for politeness wording was greater for cases of politeness wording that were inconsistent with the social context. For example, participants in a psychology experiment were more likely to remember impolite forms if the speaker was low (rather than high) in status (a graduate student) and polite forms if the speaker was high (rather than low) in status (a faculty member). Such forms violate expectations and hence are remembered well.

Memory studies have a potential limitation in that their results can be ambiguous in terms of actual on-line processing. More recently, researchers have begun to use on-line techniques in order to examine the processing of politeness in real time. One such approach is to use an eye-tracking methodology. For example, Raizen et al. ( 2015 ) used an eye-tracking procedure to examine the processing of taboo words (i.e. potential violations of positive face). They found that early fixations on taboo words varied as a function of an interaction between the speaker’s identity and the situational appropriateness of a taboo word. Specifically, taboo words in appropriate situations resulted in longer fixations when uttered by someone unlikely to use taboo words (‘saints’) than when uttered by someone expected to use taboo words (‘sinners’).

Other researchers have used electrophysiological techniques to examine politeness processing. For example, Jiang and colleagues (Jiang et al., 2013 , 2015 ) recorded Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) as participants read conversations in which speaker status and pronoun type (respectful vs. disrespectful) were manipulated. Status-inconsistent pronouns (e.g. disrespectful pronouns from a lower-status speaker) resulted in an enhanced N400—interpreted as an indicator of semantic integration effort—compared to status-consistent pronouns, thereby suggesting that brain activity varies as a function of the pragmatic implications. The status-inconsistent pronoun also resulted in a later negativity (500‒800 milliseconds (ms)) but not late positivity (i.e. P600). The authors interpret the failure to observe the latter as indicating support for a contextualized view of politeness (Terkourafi 2001 , 2005 ) rather than an intentionalist view (B&L). These researchers also examined individual differences in reactions to the politeness violation. Male participants, as well as those scoring higher on a measure of fantasy (ability to transpose oneself into the feelings and actions of fictitious others), demonstrated a significantly larger N400 in response to the status-inconsistent pronoun than females and those scoring lower on fantasy.

Hoeks et al. ( 2013 ) examined neurophysiological reactions to impolite utterances that were request refusals. Participants listened to dialogues in which one person asked another for a favour (either a request for an action to be performed or a question) and the other responded with a blunt ‘No’ or a ‘No’ that included an apology and reason for the refusal. These researchers found a significant P600 for the former relative to the latter. However, for the request for action, reactions to the refusal condition started earlier, were more broadly distributed, and of a larger magnitude relative to the question condition. The authors interpret this reaction as reflecting participants’ reorganization of their conversation model as a result of linguistic impoliteness. The possibility that this reorganization may reflect also an updating of representations of the speaker (i.e. that he’s rude) was noted.

Recently, Holtgraves & Kraus ( 2018 ) used electrophysiological techniques to examine the role of politeness in the comprehension of several different scalar expressions. Prior research using electrophysiological techniques to examine scalar expressions has explored their use in logical contexts (e.g. Some people have lungs ) (Noveck & Posada, 2003 ; Nieuwland et al., 2010 ; Hartshorne, Snedeker, Azar, & Kim, 2015 ; Skordos & Barner and Breheny, Chapters 2 and 4 , respectively, in this volume). In contrast, Holtgraves & Kraus examined their use in conversational contexts. They had participants read scenarios followed by a target utterance containing a scalar expression (e.g. some ) in the first half of the utterance, with a second half continuation of the utterance containing either the pragmatic meaning (e.g. not all ) or the semantic meaning (e.g. all ). The semantic meaning resulted in a larger P300 than did the pragmatic meaning, and this difference was greater when the situation was face-threatening relative to when it was not face-threatening. This suggests that in conversational contexts, scalar implicatures are generated when the scalar term is encountered, especially when the situation is face-threatening.

Deficit-based research is also relevant for understanding politeness processing. Consider, for example, recent research on language deficits in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Although PD is primarily associated with debilitating extrapyramidal motor dysfunction, it also affects thinking, reasoning, planning, and language functions, and in terms of the latter there is some evidence of pragmatic impairment in PD (e.g. Lewis et al., 1998 ; McNamara & Durso, 2003 ), including politeness. To investigate the latter, Holtgraves & McNamara ( 2010 ) used a role-playing task and asked participants (those with PD and matched controls) to imagine being in situations in which they were to make a request of another person and to write out exactly what they would say in order to make each request. Overall, the PD participants were less polite than the control participants. More importantly, although increasing imposition was associated with increasing politeness for control participants, this did not occur for PD participants, suggesting a reduced sensitivity to the social context for those with PD. This reduced sensitivity also occurred for speaker power, but only for PD participants who were on higher doses of dopaminergic medication.

What are the potential sources of the politeness impairment in PD? One possibility is that it reflects an overall decline in cognitive capabilities, especially executive cognitive functions (Owen et al., 1992 ; Lange et al., 1992 ; Taylor & Saint-Cyr, 1995 ; Troster & Woods, 2003 ; McNamara et al., 2008 ). Reduced cognitive resources in PD could result in an attentional deficit such that variations in request size are not noticed; because they are not noticed there is no corresponding change in politeness. Consistent with this possibility, researchers have demonstrated a clear connection between executive function deficits in PD and the ability to contribute meaningfully (e.g. being appropriately informative) to conversations (Holtgraves et al., 2013 ). Another possibility is that even when variations in the context are noticed, the cognitive capacities required to produce more polite (and cognitively complex) strategies are hindered in people with PD. In the Holtgraves & McNamara ( 2010 ) research, participants on higher doses of dopaminergic medication did notice variations in recipient status (based on manipulation check items) but they failed to produce more polite strategies for a higher-power recipient.

Researchers also have examined politeness processing deficits associated with damage to the right hemisphere (RHD). Pell ( 2007 ; Experiment 2) examined politeness judgements of RHD and heathy controls in which both prosody and utterance type (direct, indirect, very indirect) were manipulated. Past research has suggested RHD is associated with a prosody processing deficit. However, in this experiment it was the interaction of prosody and language, more specifically the occurrence of linguistic and prosodic discrepancies as a means of conveying sarcasm, that posed difficulties for RHD participants (but not for healthy controls). In addition, the distinctions made by RHD participants based on linguistic cues alone were not as fine as those made by healthy controls, a finding similar to that reported for PD individuals.

30.6 Conclusion

Experimental studies of politeness continue to be a small but relatively critical component of politeness research. After a flurry of experimental activity in the 1980s and 1990s designed to test predictions derived from the B&L model, experimental studies of politeness have expanded into new areas as described in this chapter. Looking forward, I expect there will be a continuing focus on the processing of politeness. The use of electrophysiological techniques in this regard is only beginning and has the potential to provide relevant information regarding the processes involved in comprehending politeness. Experimental studies of the role of politeness in reasoning and the communication of uncertainty should continue as well. Hopefully, the success of this endeavour will prompt researchers to consider other areas for which the analysis of politeness processes may be relevant. There is, for example, no shortage of topics in social psychology (e.g. persuasion, person perception, relationship negotiation, etc.) for which politeness plays an important but as yet unexamined role. Other important areas for future experimental research include the relationship between politeness and indirectness, the manner in which non-verbal politeness interacts with and modifies verbal politeness, individual differences in politeness, and of course cross-cultural similarities and differences in politeness, all areas that could be examined experimentally.

Experimental studies of politeness should continue to remain an important component of politeness research because they allow for the evaluation of theoretical predictions and tests of competing models. For example, the results of early empirical research on the B&L model suggested several ways in which that model needed to be modified, including the ordering of politeness strategies and the interactive effects of social variables. Experimental studies of the processing of politeness have much to offer in this regard. Or consider the claim that politeness is normative and expected and hence typically not noticed (Watts, 2003 ). Experimental memory research suggests that this may not be the case, and that people do encode some representation of a speaker’s level of politeness, even when it is expected (Holtgraves, 1997 ). Or consider the manner in which ERPs to status pronoun violations provide support for a contextualist rather than intentionalist view of politeness (Jiang et al., 2015 ).

The downside of experimental studies of politeness is their potential artificiality and decontextualized nature. Trade-offs are involved, of course, and gains in experimental control are often paid for with a drop in realism. Still, it is possible to make experimental stimuli fairly realistic, by, for example, collecting actual discourse samples to then be used in experimental research. And the development of new methodologies may eventually allow for the examination of real-time situated politeness via the use of electrophysiological techniques as individuals engage in (constrained) natural language use (see, e.g., Hoeks & Bouwer, 2014 ). The gain in precise experimental control, coupled with the back and forth between theory and data, can facilitate advances in our understanding of certain facets of politeness, an understanding that can contribute to and compliment advances made with non-experimental techniques. In short, experimental research on politeness should not be ending anytime soon.

Acknowledgements

The writing of this chapter was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1224553).

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John McWhorter

On broadway, ‘centering’ antiracism is delightful.

By John McWhorter

Opinion Writer

My 12-year-old daughter practically had to drag me into the musical “Six,” currently raging on Broadway, in which Henry VIII’s six wives all have their say about what happened to them. I wanted to see “Kimberly Akimbo.” I’m afraid I have lost touch with modern pop, and from a distance the whole “Six” premise sounded kind of unpromising to me (a singing Anne of Cleves?).

But after 15 minutes I was already itching to give it a standing ovation. Each wife comes out, in her way, as a proud, self-directed figure. For one, I love that my daughters will get this slice of history from the point of view (even if stylized) of the women, and even more that the women are cast as people of color(s), fostering a view of them as humans rather than racial types. In this, the whole show is a kind of lesson in antiracism, regardless of whether a viewer is consciously aware of it. In that way, it is a quintessentially modern work of musical theater. My daughters can sit through “A Man for All Seasons” some other time.

Beyond the lessons “Six” teaches, the performers manage some of the deftest work on Broadway I’ve ever seen. All six sing, act and move during almost the whole show at top-rate levels — I don’t even know how they remember all they have to do during the hour and a half — and the score does its job and then some: Every song in “Six” pops even if the genre isn’t your everyday soundscape.

So, “Six” can change your lens in an antiracist (and antisexist) way — while also turning you on to art, wonder, curiosity and excitement.

And this got me thinking about how much less vibrant, or even constructive, the antiracist mission feels at universities. Remember when, in 2020, the new idea was for them to “center” antiracism as their focal mission? One may have thought this was more trend than game plan, but it remains very much entrenched nationwide. According to the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative law firm, first-year law students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison just this semester were required to attend a “ re-orientation ,” learning that explained that white people have a “fear of people of color and what would happen if they gained ‘control’” and will never be free of “racist conditioning.” A University of Notre Dame “inclusive teaching” resource from last year notes that “anti-racist teaching is important because it positions both instructors and students as agents of change towards a more just society,” emphasis theirs, with the implication that this mission has unquestionable primacy in a moral society. Statements that antiracism (and battling differentials in power more generally) are central to university departments’ missions are now almost common coin. I just participated in a discussion of antiracism as universities’ central focus at the University of Texas at Austin and am regularly asked to do so elsewhere.

And I think the persistence of this centering of antiracism at universities is kind of scary.

It may understandably seem, after these four years as well as the ones preceding, that for universities to maintain antiracism as the guiding star of their endeavors is as ordinary as steak and potatoes.

But in the spirit of John Stuart Mill advising us to revisit even assumptions that feel settled, imagine a nationwide call for all universities to “center” climate change as the singular focus of their mission. Or STEM subjects, historical awareness or civic awareness, each of these positioned as the key to serious engagement with the challenges of the future. We might imagine the university is to “center” artistic vision or skill in public expression, or even physical culture.

Note that all of these centerings would be about things most consider good, and even crucial, but the question would be why the university, as a general rule, should make any of those things the essence of what an education should consist of. Any university that did so would openly acknowledge that its choice was an unusual, and perhaps experimental, one.

One might propose that antiracism deserves pride of place as a kind of atonement for the sins of slavery and Jim Crow. But while getting beyond evils requires being aware of them, redressing past injustices — in fact, redressing just one past injustice — is not the basic mission of a university. The Scholastics of the Middle Ages “centered” education on Christianity, with the idea that education must explore or at least be ever consonant with the essences of natural law and eternal grace. Today we may view this focus as antique or unintentionally parochial. But it’s not just Christianity: We should question the idea that that any one issue, even one that feels urgent at this particular moment, must be regarded as the heart of education.

I found Bradley Cooper’s biopic of Leonard Bernstein, “Maestro,” incurious in a related way. To build an entire film around Bernstein’s being gay or bisexual — with “West Side Story,” his masterful teaching on television and even the radical politics that led to the famous Black Panthers fund-raiser in his home left out or barely perceptible — is an almost boorish reduction of a life, soul and talent. Cooper’s focus reflects neither how life felt to Bernstein (which I have heard about from friends of his) nor how he should be presented to those new to him.

Imagine if Cooper was directing “Oppenheimer” and J. Robert Oppenheimer happened to be gay, and the film had focused on how he and his wife dealt with that rather than, well, what actually made his life significant. This is what it looks like to me for universities to make antiracism their core mission. Antiracism is important, but for a whole world to revolve around it yields a distortion of what America is, and what actual humanity, be it Black or white, is or can be.

I am especially dismayed by the utter static joylessness of the endeavor. The primum mobile is glum accusation, with observations considered most important (to the extent that they lend themselves to this mission). A curiosity focused mainly on condemnation is not truly curiosity.

A long time ago at a university function, a Black scholar was telling me about his dissertation. It described how in the 19th century in one state, Black people with a certain disability were offered fewer resources than white ones with the same disability. It isn’t that such injustice should not be chronicled, but for one, it would be hard to say that what he had discovered was exactly surprising. And I couldn’t help noticing the guy’s gloom. He talked about this dissertation, the product of years’ work, in the tone one would harbor to talk about bedbugs having been discovered in his house.

But near me, another Black scholar was talking about her study of a (very white) operetta composer of roughly the same period, whose work indeed contains richnesses often overlooked. This scholar was elated, intrigued, driven — and although I was polite and made sure to hear the gloomy guy out, I couldn’t help feeling that the woman studying operetta was expanding her mind more, not to mention getting more out of life. (I should mention that her work also involved issues related to Black people.)

In the foisting of an antiracist agenda upon the life of the mind, I see increasingly constricted space for what knowledge truly is. Our universities are becoming temples of a kind of dutiful score-settling, where the motto is less something about truth in Latin than “j’accuse.” It’s a narrow, soul-crushing abbreviation of what education is supposed to be.

John McWhorter ( @JohnHMcWhorter ) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “ Nine Nasty Words : English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “ Woke Racism : How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @ JohnHMcWhorter

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This dissertation contributes to the theory and research in the fields of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), EIL, Intercultural Communication, Interlanguage Pragmatics and Politeness by providing insights into the pragmatic competence and politeness of L2 English speakers. This work deepens the body of scholarship in these
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