Clearing the mist: The border between linguistic politeness and social etiquette (original) (raw)
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Politeness is a topic on which people have very different opinions (and “people,” in this case, includes linguistic scholars and researchers). According to one view, politeness is a superficial and dispensable adornment of human language, rather like icing on a cake. For others, including myself, it is a deeper phenomenon, some- thing that human communicators would find it hard to do without. 1 Many children learning their native language soon discover the importance of saying things like please and thank you, which are insisted on by their parents in the process of social-ization—becoming “paid-up” members of human society. This reminds us that po-liteness is a social phenomenon—and yet a social phenomenon largely manifested through the use of language.
English Linguistics (English Society of Japan) 33: 2 (2017) 511–543, 2017
This review paper focusses on how Leech’s (2014) General Strategy of Politeness and its sub-strategies (maxims) of pos-/neg-politeness work in the naturally occurring data of Japanese and English. The ultimate goal is to explore how people in conversation proceeds interactively by aligning themselves with each other in order to attain positive/negative politeness goals. Rather than looking at data pragmalinguistically in the sense of Leech (2014), we maintain the view that politeness phenomena are to be analyzed functionally and sequentially. After reviewing Leech’s most recent approaches, we propose that his (old) cost/benefit or (new) high/low value maxims of politeness principle may be applicable to natural data in some way, but need complete revision in terms of social and functional perspectives.
Integrative pragmatics and (im)politeness theory
Pragmatics and its Interfaces (ed. Cornelia Ilie and Neal Norrick)
In this chapter, we first discuss the role that pragmatics has played in the development of (im)politeness theory, and the recent move towards a middle ground that integrates classic and discursive approaches to (im)politeness. We outline the key tenets of integrative pragmatics that afford such a move, before illustrating how these can be implemented through a case study focusing on an incident in Big Brother UK where the (ostensibly) jocular use of a racial slur by a contestant caused offence and the subsequent removal of that contestant from the show. Our analyses draw from multiple methods, including those of interactional pragmatics and corpus pragmatics. In this way, we aim to both highlight the fundamentally pragmatic basis of (im)politeness, as well as the need for a nuanced and complex theorisation that integrates multiple perspectives and methods of analysis.
CENTRAL ASIAN JOURNAL OF LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE, 2022
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.
Linguistic Politeness Beyond Modernity
Over the past three decades, politeness studies have attempted a scientific conceptualisation of politeness and have sought to establish a universal theory applicable to all cultures and languages. Recognising that the field has been influenced by modernist principles in theory construction, this dissertation engages in a critical reconsideration of politeness, setting it in the wider intellectual context of modernity and post-modernity. In the first half, it uncovers the assumptions underlying three major theories: Lakoff (1973, 1975), Leech (1983) and Brown & Levinson (1978[1987]). Lakoff and Leech’s theories conceive of politeness as pragmatic rules/principles in a framework inherited from Saussurean structuralism. These represent a ‘structure-centred approach’, whereas B&L’s theory can be seen as an ‘agency-centred approach’, concentrating on the actor (agency) and borrowing theoretical constructs from ‘rational choice theory’ – indeed B&L’s “Model Person” is modernity’s model of an ‘autonomous’ ‘rational’ ‘calculative’ self. But in late modern sociology, the longstanding structure/agency, theory/practice, mind/body, objectivism/subjectivism dichotomies have reached an epistemological deadlock, and politeness theories now face similar difficulties. The dissertation then explores alternative ways of understanding politeness, unconstrained by modernist assumptions, and turns to Bourdieu, Goffman and Gadamer as ‘thinking tools’. Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice’ helps to resolve structure/agency and other dichotomies, and his habitus provides a healthy alternative to B&L’s politeness as ‘rational calculative action’. However Bourdieu’s theory provides too limited a role for ‘agency’ in politeness, and here Goffman’s socially constructed self in social interaction proves complementary. Lastly, modernist politeness theories assume that the Hearer’s role is to reconstruct the Speaker’s intentions passively and here Gadamer’s hermeneutics, particularly his notions of ‘prejudices’ and ‘horizons’ illuminates a great deal of contingency which surrounds the Hearer, vital to a thorough evaluation of politeness. Overall, the dissertation moves from a critique of modernist approaches to politeness towards a more viable post-modern reconstruction.