Volume 20, Issue 1 - Special Issue: 20 years (further) on: whither politeness studies now? Opening up the binaries; Guest Editors: Michael Haugh and Jim O’Driscoll

What (im)politeness means changes over time. As these changes are usually gradual, we tend to be relatively unaware of them. However, when changes are abrupt, people not only notice but are also concerned with them. The COVID-19 pandemic entailed such abrupt changes involving new rules most of which are at odds with the rather automatic conventions of politeness that we follow. My aim in this paper is to explore what politeness means to non-academics in the context of the pandemic and how similar or different their understandings are from academic accounts. To this end, I will draw from an online article entitled “Your politeness is a public health hazard”, which appeared at the onset of the pandemic, and the user-generated comments it triggered. The discussion is placed within the discursive turn in (im)politeness research, considering its key distinction between first-order and second-order conceptualisations of politeness. The findings suggest that politeness in the pandemic is still mostly understood as consideration for the other, an understanding shared with (im)politeness research. However, posters’ views are broader overlapping with understandings of ‘civility’. These views manifest their knowledge as observers and participants of social reality but also reveal that they are in dialogue with work in philosophy, sociology and psychology.

This paper examines the Italian folk concept of bella figura in the framework of politeness-theories and the various binary conceptions it provides for explaining the nature of human communication. BF is a culture-specific understanding of self-projection in everyday discourse: It is both, a cognitive concept concerning the “beautiful” embodiment of self, and a performative concept concerning the active “figuring out” of a bella figura in order to avoid its contrary, the brutta figura. Thus, the figura -concept represents a pragmatic principle for acting in line with socially accepted norms setting out a reference frame for judging social endeavours according to a culture-inherent value system. Accordingly, affinities can be assumed between the figura -concept and the sociopragmatic core notions ‘face’ and ‘politeness’. A comparison of the figura -concept with the respective first- and second-order conceptions of the two, reflects a cultural version of ‘impression management’ conceiving an image of self which coincides with Goffman’s, but not at all with Brown and Levinson’s face-concept. This makes it difficult to identify figura in relation to politeness. Connections and disconnections are discussed alongside the paradigmatic binary scales and the positive/negative value-attributes. Finally, the findings are verified by comparing the use of the respective expressions as evaluation tools.

Historical politeness scholars use Discernment as a second-order metaterm for compulsory social behaviour that is scripted according to circumstances and rank difference. However, in Renaissance courtesy books the Italian verb discernere ‘to discern’ has a first-order meaning: to individually work out appropriate behaviour when the fit of rules to circumstances is unclear. Discernment1 and Discernment2 appear to contradict each other. This paper addresses a theory gap: a theory of Discernment2 must unravel the link with Discernment1, given that Discernment1 functions as a metaterm in prescriptive politeness sources from a historical period for which scholars believe social practices are determined by Discernment2. Using a self-built corpus of ca. one hundred nineteenth-century etiquette books in US-UK English, French, Italian and Dutch, I conduct a semantic analysis of discern * (92 hits) and its collocate “tact”, tact, tatto, takt (575 hits), which point to a practical type of reasoning, to carry out a careful assessment of the unique and complex situation at hand before deciding on a course of action. However detailed etiquette scripts are, discernment (tact) is needed to process the complexity of real-life circumstances. Hence, Discernment1 and 2 appear complementary.

This paper argues for a distinction between “conduct politeness” and “etiquette politeness”, where the former refers to the propriety of what people do and the latter to the decorum of how people do things. In everyday discourse, the distinction is often fuzzy, but as a second order distinction the terminology provides a useful analytical tool. In the history of politeness in English, a bifurcation into the two types of politeness can be observed in the eighteenth century, and today the distinction provides additional conceptual clarity of the changing theoretical focus during the three waves of politeness theory. After a review of the historical link between morals and manners, a brief case study focuses on their separation in the eighteenth century. A final discussion applies the distinction to the paradox that politeness is often seen as a positive thing that, unfortunately, is on the decline and as a negative thing because it is insincere, superficial and hypocritical.

In this article, I explore the potential of the strategic/non-strategic distinction to link im/politeness with recent developments in pragmatics more generally. My point of departure is the claim that the binary between strategic/non-strategic politeness, as drawn in previous research starting with the distinction between discernment and volition, leaves a blind-spot when it comes to established ways of achieving politeness that do not rely on recognition of the speaker’s intention, yet go beyond a pre-defined repertoire of forms. To shed light on this blind spot, I recruit the notions of first-order (S1) and higher-order (S2) polite speakers from Rational Speech Act models, which distinguish between different types of speakers depending on the degree to which they reason not just about their own goals but also about what the hearer thinks of them. However, contrary to the standard RSA model, I propose to think of such reflexive reasoning as a matter of degree, which can be used to explain a continuum of uses from strategic to non-strategic politeness. This move highlights points of contact between theoretical traditions that have developed independently and helps to reinstate im/politeness as a driver of pragmatics research broadly conceived.

Several decades of analytical inquiry into linguistic im/politeness have produced a substantial body of research shedding light on its linguistic and social dimensions, but also distinct discursive conventions and terminology. This study turns the spotlight on im/politeness as the term of choice for researchers to think and talk about a rather broad range of social meanings and considers the pros and cons of this preferred denotation. I argue that while the term has undoubtedly scaffolded the development of a coherent field of enquiry, its continued use as a moniker, despite shifting concerns and broadening perspectives, may becloud our views too. The field’s trajectory of development is revisited by likening it to a process of register formation, in which the term im/politeness has accrued differential (and stereotypical) indexicalities for different groups, in a diverse, multicultural community of scholars with different research agendas. Our differential allegiances to a particular taxonomy arguably engender different ways of seeing, and the increasing complexity of the field demands that we continue to interrogate and justify the labels we use.

Despite the fact that impoliteness research has spanned over three decades, it has been conceptualized persistently in terms of politeness as its binary opposite. In this paper, we endeavor to provide a theoretical framework for studying impoliteness as significant communicative practice. We aim to introduce Levinas’ face as an alternative to Goffman’s face and identify impoliteness with Levinas’ face for the reason that Levinas’ face, featuring absolute difference, can only be expressed through the discourse of resistance which manifests in various phenomena commonly categorized as impoliteness. We also argue that impoliteness is essentially the discourse of the authentic Self whose uncompromising difference, though potentially resulting in conflictive phenomena, facilitates understanding between individuals, not as actors, but as unique beings with their individualities and differences. We further contend that impoliteness is ethical in that the discourse of resistance does not aim for power but calls for respect for individual difference as well as responsibility for the Other in an effort to seek equality in human relations which are fundamentally power-laden and unequal. We also provide a case study to apply our theoretical construction of impoliteness to a literary classic, namely, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to illustrate our main points.

This paper addresses the issue of verbal behaviour which, being neither markedly polite nor markedly impolite nor simply politic, is interpersonally ambivalent. It focuses on what are known as mock impolite utterances (in which a positive attitude to the addressee(s) masquerades as a negative one). Through the detailed analysis of one attested utterance, it shows that apparently non-serious utterances of this kind can be more than simply the opposite of their surface realisations, that they can contain within them varying degrees of ‘seriousness’, so that interpretation of them is not just a binary matter of serious versus non-serious. It proceeds to propose that we can go some way to capturing this complexity by recognising that (non)seriousness operates on at least two dimensions – the affective and the propositional – and moreover that the precise degree of (non)seriousness of an utterance on each dimension is independent of the other. Two further examples are briefly examined to illustrate this variability.

The first-second order distinction has dominated theoretical discussions about (im)politeness for the past two decades. However, while there has been a lot of emphasis placed on different perspectives on (im)politeness in the field, what constitutes our object of understanding(s) arguably remains somewhat more elusive. In this paper, I suggest that one of the reasons for this is that we have inadvertently conflated (im)politeness-as-perspective (an epistemological issue) with (im)politeness-as-object (an ontological issue), and have largely ignored the latter in ongoing debates about the first-second order distinction. Building on observations about mundane interactions between co-participants who behave in ways we might not typically associate with politeness, I first propose that (im)politeness-as-object encompasses a complex, multi-layered set of first, second and third order evaluations that are reflexively interrelated but nevertheless ontologically distinct. I then suggest that the inherent complexity of (im)politeness-as-object calls for a more nuanced account of (im)politeness-as-perspective in which researchers necessarily draw on different first-order (commonsense, emic, user, folk theoretic) and second-order (academic, etic, observer, scientific theoretic) understandings to varying degrees. I conclude that the multidimensional, prismatic model of (im)politeness that emerges reflects the complex and multifaceted nature of (im)politeness itself.