Introduction

Abstract

This Special Issue contributes to current conceptualizations of politeness as a discursive phenomenon. Although earlier theories of politeness differ in some important respects, the most influential proposals, those of Brown and Levinson (1987) and Leech (1983), rest on one or more of the following assumptions. 1. Politeness is grounded either in a set of social maxims or the social psychological construct of face. Either way, the theories adopt a rational actor model of politeness, focusing on speakers' goals and social motivations. 2. Social acts are understood as endowed with inherent relational properties and hence categorized as ‘face threatening’ and ‘face supportive’, or as ‘competitive’, ‘convivial’, ‘conflictive’, and ‘collaborative’, in abstractu, outside of activities in natural settings. 3. Likewise, the linguistic resources serving to ‘encode’ politeness are seen as having fixed relational values. Nonverbal and nonvocal resources are not examined for their possible politeness-implicative functions. 4. Social context, viewed as configurations of discourse-external social variables, is the determining force in speakers' selection of politeness strategies. 5. Context factors assumed to have a bearing on politeness are understood as prespecified and static. Typically such factors are confined to power relations, social distance, and the culturally variable degree of ‘imposition’ inherent in a social act. 6. Politeness results from an actor's internal assessment of context variables in relation to the social act she or he is planning to perform. In other words, politeness as a form of linguistic behavior is conceptualized as a dependent variable, determined by the values of the context factors as independent variables.