20 years (further) on: whither politeness studies now? Opening up the binaries

Jim O’Driscoll; Michael Haugh

doi:10.1515/pr-2023-0085

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20 years (further) on: whither politeness studies now? Opening up the binaries

Jim O’Driscoll and Michael Haugh

Published/Copyright: January 23, 2024

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From the journal Journal of Politeness Research Volume 20 Issue 1

1 The origins of this special issue

We must begin by explaining the “20 years” in the title of this special issue. It is, after all, only 19 years since the very first issue of this journal in 2005. We might seem to be jumping the gun somewhat. In fact, the 20 years refers to something different, the lapse of time between the 14th Sociolinguistics Symposium (SS14) in 2002 and 24th Sociolinguistics Symposium (SS24) in 2022. Both of these conferences were held at Ghent University in Belgium. At the first of them, a colloquium on, “First-order and second-order politeness: The dispute over modelling politeness” (convened by Richard Watts, Gino Eelen and Jim O’Driscoll) created a significant impact, helping to set the tone for (im)politeness studies in the 21st century.

In view of the fact that most of the contributors to that 2002 colloquium are still active in the field, and inspired by this return to Ghent, it seemed only right and proper to convene a “20-years-on” colloquium at SS24 with the aim of considering the current state of affairs in the field, especially developments since that time. Accordingly, we did so. Many of the 2002 “veterans” participated, as well as many other prominent researchers. In fact, we received so many fine contributions that, in order to comply with the scheduling restrictions imposed by the conference organisers, we ended up with two nominally separate colloquia. As far as we were concerned, though, they were part of the same event. This special issue contains nine selected contributions that emerged from both parts of that event.

An additional inspiration was the SS24 theme of Inside and Beyond Binaries. This theme was intended to be meaningful for all branches of sociolinguistics, but it resonates especially clearly in our field, calling to mind several major (apparent) dichotomies. One of these, the distinction between first-order (“commonsense”) and second-order (“scientific”) perspectives, was the headline of the 2002 colloquium and has since become a basic tenet of scholarship in the field. And indeed, almost all of the contributions to this issue refer to it and many make use of it. Yet while the distinction has inspired a vast amount of theoretical debate and empirical research, the terms of the debate have also expanded over the past two decades, as illustrated by a number of the contributions to this special issue. The studies by Haugh and Sifianou draw attention to its importance, but at the same time point to its shortcomings and what it hides if conceptualised as a strict, either/or binary, as do the papers by Held and Paternoster, while others, including Jucker, O’Driscoll, Pizziconi and Terkourafi, argue for the need for additional distinctions to be brought to the fore.

Perhaps the most obvious dichotomy in our field is that of politeness/impoliteness. Indeed, calls for a greater focus on impoliteness was a repeated theme of the 2002 colloquium. Twenty years on we can see that call was well and truly answered. However, several papers in this issue problematize the assumed equation of this pair with a good/bad binary. Sifianou points to a folk identification of a “bad” kind of politeness, and also to cases where even the (possibly) “good” kind of politeness can have, or has had, the direst of consequences. Conversely, Xie and Fan argue that impoliteness can be of great social value (i.e., “good”). Jucker’s distinction between conduct and etiquette politeness also raises this question, and O’Driscoll explores ambivalent utterances which are neither simply polite nor simply impolite.

It is clear, then, that the distinction between first-order and second-order concepts and the politeness-impoliteness dichotomy, which lay at the heart of debates at the SS14 colloquium, continue to have an important role to play in (im)politeness research. The aims of this special issue are to carefully consider what other distinctions have come into the mix over the past two decades of research alongside these two classic ones, to critically reflect on the role of such distinctions for the study of (im)politeness, and to provoke deeper contemplation about where the field might be heading next.

2 A niggling problem – im/politeness versus (im)politeness. Or what?

Before we introduce the papers in this issue, we want to raise a matter which in itself might seem trivial, but which relates to a matter of much wider concern. How should we refer to the full purview of our field?

Because early theorists focused almost exclusively on how interactants convey a positive attitude towards each other (i.e., how they are polite), with impoliteness seen merely as a failure of these techniques, there was no need at that time for such questions to arise. The term “politeness” was understood to circumscribe all behaviour of interpersonal, or at least affective, significance, in much the same way that the study of “heat” is understood to include the study of its absence (i.e., “cold”).

But two concurrent developments since that time have made this understanding of the term problematical. One is the increasing amount of attention given to impoliteness specifically. The other is the greater significance attached to first-order perspectives in which “politeness” typically denotes a specifically positive evaluation. As a result, scholars now fear that the use of a bare “politeness” to refer to the field in general is vulnerable to misinterpretation.

Accordingly, to circumscribe the field, it is now common to refer either to “im/politeness” or to “(im)politeness”. Both these forms are rather tortuous – how would you utter them in spoken mode? But at least this artificiality has the advantage of highlighting that they are part of a theoretically informed metalanguage. Which is better? We asked the contributors to this issue for their views. What follows in the paragraphs below is a summary interpretation of these together with our own views.

“Im/politeness” has the advantage of presenting politeness and impoliteness on an equal footing in the same way as the English form “s/he” is often used to encode a generic third person. However, this particular usage notwithstanding, the forward slash is most commonly used in English writing to indicate complementary opposites (e.g., on/off, yes/no, either/or), thereby foregrounding a binary, exclusive choice, whereas the intended reference here is not either/or but both. “(Im)politeness” avoids this possible misinterpretation, but has the disadvantage of risking the interpretation that impoliteness is in some way subordinate to politeness.

However, neither of these risks are large; the forward slash can easily be interpreted in context as meaning “either/or, it doesn’t matter which” (i.e., both), while the use of brackets is widely understood as a typographical convenience without the suggestion of any hierarchical relation. We are not aware of any cases where the use of one of these forms rather than the other has had theoretical implications or has actually led to misunderstanding in practice.

This choice of representations, then, may come down to a matter of practicality. From an author’s viewpoint, “im/politeness” is much easier to type than “(im)politeness”. On the other hand, publishers suggest that the latter is more accessible to on-line searches, and overall, publishers do seem to prefer this variant. But even among them there is no unanimity (Perhaps they mostly just go along with whichever variant their authors present to them). Against titles such as Teaching and Learning (Im)Politeness (Pizziconi and Locher 2015), The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness (Culpeper et al. 2017), the series Advances in (Im)politeness studies (Xie 2021-), and the new Routledge Focus on (Im)politeness series (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Sifianou 2023-), one may set Im/politeness Implicatures (Haugh 2015) and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Im/politeness (Terkourafi 2015).

Moreover, to some degree, the earlier understanding of “politeness” as an umbrella term persists. It can be found in Situated Politeness (Davies et al. 2011), Understanding Politeness (Kádár and Haugh 2013), both of which encompass impoliteness, and, of course, the name of this journal! There has been no widespread clamour for this to be amended, although in this issue Pizziconi, in her very thoughtful discussion about what (im)politeness (or should that be “im/politeness”?) research is all about and why we have come to prefer those terms, comes close.

We were prompted to raise this matter here because, testifying to the ongoing lack of consensus, three of the papers in this issue prefer to use the forward slash, three use brackets, while the other three find they can make do quite happily with “politeness” (or “impoliteness”). As editors of this issue, we see no reason to impose our own preference and no value in consistency for consistency’s sake. But further discussion on the matter may arise, especially when it is widened to include the question of exactly what it is that we believe we are studying, an underlying question that runs through every contribution to this issue.

3 Overview of this special issue

There are inevitably different ways of slicing the pie. And how to best arrange the contributions to this special issue is no exception to that. However, given the origin of the SS24 colloquium lies in an intent to revisit the binaries that were hotly debated at the SS14 colloquium 20 years previously, we have arranged the papers into three loose groupings that take inspiration from the original distinctions discussed at that time – (1) first-order politeness, (2) second-order im/politeness, and (3) the politeness-impoliteness dichotomy and what might lie between – even though to classify them as such does not do justice to their sophistication and range (we beg the authors’ indulgence).

3.1 First-order perspectives

The first set of papers centre in some way or another on the classic first-order/second-order distinction, but with a particular focus on the role of first-order, commonsense or lay concepts or perspectives.

Our special issue opens with a contribution by Maria Sifianou in which she considers the way in which the meaning of terms like politeness and impoliteness can change over time, with a particular focus on the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on first-order concepts of politeness. Her analysis of an online article about politeness that appeared near the onset of the pandemic highlights the way in which politeness has sometimes come to be seen in online public discourse as not simply a “good” thing (and may even be considered to carry with it “bad” or “dangerous” assumptions and practices), and that online posters generally take a broader view on (im)politeness than the traditional research emphasis on verbal behaviour. She also demonstrates how supposedly academic, second-order understandings of (im)politeness have entered into circulation in non-academic, first-order discourse, and that the first-second order distinction should thus be understood not as a mutually exclusive dichotomy but as a cline where the boundaries between “commonsense” and “scientific” concepts of (im)politeness are more porous than is often assumed by researchers in the field.

The next paper, by Gudrun Held, applies a trenchantly first-order, culture-specific concept to both first and second-order conceptualisations of politeness and face. In Italian culture the notion of bella figura is highly salient, not only as an abstract ideal of self-presentation, but also in functioning as both a guide to social behaviour and as a benchmark for evaluating this behaviour, being thus installed as a normative principle of moral relevance. She finds that the Italian notion accords well with Goffman’s concept of face, the “approved social attributes” (Goffman 1967: 5) of which he does not specify but which are supplied by the values of Italian culture. As such, bella figura stands as an exemplar of a first-order reflex of a second-order concept (namely, face). By contrast, she finds that it does not accord well with understandings of politeness, either first or second order. The only tangential connection appears to be with behaviour evaluated as – specifically – impolite. This finding relates to the ongoing debate about the extent to which the concepts of face and (im)politeness need to be tied together.

The paper which appears next, by Annick Paternoster, is another which advises on the important of the first-second order distinction but, like Sifianou, points to the dangers when this is seen as a simple binary. She demonstrates the apparently inevitable problems when a first-order understanding of a word is adopted as a second-order term – in this case the lemma “discern*” – in several European languages. Through systematic study of nineteenth century etiquette books, she finds that while “Discernment2” in the scholarly literature denotes scripted (i.e., non-strategic, routine) behaviour, “Discernment1” involves working out the most appropriate way to behave on the basis of the unique circumstances of the situation and thus is inherently strategic, a resource for when prescriptive rules are not enough. As a result, first-order and second-order views, rather than being dichotomous, are complementary. Like many other contributions to this special issue, she therefore pleads for more investigation of the middle ground between the two perspectives.

3.2 Second-order perspectives

The next set of papers likewise centre in some way or another on the classic first-second order distinction, but this time with a particular focus on the role of second-order, scientific or academic concepts or perspectives.

In his paper, Andreas Jucker draws attention to a basic difference between the “what” and the “how” of politeness by proposing a technical, second-order distinction between what he terms “conduct politeness” and “etiquette politeness”, respectively. He uses historical and contemporary evidence to show that while the distinction between “morals” and “manners” is reflected in first-order understandings of politeness, albeit with some degree of cross-over, drawing a second-order, analytical distinction in this way provides us with a new perspective which affords greater understanding of developments in politeness scholarship. Indeed, he argues that the distinction between first-order and second-order concepts is an essential one if we are to avoid misinterpretation and crossed wires among scholars in the field.

The next paper, by Marina Terkourafi, offers new insights into another “classic” second-order distinction, that between the strategic and the non-strategic. She first observes that this distinction has gone by various names with varying emphases, including volition versus discernment, strategic politeness versus social indexing, and trivalent versus bivalent politeness. She then links these distinctions with one that can be drawn between utterances evaluated as (im)polite by virtue of their form, and those evaluated by virtue of their propositional content, but then goes on to show that the former can get “noticed”, so that to some extent they come across as strategic, and the latter are often conventionalised in specific situations so that they come across as non-strategic. She uses Rational Speech Act Theory to ground her argument and to consider the relation between the three goals of a speaker when they utter something – informational, social, self-presentational – but alters the model by taking into account the expectations of listeners.

This group of papers concludes with the contribution by Barbara Pizziconi, in which she provokes us to think more deeply about what the rise of “im/politeness” as the preferred second-order term to denote the field has had on it. This century has seen a vast increase in scholarly interest in im/politeness. This journal, for instance, now receives several times as many manuscripts as it has room to publish, and studies in our field now appear regularly in other sociolinguistically and pragmatically focused journals. This “success” raises one stark binary yes/no question. Is “politeness studies” a recognisably distinct field anymore? This is a question faced head-on by Pizziconi, who offers a thoroughgoing critique of the labels we use, especially that of (im)politeness itself. She traces the reification of this label and identifies the dangers attending this process – that different scholars with different ideological stances diverge in their interpretations of its meaning and scope.

3.3 Politeness, impoliteness and what lies between

This final set of papers opens with a contribution by Chaoqun Xie and Weina Fan, in which they argue that despite the increasing amount of attention devoted to impoliteness over the past two decades, its theorisation still remains unduly tied up in notions of politeness, harmony and morality. They suggest that this is due, in large part, to the foundational role that Goffman’s notion of face has played in the field with its emphasis on positive self-presentation. As an alternative, they propose that the concept of face expounded by Levinas provides the basis for a more balanced and sounder theoretical approach to it. Their argument is premised on the observation that impoliteness is almost invariably presumed to be associated with non-ideal states of conflict and disharmony, which, they contend, results in an underdeveloped understanding of impoliteness. They suggest that an understanding rooted in the discourse of the authentic Self and difference fosters deeper understanding among individuals, not simply as actors (in the Goffmanian sense) of social roles, but as unique beings with their own individualities.

In his contribution, Jim O’Driscoll offers a way in which we might more deeply contemplate phenomena that lie between politeness and impoliteness, where the valence of utterances is equivocal or even unclear. Through a detailed analysis of one such incident, he argues that mock impoliteness is more than just a reversal whereby what is presented on the surface as impolite is in reality polite, and that instead both valences can be in play at the same time. The interpretation of utterances of this ambivalent type are therefore a matter of degree. He goes on to propose that for analytical purposes we distinguish between the relative non-seriousness of the propositional content of an utterance and the relative non-seriousness of the affective attitude projected.

Finally, Michael Haugh revisits the classic first-second order distinction, and argues that the emphasis placed on acknowledging these different perspectives on (im)politeness has obscured a relative lack of consensus about what it is we are studying. He proposes that one reason for this is that we have inadvertently conflated (im)politeness as an object with (im)politeness as a perspective. Building on observations about brief excerpts of data that challenge our preconceptions about what (im)politeness research is all about, and the role played by middle-class ideologies in our field, he proceeds to reconceptualise (im)politeness-as-object as a multi-layered set of first, second and third order evaluations that are ontologically distinct, but nevertheless reflexively interrelated. He then proposes that this calls for a more nuanced account of (im)politeness-as-perspective which acknowledges that as researchers we inevitably draw on a range of different first and second order understandings. The complex, multi-layered, prismatic model of (im)politeness that emerges not only draws attention to phenomena that lie between “classic” instances of politeness or impoliteness but also points towards the complex and multifaceted nature of (im)politeness itself.

4 Concluding remarks

One theme running throughout the contributions here is that, while many of the factors operating in our field can indeed be conceptualised as dichotomies, they are not binary, absolutes alternatives, but rather gradients or clines. To borrow from the terminology of lexical semantics, we may say that they are not so much complementary opposites (as in English on/off, dead/alive etc.), but rather gradable opposites (as in English hot/cold, young/old).

We identify and make use of dichotomies in order to sharpen our understanding of (im)politeness phenomena. We sometimes propose new ones or draw attention to overlooked ones (as in the papers by Haugh, Jucker, Paternoster, O’Driscoll and Terkourafi in this volume) so as to gain a fresh perspective which allows us to account for phenomena not previously accommodated. But in neither case do we wish to install the two members of a dichotomy as binaries in the strict sense; that is, as exclusive on/off alternatives. Rather, the members are always poles of a cline. The dichotomies are always matters of degree.

Where, then, does that leave us, and where might the field be heading next? It is clear for a start that we are now drawing on a much wider variety of data to analyse a much greater variety of phenomena in (im)politeness studies. Twenty years ago, the analysis of politeness in spoken interaction was more or less considered the norm. The increasing diversity of data and phenomena being examined, including the ubiquity of digitally-mediated forms of communication that now pervade almost every aspect of our lives, has given rise to a much greater degree of methodological pluralism in the field. We have also seen a greater focus on metapragmatic dimensions of (im)politeness by researchers, in part due to the increasing availability of data that enables us to tap into discourse about (im)politeness, and in part as a consequence of the increased focus in public discourse on issues of (in)civility and offence.

Given making predictions about where a field might be heading is almost inevitably doomed to failure, we will defer from engaging in such speculations. We conclude instead, in the spirit of this special issue, with some questions which were raised at the SS24 colloquium and which we think may require further contemplation:

What role should binaries and first-second order distinctions continue to play (or not) in the field?
How has the rise of online communication altered the trajectory of our research?
How have developments in the range of data types and methods shaped the field?
What have we missed? Are there still underdeveloped areas?
Given the much broader range of theories, methods and types of data being examined in (im)politeness studies, does it still constitute a coherent field of research? And does that matter anyway?

Corresponding author: Michael Haugh, School of Languages and Cultures, Gordon Greenwood Building, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia, E-mail: michael.haugh@uq.edu.au

References

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Published Online: 2024-01-23

Published in Print: 2024-02-26

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