Volume 1, Issue 2

Previous discussions of politeness have focused on its function in dyadic encounters. But this basically private and individual set of strategies has uses in public and group contexts, in the behavior of persons in the public eye and the interpretation of the utterances of these figures. Americans increasingly expect their politicians, especially presidents, to be Nice (i. e., behave according to the principles of politeness, especially positive politeness). Two reasons are suggested for this novelty: the obscuring of the line between public and private , in favor of the latter, over the last 50 years; and the increasing presence of women, historically restricted to private discourse, as participants in United States public activity. Examples are examined of the use (and abuse) of Niceness-related criteria in recent electoral campaign rhetoric; and as explanations of other current non-electoral strange cases, in particular the media treatments of Nancy Pelosi and Martha Stewart.

This paper considers the notion of impoliteness through a detailed analysis of questioning and answering in confrontational television interviews. The paper first discusses the notions of politeness and impoliteness in discourse on the basis of previous research, paying particular attention to work generated by Brown and Levinson’s model (e. g., Culpeper 1996; Harris 2001) and recent critiques and alternatives to the dominant ‘paradigm’ (e. g., Arundale 1999; Eelen 2001; Watts 2003). The second part of the paper offers a close analysis of some resources through which participants manage adversarial questioning in television interviews. The analysis focuses on (i) the micro-level practices through which interviewers build question turns so that they impose particular agendas, carry damaging implications, or serve as vehicles of accusation and (ii) practices of answering through which interviewees address the implications of questions and resist the IR’s attempts to control the topical agenda of the interview. The analysis calls into question the usefulness of the notion of impoliteness for the analysis of confrontational discourse. The paper argues that if politeness research seeks to describe how utterances and interpretations are generated in interaction, empirical investigations in this field should be based on premises that are consistent with work in conversation analysis.

This paper analyzes the recommendations made by Hmong immigrant women and Hmong-American women for responses to a face-threatening scenario, in which a woman is invited to play a courting game with a man in whom she has no interest. While the older women recommend direct statements and unmitigated directives to discourage the suitor, the younger women recommend excuses and attempts to postpone. Thus the younger women appear to recommend more polite verbal strategies than the older women do, a pattern that seems puzzling. A close look at the older women’s responses reveals that they were assuming conditions for the interaction similar to those that prevailed when they were young women in Laos, where women’s power, both in general and in interaction, was much less than men’s. In contrast, the young Hmong- American women assume different conditions and possibilities for women’s lives, with greater power available to them than to women of their grandmothers’ generation. Thus, greater power for these speakers seems to occasion increased use of verbal politeness, while speakers with assumptions of lower power employ more bald-on-record strategies, a tendency that Brown and Levinson (1987 [1978]) do not predict.

Politeness research to date has generally adopted one of two views: the “traditional” view based on the dual premises of Grice’s Co-operative Principle and speech act theory (Lakoff 1973, Brown and Levinson 1987 [1978], Leech 1983), or the “post-modern” view, which rejects these premises and substitutes them by an emphasis on participants’ own perceptions of politeness (politeness1) and on the discursive struggle over politeness (Eelen 2001, Mills 2003, Watts 2003). Contrasting these two views, this article considers not only their points of disagreement, but, crucially, points where the two views coincide, bringing to light their common underlying assumptions. It then goes on to show how, departing from these common assumptions, a third direction for politeness studies, the “frame-based” view, is possible. Following an outline of the frame-based view, it is suggested that this fits in with the traditional and the post-modern views in a three-layered schema addressing politeness phenomena at different levels of granularity.

This article analyzes the complex relationship between gender and impoliteness. Rather than assuming that gender and impoliteness are concrete entities which can be traced in conversation, I argue that gender and impoliteness are elements which are worked out within the course of interaction. They are elements which are closely inter-related as stereotypically feminine gender identity is largely constructed around notions of “nice”, supportive, co-operative behaviour, either affirming or resisting those stereotypes of femininity. Challenging the notion that women as a whole are “nicer” than men in interaction, since much current research seems to highlight women’s interactional competitiveness, I argue that nevertheless supportiveness may play a role in other interactants’ judgments of women’s linguistic behaviour and may result in assertiveness being categorized as impoliteness.

Nuria Guerra-Bernal Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. A Contrastive Study of Requests and Apologies , by Rosina Márquez-Reiter Abdurahman Hamza Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport Through Talk Across Cultures , by Helen Spencer-Oatey Louise Mullany Gender and Politeness , by Sara Mills Derek Bousfield Politeness , by Richard Watts