Volume 12, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Case studies in historical politeness (ancient languages)

In this paper deferential and strategic or face-based politeness are distinguished (Jucker 2010). The distinction seems to be crucial for a proper understanding of the use of address and self-presentation terms and the address formula in Hittite state correspondence. Namely, the corpus of 80 letters written between c. 1450 and 1190 B.C. shows that the appropriate use of politeness largely reflects the writer’s awareness of his place in society, as well as his desire to behave in conformity with culturally expected forms of behavior. Examples of deferential politeness are thus influenced by the relative and absolute social status of communication participants as well as general and socially expected concern for the addressee’s face. Examples of real strategic politeness may be observed in symmetric relations where the writer is trying to minimalize a potentially face-threatening act and in some letters to the Hittite king.

This paper tests the applicability of Brown and Levinson’s concept of off-record politeness on a specific sub-set of patterned dialogues in Sophocles’ extant tragedies, i.e., those involving the participation of female speakers. Brown and Levinson’s framework still provides the most suitable model for empirical analysis, but with refinements concerning the interrelation between emic and etic politeness, the notion of face, the extension of analysis to longer stretches of conversation, and the absolute ranking of the super-strategies. The survey suggests that a strict connection between the use of off record and the mitigation of FTAs can be established quite straightforwardly and that the hearer’s reactions to off record can help to identify the valid instances of the phenomenon. Moreover, it is argued that (a) female speakers frequently resort to off record, most notably in cross-sex interactions with men invested with high power; (b) few restricted categories of male speakers, i.e., strangers and lower-status characters, do use off-record politeness towards women; (c) off record in same-sex interactions among female characters is limited to when the imposition is of extraordinary seriousness.

This paper takes four frameworks for understanding linguistic politeness (Brown and Levinson, Watts, Terkourafi, Hall) and tests each on the same corpus to see whether they yield results that are useful and/or in keeping with the other information we have about the material. The corpus used consists of 661 polite requests made in letters by a single Roman author, Cicero. The results demonstrate first that politeness theories are helpful as explanatory tools even in dealing with very well-known material, and second that no one theory is best: different theories are more and less useful in answering different questions about the data. It is therefore suggested that the use of multiple frameworks will provide the best understanding of the data.

Homeric epics are rich in paradigmatic scenes, where it is not inappropriate to look for examples of Greek polite social behaviour. This paper proposes an analytical framework to study ancient Greek politeness, and applies it to a famous scene of the Odyssey : the arrival of the goddess Athena, disguised as the old stranger Mentes, at the door of the royal palace of Ithaca, where she is welcomed by Ulysses’ son Telemachus. The stranger’s welcome in Homer is a very formal ritual following a well ordered pattern, which is made by several steps that require a high level of cooperation between the householder and his guest. My interpretation of Telemachus’ behaviour toward Athena-Mentes is based on the analytical categories developed by Erving Goffman to understand the everyday behaviour code. I take into consideration two main variables: the distribution of authority that characterizes the social situation of Ulysses’ palace and its social density, defined as the degree to which people are in each other’s presence and hence under each other’s surveillance. A close analysis of these variables within the social situation is helpful in defining its members’ social expectations towards each other, and, thus, highlighting which behavioural norms are enforced by the social situation itself.

The Late Ramesside Letters, a corpus of over 70 personal communications written in Late Egyptian, form one of the most complete letter collections from ancient Egypt (c. 1099–1069 BCE). A key feature of ancient Egyptian letter writing is the adherence to the social positions of, and relationships between, the interlocutors, allowing scholars to reconstruct the hierarchical network of individuals directly and indirectly included in the corpus. From this understanding, how can modern scholars discern what was considered to be ‘polite’ communicative behaviour within these relationships and how can developments in historical politeness help us do this? This article will explore three case studies surrounding different aspects of politeness research: first-order politeness, facework, and discernment politeness in order to explore the phenomenon of ‘politeness’ in Late Egyptian and reflect on the suitability of current politeness frameworks for the analysis of the Late Ramesside Letters.

This paper contributes to the study of linguistic politeness in the Latin language, through the analysis of the speech act of congratulation. Taking the comedies of Plautus ( ca. 254–184 B.C.) and Terence ( ca . 185–159 B.C.) as the corpus, the present study analyses both the possibilities that the speaker has at his/her disposal to express this communicative intention, and the interferences that are produced with other speech acts that are conceptualised in a similar way in the corpus. The article also discusses some of the sociolinguistic distribution tendencies at play.