Volume 14, Issue 1

Discursive approaches to analyzing politeness often eschew Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness as being too dependent on speech act theory and Gricean pragmatics. However, in this analysis of a courtroom interaction I will show how some of the concepts from Brown and Levinson’s theory, such as face-threatening behaviour and positive and negative politeness, can provide us with a vocabulary with which to talk about dynamic situated interaction. These are combined with reference to the norms of behaviour in the context of situation, as well as an appreciation of how meaning is defined as negotiated by participants as they interact. In the interaction under question here I show how the meaning of these utterances can be observed in the data themselves by looking at the sequence and take-up of turns at talk and by commenting on the relationship between the form of the utterances and the context in which they are uttered. In this way, some of the most useful concepts from Brown and Levinson are applied to the data from a constructivist perspective.

This paper attempts to explain the trajectory and unusual outcome of this courtroom encounter by applying Erving Goffman’s approach to interaction. It employs his notions of frame and footing, plus those of face, ritual deference and demeanour when they are useful. This perspective shows that, as well as the socially constituted power asymmetry, the participants create an interactive asymmetry in which the accused, Penelope Soto, although a canonically ratified participant, is sometimes effectively ‘de-ratified’. However, as the encounter progresses, Soto and the judge shift their footings back and forth such that into the court-hearing frame, another frame, that of the social encounter, is insinuated. This clash of frames is shown to be a major cause of the trajectory taken by the encounter. The Goffmanian perspective also points up the effect of the use of a video link for this encounter. This application of Goffman’s framework functions as a test of some of his concepts and the paper concludes with some comments and suggested elaborations.

In this article we take a neo-Peircean semiotic approach to analyzing an interaction in which a routine bail hearing between a defendant and a judge goes awry. Neo-Peircean semiotics is steadily gaining recognition within linguistics for providing a new perspective on meaning. One neo-Peircean approach, referred to as Relationship Thinking (Enfield 2009, 2013), has the potential to be influential for politeness research and linguistic pragmatics generally. In this article, we explore how the concept of relationship can be used to explore meaning on two dimensions: residential and representational (Kockelman 2006a, 2006b). It is our contention that both of these dimensions are crucial to developing an understanding of what happens in the courtroom data on which this special issue focusses. We begin by providing a detailed overview of neo-Peircean semiotics in order to demonstrate its utility for researchers from different disciplines. We then show how a neo-Peircean analytical approach can illuminate elements of data that may not be accounted for in other analyses. This is as a consequence of the neo-Peircean framework’s scope and its capacity for coping with a range of interactionally significant phenomena, from individual linguistic tokens to institutional norms. In our analysis of the data at the heart of this special issue, the Penelope Soto case, we show that problems can arise when interactants have different understandings of what is a sign and what is an interpretant (Peirce 1955). We make the case that it is a misunderstanding at this level (specifically the interpretations of the word “ value ”) that is ultimately what causes the interaction to conclude in the way that it does. Ultimately, we suggest that a neo-Peircean approach to the study of in/appropriate behaviour can facilitate links between the traditional (and sometimes disparate) methods of analysis used in politeness research.

The aim of this special issue of the Journal of Politeness Research is to show what happens when different analytical frameworks are be applied to a single piece of data: a short YouTube clip of a hearing in a USA courtroom. My specific aim in this paper is to show what an indexical analysis of (im)politeness phenomena, that is informed by a relevance-theoretic approach to communication, can bring to light about a short exchange between the judge and the defendant, that would not be evident to most viewers of this clip, and which also would not come to light through the application of the other methodologies demonstrated in this issue. Overall, I show that an analytical framework that takes a pragmatically informed indexical approach to (im)politeness phenomena, would predict and can explain variation between interpretations of an utterance as well as similarities in interpretation. It can therefore be used to address a problem that has always been present in (im)politeness analyses: how to identify and account for the social meanings generated by the use of a linguistic form in context.

Participant evaluations have been at the heart of recent discursive (im)politeness research, yet despite their importance, there has been little consideration of how we identify such behaviours and how we can substantiate their worth in an analysis. In this paper, it is proposed that we need to distinguish between different, ordered, categories of evaluation because these provide different levels of evidence for participants’ understandings of (im)politeness. Using online comments from Daily Mail articles relating to the Penelope Soto court hearings, I show that apparent agreements in the classification of linguistic behaviour as (im)polite can mask disagreements in the underlying rationales for those judgements. It is these rationales that provide the strongest warrant for analysts because they represent the ideological basis behind an individual’s understanding of politeness – why people should behave in this way. This links to Haugh’s (2013) use of ‘moral order’ and also Eelen’s (2001) key, but underdeveloped, notion of argumentativity . The rationale behind an individual’s judgement provides the argumentative link between metapragmatic behaviour and the social order. Classifications and positive/negative assessments of person are only clues to this underlying rationale, and need to be treated as such. Understanding these differences will assist analysts in assessing the ideological weight of metapragmatic behaviour and provide better-informed warrants for their analyses.

The shift to a middle ground between classic and discursive approaches to politeness has opened up space for the proliferation of various different theoretical accounts of (im)politeness. While this diversity can lead to different insights into the same dataset, as we have seen in this special issue, it does beg the question of whether the field of (im)politeness research remains a coherent enterprise. After pointing out that different theories of (im)politeness inevitably not only afford but also constrain what we observe and the explanations that can be developed to account for those observations, I suggest that in light of the increasing proliferation of theoretical approaches in the field, a greater focus on metatheorization is in order. After briefly discussing some of the key questions such a metatheoretical discussion should address, I conclude that metatheorizing enables us to systematically examine what different theories of (im)politeness bring to the field, thereby also drawing attention to what areas appear to be in particular need of further theoretical development and empirical study.