Volume 3, Issue 2

Brown and Levinson (1987 [1978]) has remained the most seminal and influential starting point for studying cross-cultural and interlinguistic politeness. Yet it has also provoked countervailing arguments (e. g., Ide 1989; 1993; Matsumoto 1989; Gu 1990; Mao 1994), claiming a Western bias in Brown and Levinson's model, particularly in their construal of the concept of ‘face’, in their overemphasis on face-threat and their assumption of individualistic and egalitarian motivations, as opposed to the more group-centred hierarchy-based ethos of Eastern societies. This leads to the question: Is there an East-West divide in politeness? This article presents a pragmatic framework for studying linguistic politeness phenomena in communication: a common principle of politeness (Leech, 1983; 2005) and a Grand Strategy of Politeness (GSP), which is exemplified in common linguistic behaviour patterns in the performance of polite speech acts such as requests, offers, compliments, apologies, thanks, and responses to these. The GSP says simply: In order to be polite, a speaker communicates meanings which place (a) a high value on what relates to the other person (typically the addressee), and (b) a low value on what relates to the speaker. It is clear from many observations that constraint (a) is more powerful than constraint (b). The following hypothesis will be put forward, and supported by evidence from four languages: that the GSP provides a very general explanation for communicative politeness phenomena in Eastern languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean, as well as in Western languages such as English. Since politeness deals with scalar phenomena, this is not to deny the importance of quantitative and qualitative differences in the settings of social parameters and linguistic parameters of politeness in such languages. A framework such as the GSP provides the parameters of variation within which such differences can be studied. Hence this article argues in favour of the conclusion that, despite manifest differences, there is no East-West divide in politeness.

This paper proposes the study of British English and Japanese conceptualizations of politeness by means of a measurement of the semantic domains which arguably constrain the expressive choices of speakers of these languages. Such measurement involves eliciting native speakers' similarity judgements of pairs of lexical items (metapragmatic judgements of attitudes and behaviours such as ‘polite’, ‘kind’ or ‘considerate’), mapping them onto bi-dimensional spaces, and interpreting the nature of the two principal dimensions held to contribute to the distribution of the items. These findings are compared with the results of previous works on this topic. Moreover, the paper discusses issues of methodology in the treatment of data relevant to analyses that attempt to link linguistic and cultural facts, and individual and cultural representations.

This paper is about face-threatening acts (FTAs). It upholds the usefulness of the general concept as first introduced by Brown and Levinson but presents a different view of (1) what an FTA is and how it arises and (2) how to gauge the relative severity of one. Regarding (1), it argues that no act is intrinsically face-threatening and that FTAs cannot be equated with speech acts. They can only be identified in the context of the ongoing interaction. An FTA, it is suggested, is simply any move which predicates a change in face. However, its ultimate identification rests with interactants. With regard to (2), the paper demonstrates that Brown and Levinson's ‘weightiness’ formula does not work. It is suggested that the severity of an FTA is the product of two factors: the amount of face-change it predicates and the amount of salience accorded to face at the time. But the values of these factors are also ultimately determined by participant reactions. Both matters are addressed largely through the close examination of one particular moment in one particular encounter.

The aim of this paper is to open up for debate the question of whether Sperber and Wilson's (1995 [1986]) relevance theory can usefully inform politeness research. It is therefore designed to indicate some of the methodological implications for the study of politeness that would arise from an adoption of a relevance-theoretical framework. I begin by outlining some arguments posited by politeness theorists who have applied relevance theory and then provide a brief account of some of the key differences between the Gricean framework that informs Brown and Levinson's (1987 [1978]) theory of politeness and the account of utterance interpretation offered by relevance theory. I conclude by suggesting some of the differences in focus that would result from the analysis of politeness from a relevance-theoretical perspective.

The discursive approach to politeness represents one of the most coherent challenges to the dominance of Brown and Levinson's politeness theory to date, and indeed to the continuing viability of the field of politeness research itself. However, while the discursive approach advocates the displacement of politeness as the focus of research, upon closer examination of the epistemological and ontological assumptions underlying this approach, a number of inconsistencies arise. In particular, the issue of how researchers can identify instances of (im)politeness without imposing the analysts' understandings comes to the fore. In this paper it is suggested that a theory of (im)politeness needs to examine more carefully how (im-) politeness is interactionally achieved through the evaluations of self and other (or their respective groups) that emerge in the sequential unfolding of interaction. This entails the analyst looking for evidence in the interaction that such (im)politeness evaluations have been made by the participants, either through explicit comments made by participants in the course of the interaction (less commonly), or through the reciprocation of concern evident in the adjacent placement of expressions of concern relevant to the norms invoked in that particular interaction (more commonly). In this way, the development of a theory of (im)politeness within a broader theory of facework or interpersonal communication can remain a focal point for the field of politeness research.

McEnery, Tony (2006). Swearing in English: Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present . London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 10-415-25837-5; 304 pp. Price: £ 80.00. (Lynn Grant) Truss, Lynne (2005) Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life, or Six Good Reasons to Stay at Home and Bolt the Door . Profile: London. ISBN 186197-933-9; 214 pp. Price £ 9.99 / USD $ 20.00. (Sara Mills) Cho, Yongkil (2005). Grammatik und Höflichkeit im Sprachvergleich. Direktive Handlungsspiele des Bittens, Aufforderns und Anweisen im Deutschen und Koreanischen. (A Comparison of Grammar and Politeness in German and Korean: Directive Language Games with Requests, Injunctions and Instructions) . Tübingen:Max Niemeyer Verlag. ISBN: 3-484-75032-4; 202 pp. Price: Euro 118.00. (Gila A. Schauer) Watts, Richard, Sachiko Ide, and Konrad Ehlich (eds.) (2005). Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory and Practice (2 nd Edition). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Hardback ISBN 3-11-018549-0; Paperback ISBN 3-11-018300-5; 404 pp. Price: Hb: £ 66.20 / Euro 98 / USD 132.30. Pb: £ 28.99 / Euro 38.95 / USD 52.60. (Ian Walkinshaw)