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CulpeperHaugh2014-Chp7 Interpersonalpragmatics

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Interpersonal Pragmatics

Chapter · January 2014


DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-39391-3_7

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CHAPTER

7  Interpersonal Pragmatics

7.1  Introduction

At the beginning of Chapter 3, we briefly mentioned Leech’s (1983) usage


of the term “interpersonal rhetoric”, which in turn draws on Halliday’s (e.g.
1973) use of “interpersonal” for one of his three semantic or functional
components of language (the others being “ideational” and “textual”).
Halliday ([1970] 2002: 175) writes that the interpersonal function “serves
to establish and maintain social relations”. Leech (1983: 56) interprets the
interpersonal function as “language functioning as an expression of one’s
attitudes and an influence upon the attitudes and behaviour of the hearer”.
Together, these quotations capture the two important areas of concern for
interpersonal pragmatics, namely, interpersonal relations (mutual social
connections amongst people that are mediated by interaction, including
power, intimacy, roles, rights and obligations) and interpersonal attitudes
(perspectives, usually value-laden and emotionally charged, on others that are
mediated by interaction, including generosity, sympathy, like/dislike, disgust,
fear and anger). These areas are strongly linked. Love, for example, involves
both. Consider that the expression lovers refers to two or more people inti-
mately and/or sexually connected with each other, whereas the expression
in love refers to a perspective on someone else. Both relations and attitudes
shape, and in turn are shaped, by language in interaction. To give a simple
example, being in love may give rise to loving talk, and in turn that loving
talk may result in the target falling in love and reciprocating the loving talk,
which may establish their connection as lovers, and so on. It is worth briefly
noting that the area of interpersonal attitudes is linked to (1) interpersonal
emotions, which encompasses embodied feelings or states of mind often
characterised by participants as “irrational and subjective, unconscious rather
than deliberate [and] genuine rather than artificial” (Edwards 1999: 273), and
(2) interpersonal evaluations, which involves “appraisals or assessment of

197
198 Pragmatics and the English Language

persons, or our relationships with those persons, which influence the way
we think and feel about those persons and relationships, and consequently
sometimes what we do” (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 61) (for the nature of those
links, see the work of Teun van Dijk, e.g. 1987: 188–193).
The main area which Leech (1983) discusses under the heading of inter-
personal rhetoric is politeness, and we will do likewise in this chapter. Both
politeness and impoliteness can be seen as interpersonal attitudes. We should
note at this early stage Leech’s (1983: 62) point that interpersonal pragmatics
plays a greater role in strongly situated uses of language (e.g. face-to-face
interaction with an assistant in a coffee shop) as opposed to “unsituated” uses
(e.g. encyclopaedia articles). The notion of situated can be understood with
reference to Goffman’s ([1964] 1972: 63) definition of a social situation as “an
environment of mutual monitoring possibilities, anywhere within which an
individual will find himself accessible to the naked senses of all others who
are ‘present’, and similarly find them accessible to him”.1
What exactly is politeness? Need the question be asked? We all know
what politeness is, don’t we? Imagine you are ensconced at a dinner table
in England: politeness might include remembering to use please when you
want something passed, saying something nice about the food and defi-
nitely not burping. Actually, all of these particular things are somewhat more
complex – even problematic – than they first appear. The word please is the
“magic word” that British parents impress upon their children to use with
all requests, and it looms large in the British psyche. But how is it actually
used? Aijmer (1996: 166–168) provides some evidence. It matters how the
rest of the request is worded: please is most likely to be used in conjunction
with an imperative (e.g. “please make me a cup of tea”) or with could you (e.g.
“could you please make me a cup of tea”), but much less likely to be used with
can you or will you. You will note that we failed to specify whether you were
ensconced at a family meal or had been invited to dinner. Differences in situa-
tion would influence whether you use the word please. Please tends to be used
in relatively formal situations, and in business letters and written notices. It
is particularly frequent in service encounters, notably via the telephone (all
too often we hear “can you hold the line please!”). So, if the dinner were a
formal invitation, please would be more likely to be used. Complimenting the
cook on the food may also seem a straightforwardly nice thing to do, but it
is not straightforward: you place the recipient of the compliment in a rather
tricky position. If they simply accept the compliment, they may sound rather

1
Intriguingly, one might note that this definition seems to be echoed in Sperber and Wilson’s
(1986[1995]: 41–42) description of context from a Relevance theory perspective: “Any shared
cognitive environment in which it is manifest which people share it is what we will call a
mutual cognitive environment”. This is in spite of the fact that the data discussed in their book is
far from situated.
Interpersonal Pragmatics 199

immodest, but if they simply reject it, they may offend the person who made
it. Consequently, responses to compliments in Britain tend to weave a path
between these two positions. A response such as “it’s kind of you to say that”
suggests that the compliment is (at least in part) a product of the compli-
menter’s kindness and not necessarily a true reflection of the value of the
food. Finally, even burping cannot always with certainty be seen as the antith-
esis of politeness. Cultural considerations come into play. In some cultures,
burping may be acceptable, or even a sign of appreciation of the food – a
compliment! Needless to say, culture keenly influences politeness. The use of
the word please is more typical of British culture than North American, being
used about twice as frequently (Biber et al. 1999: 1098). This is not to say that
American culture is less polite. There are other ways of doing politeness, and
those other ways might be evaluated as polite by North Americans, just as
using please in certain contexts might be evaluated as polite by speakers of
British English. Politeness, or impoliteness for that matter, is in the eyes and
ears of the beholder. It is a particular attitude towards behaviour, and one that
is especially sensitive to the relational aspects of context. The fact that polite-
ness involves both the interpretation of a behaviour in context and working
out its attitudinal implications (rather than the straightforward decoding of a
sign of politeness) is what makes it a pragmatic and interpersonal matter.
Politeness, then, involves a polite attitude towards behaviours in a partic-
ular context. In fact, that attitude is often extended towards the people who
do politeness: they are considered polite people. What those behaviours,
linguistic and non-linguistic, consist of, how they vary in context, and why
they are deemed polite are some of the key areas of politeness study. The first
part of this chapter introduces two different approaches to politeness. The
middle and largest part of this chapter focuses on the most popular polite-
ness framework, namely, that of Brown and Levinson ([1978] 1987) (hereafter
Brown and Levinson). The chapter then briefly considers a new, rapidly devel-
oping area, closely related to politeness, namely, impoliteness. Finally, the
chapter concludes by looking at relatively recent work which argues that the
notion of politeness and its place within interpersonal pragmatics be recon-
sidered from an interactional perspective.

7.2  Two general approaches to politeness

7.2.1  The socio-cultural view of politeness


A notion at the heart of much work on the socio-cultural view of polite-
ness is that of social norms. Social norms are of two types. A prescrip-
tive social norm is a rule of behaviour enforced by social sanctions. Thus,
200 Pragmatics and the English Language

throwing litter on the floor breaks a social norm. Social norms are driven
by social rules (“do not litter”), and breaking those rules incurs sanctions.
Impolite language – that is, abusive, threatening, aggressive language – is
often explicitly outlawed by signs displayed in public places (e.g. hospitals,
airport check-in desks). Sanctions are underpinned by social institutions and
structures (e.g. a legal system) and enforced by those in power. Moreover, if
social norms become internalised by members of society, as they regularly
do, sanctions can take on a moral dimension in the form of attitudes, such
as disapproval from others or guilt emanating from oneself. Interestingly, the
word morals is derived from the Latin mores, meaning customs. The obliga-
tions associated with social norms are what underlie their morality. Such
obligations can be articulated in rules of conduct. Goffman (1967: 49) makes
the link with morality clear:

Rules of conduct impinge upon the individual in two general ways:


directly, as obligations establishing how he is morally constrained to
conduct himself; indirectly, as expectations, establishing how others are
morally bound to act in regard to him.

Those expectations are attitudes about how things should be, and their viola-
tion leads to a sense of immorality.
What he refers to as the “social-norm view” of politeness is neatly summed
up by Fraser (1990: 220):

Briefly stated, [the social-norm view] assumes that each society has a
particular set of social norms consisting of more or less explicit rules
that prescribe a certain behavior, a state of affairs, or a way of thinking
in context. A positive evaluation (politeness) arises when an action is in
congruence with the norm, a negative evaluation (impoliteness = rude-
ness) when action is to the contrary.

Politeness, in this sense, subsumes everyday notions such as “good manners”,


“social etiquette”, “social graces” and “minding your ps and qs”. Parents
teaching their children to say please typically proscribe requests that are not
accompanied by that word. Social norms, of course, are sensitive to context:
the social politeness norms that pertain to a family dinner are rather different
from those pertaining to a formal dinner occasion. Actually, there are some
situations where communicative behaviours are not subject to politeness
prescriptions; in other words, situations in which behaviours which might be
viewed as “impolite” are unrestricted and licensed. Often, such situations are
characterised by a huge power imbalance, as might be the case in army recruit
training, but not necessarily so. Harris (2001), for example, describes the sanc-
tioned impoliteness that takes place in the UK’s House of Commons, giving
Interpersonal Pragmatics 201

Opposition MPs opportunities to attack the Government that they might not
have had in other contexts.
There is another sense in which social norms underpin much research on
politeness. Experiential or descriptive social norms have their basis in an
individual’s experience of social situations. Repeated experiences of social
situations may lead one to expect certain kinds of interaction to happen, be
able to hypothesise what others’ expectations are, and know how to meet
them. Opp (1982) argues that regular behaviours develop into expectations,
those expectations give people a sense of certainty, and it is this certainty
that has value – value which feeds politeness attitudes. People generally like
to know what will happen next, a point made forcefully in social cognition
in relation to schema theory (see, for example, Fiske and Taylor 1991: 97).
Additionally, in the area of human relations, Kellerman and Reynolds (1990:
14), investigating the link between expectancy violations and attraction, state
that deviations from expectations are “generally judged negatively”. However,
it is important to note context dependency. It is not the case that all thwarted
expectations are judged negatively. Aesthetic pleasure and entertainment are
often achieved through surprise (as in the surprise ending of a film).
Etiquette books and parental instruction are simply not detailed enough
to help us through the mass of social occasions we will tackle in our lives.
We acquire politeness routines from our regular experiences of social interac-
tions. Politeness routines or formulae are expressions which have become
conventionally associated with politeness attitudes in specific contexts.
Linguistic politeness can be taken to mean the use of expressions that are
both contextually appropriate and judged as socially positive by the target
(some researchers, such as Watts 2003, take “socially positive” primarily to
mean showing “consideration” to the target) (cf. Locher and Watts 2005).
Remember the use of please? It is not just used by anybody to anybody, or
in any context, and when it is used, it is generally considered socially posi-
tive. The point about politeness routines/markers is that knowledge of both
their appropriate context and their positive social meaning has become
conventionally associated with the linguistic expression. This is why we can
pronounce on how polite or otherwise an expression sounds even when
considering that expression out of its normal context (e.g. in a list of polite-
ness expressions). Of course, this does not mean that simply using a polite-
ness routine/marker will result in people viewing it as polite. Politeness always
involves an overall contextual judgement. Thus, Go to hell please, said to
get rid of somebody, might well be considered socially negative, despite the
fact that a conventional politeness formula (please) has been used. In fact,
this particular utterance achieves its power, because politeness is part of the
conventional meaning of the expression please. The contexts of usage and
socially positive meanings of that word clash with its actual usage on this
202 Pragmatics and the English Language

occasion – they lend a note of sarcasm (which can be regarded as a form of


mock politeness).
In practice, prescriptive social norms and experiential social norms can –
and often do – coincide and interact. Thanking a host for dinner, for example,
involves both: it is something we are under social pressure to do and we often
do it. The socio-cultural view of politeness has been given a new lease of life
in the last decade, notably in the guise of discursive politeness, and we shall
consider relevant work in section 7.4.1.

7.2.2  The pragmatic view of politeness


The classic, and most frequently cited, politeness studies lean heavily towards
a pragmatic view. From roughly the late 1970s to the early 2000s, polite-
ness theories have concentrated on how we employ communicative strat-
egies to maintain or promote social harmony (e.g. Leech 1983: 82; Brown
and Levinson 1987: 1). Thomas (1995: 179) neatly summarises the research
agenda of scholars engaged in the study of pragmatic politeness:

All that is really being claimed is that people employ certain strategies
(including the 50+ strategies described by Leech, Brown and Levinson,
and others) for reasons of expediency – experience has taught us that
particular strategies are likely to succeed in given circumstances, so we
use them.

In our dinner table scenario, an example would be selecting a pragmatic


strategy in order to achieve the goals of both being passed something and
maintaining “social equilibrium” and “friendly relations” (Leech 1983: 82)
despite inconveniencing the target of our request. For example, could you pass
the salt please may be more expedient in this sense at a formal dinner event
than pass the salt. We take pragmatic strategy here to mean a conventional
means of achieving the goals of a participant.
Given the dominance of the pragmatic view in politeness research, we will
devote the next section to outlining classic theories positioned within it.

7.3  The two classic pragmatic politeness theories

7.3.1  The conversational-maxim view: Lakoff (1973) and


Leech (1983)
The classic theories of politeness draw, as one might guess, on the classic
pragmatic theories, notably, Gricean conversational implicature and speech
act theory, as outlined in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. Given that pragmatic theory
Interpersonal Pragmatics 203

has moved on, this is one of the weaknesses of those politeness theories.
The bulk of the work in politeness studies has been based on or related to
Brown and Levinson (1987), which we will outline in the following section.
First, however, we will also note an alternative theory, mainly as a way of
illustrating how politeness can interact with the Cooperative Principle (see
section 4.2.2).
Robin Lakoff (1973) was the first to posit a maxim-based view of politeness.
In brief, she proposes that there are two rules of pragmatic competence, one
being “be clear”, which is formalised in terms of Grice’s (1975) Cooperative
Principle, and the other being “be polite”, which is formalised in terms of a
Politeness Principle. The latter Politeness Principle consists of the following
maxims: (1) don’t impose, (2) give options, and (3) make your receiver feel
good. Lakoff notes that sometimes the need for clarity would clash with
the need for politeness. Leech (1983) also posits a Politeness Principle, one
which is more elaborate than that of Lakoff. The central mechanism of his
Politeness Principle is involved in “trade-offs” with the Cooperative Principle.
As an illustration, consider this event. At the annual general meeting of an
undergraduate university society at which the major business was to vote for
the president for the coming year, an author of this book witnessed that a
candidate for the presidency had gained only one vote from the forty people
present in the room. The candidates had been waiting outside, and the first
author of this book was asked to summon them inside to receive the results.
Upon meeting the candidate who got one vote, the candidate immediately
asked him how many votes she had gained. He could not reveal the truth,
since that would upset her; on the other hand, he did not want to be seen to
be lying. Cornered by her question, he decided to be vague and replied, not
many. His response thus avoided both a prototypical lie and the upset to the
hearer that would have accompanied a more cooperative – in Grice’s sense
(1975) – reply. By flouting Grice’s maxim of Quantity (1975) (not many rela-
tive to what?), he hoped that she would draw the implicature that a more
cooperative reply would have been more damaging to her, and that was why
he had been uncooperative. In Leech’s (1983) terms, the reason why he had
expressed himself unco-operatively was to uphold the Politeness Principle,
which Leech defines as: “Minimize (other things being equal) the expression
of impolite beliefs ... (Maximize (other things being equal) the expression of
polite beliefs)” (1983: 81). More specifically, he had abided by the Approbation
maxim (minimise dispraise of other/maximise praise of other), by minimising
“dispraise” of the candidate. The other maxims of the Politeness Principle
are: Tact, Generosity, Modesty, Agreement and Sympathy (see Leech 1983:
131–139, for details). The key point is that the Cooperative Principle accounts
for how people convey indirect meanings, the Politeness Principle accounts
for why people convey indirect meanings.
204 Pragmatics and the English Language

Reflection: Indirectness, (im)politeness and cultural variation

Gricean implicature underpins the notion of directness (cf. Searle 1975).


This is the main dimension for both of the classic politeness theories, Leech
(1983) and Brown and Levinson (1987). Leech’s (1983: 108) comments on
the relationship between politeness and indirectness are frequently cited:
indirect utterances, such as Could you possibly answer the phone, tend to
be more polite because they increase optionality for the hearer, while
decreasing illocutionary force (ibid.). However, we must be careful not to
assume that implicitness or indirectness always conveys politeness, a point
we discussed in section 6.3. It may be typical of British culture, but is not so
for all cultures. More directness is not always interpreted as less politeness
(particularly, it seems, in less individualistic cultures) (see also Field 1998
on directives in a native American culture).
We should briefly note that researchers typically mis-report Leech’s work
(see Leech 2007). As far as indirectness and politeness are concerned, they
usually ignore the fact that he also points out that indirectness might
increase impoliteness when expressing “impolite beliefs”. He comments
“because ‘You have something to declare’ is an impolite belief, the more
indirect kinds of question [e.g. ‘Haven’t you something to declare’] are
progressively more impolite, more threatening, than the ordinary yes–no
question” (1983: 171). While intuitively there seems to be something in
this, it has not as yet been fully empirically investigated.

Perhaps the biggest problem for all classic approaches to politeness, both
those subscribing to the maxim view and those subscribing to the face-saving
view (to be discussed below), is that they focus on politeness arising from
deviations from the Cooperative Principle, and pay little attention to polite-
ness that does not. Merely saying good morning to a colleague at the beginning
of the working day may be considered “polite”, but this does not involve a
deviation from the Cooperative Principle triggering the recovery of the speak-
er’s intention – it is more a case of performing a routine expected by the
hearer, given the social norms. A number of researchers have accounted for
the fact that politeness can be expected, normal, not noticed and thus not a
deviation from the Cooperative Principle (e.g. Escandell-Vidal 1998; Jary 1998;
Terkourafi 2001; Watts 2003). This kind of politeness is labelled anticipated
politeness by Fraser (1999, cited in Terkourafi 2001). Anticipated politeness
is based on associative inferencing, as described in section 3.2.1. The distinc-
tion between anticipated politeness and inferred politeness is elaborated
by Haugh (2003) (see also Terkourafi 2001: 121–127). Inferred politeness is
based on “logical” inferencing as mentioned in section 3.2.1 and elaborated
Interpersonal Pragmatics 205

in Chapters 4 and 5. It is this kind of politeness that is discussed by the classic


theories. In a nutshell, “politeness is anticipated when the behaviour giving
rise to politeness is expected, while it is inferred when the behaviour giving
rise to politeness is not expected” (Haugh 2003: 400). The distinction between
anticipated and inferred politeness is also echoed in the distinction between
politic behaviour and politeness, which we will discuss in section 6.4.2.

7.3.2  The face-saving view: Brown and Levinson (1987)


The main proponent of the face-saving view is Brown and Levinson (1987).
Their theory consists of the following inter-related components: face, face-
work and face-threatening acts, parameters affecting face threat and prag-
matic and linguistic output strategies. We shall deal with each in turn.

Face
What is face? Notions such as reputation, prestige and self-esteem, all involve
an element of the folk notion of face. The term is perhaps most commonly
used in English in the idiom losing face, meaning that one’s public image
suffers some damage, often resulting in humiliation or embarrassment. Such
reactions are suggestive of the emotional investment in face. Much modern
writing on face draws upon the work of Goffman (e.g. 1967). Goffman
(1967: 5) defines it thus: “the positive social value a person effectively claims
for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact.
Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes.”
Brown and Levinson’s conception of face consists of two related compo-
nents, which they assume are universal: “every member wants to claim for
himself” (1987: 61) [our italics]. One component is labelled positive face,
and appears to be close to Goffman’s definition of face, as it is defined as “the
want of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some others ... in
particular, it includes the desire to be ratified, understood, approved of, liked
or admired” (1987: 62). One may assume, for example, that you want your
existence acknowledged (e.g. people to say Hello), approval of your opinions
(e.g. You’re right about that student), or the expression of admiration (e.g. I
thought you did a good job). Note that positive face clearly involves particular
attitudes. The other component, negative face, is defined as: “the want of
every ‘competent adult member’ that his actions be unimpeded by others”
(1987: 62). One may assume, for example, that you want people to let you
attend to what you want, do what you want and say what you want (hence,
requests that inconvenience you are tentatively worded). Incidentally, the
words “positive” and “negative” in the labels for these two kinds of face
carry no implications of good and bad; they are simply technical terms for
different kinds of face.
206 Pragmatics and the English Language

Reflection: Face and cultural variation

In the introduction to this chapter, we noted cross-cultural variation in


the linguistic formulae by which politeness is achieved. But what if the
concepts with which we are analysing politeness are themselves cultur-
ally biased? In the last decade or so, discussion has focused on the precise
definition of “face” (see, in particular, Bargiela-Chiappini 2003). Much
of this has been a reaction to Brown and Levinson’s (1987) idea that
face can be described in terms of universal individualistic psycholog-
ical “wants”. Brown and Levinson (1987: 61) claim that their notion of
face is “derived from that of Goffman and from the English folk term”.
Compare the definitions above. That of Brown and Levinson is a very
reductive version of Goffman’s. With Goffman, it is not just the positive
values that you yourself want, but what you can claim about yourself
from what others assume about you – much more complicated! The point
is that how you feel about yourself is dependent on how others feel about
you. Hence, when you lose face you feel bad about how you are seen in
other people’s eyes. This social interdependence has been stripped out of
Brown and Levinson’s definition. Recent approaches to politeness (e.g.
Arundale 2006) have tended to shift back towards a reflexive notion of
face (i.e. involving what you think others think of yourself), as originally
advocated by Goffman (see Chapter 8 for further discussion of reflexivity
in pragmatics).
Furthermore, some researchers have criticised the individualism
reflected in Brown and Levinson’s definitions, particularly in nega-
tive face. Positive face is about what you as an individual find positive;
negative face is about not imposing upon you as an individual. But this
seems to ignore cases where the positive attributes apply to a group of
people (e.g. a winning team), or where an imposition on yourself is not
the main concern, but rather it is how you stand in relation to a group
(e.g. whether you are afforded the respect associated with your position
in the team). From a cultural perspective, some researchers have argued
that Brown and Levinson’s emphasis on individualism is a reflection of
Anglo-Saxon culture, and not a universal feature, despite the fact that
their politeness theory is pitched as a universal framework (cf. the title
of their book: “Politeness: Some universals of language usage”). Matsumoto
(1988) and Gu (1990), for example, point out that Japanese and Chinese
cultures stress the group more than the individual. These are cultures that
lean more towards collectivism. However, we should briefly note that not
everybody thinks that Brown and Levinson got it wrong. Chen (2010),
for example, argues that differences of this kind are differences in surface
phenomena, while the underlying motivations have a more general appli-
cation. Furthermore, one should remember that Brown and Levinson’s
description is based on the analysis of three very different languages, only
one of which is English.
Interpersonal Pragmatics 207

Reflection: Do cultures in England orientate to negative politeness?

As just noted, Brown and Levinson’s politeness model is said to reflect


the characteristics of politeness in England, notably, an emphasis on
individualism (e.g. Matsumoto 1988; Gu 1990; Nwoye 1992; Wierzbicka
[1991]2003). Similarly, one might observe of Leech (1983) that it is the
politeness maxim of Tact, encompassing indirectness, that receives most
attention. The Tact maxim covers the “most important kind of politeness
in English-speaking society” (1983: 107) (presumably Leech had in mind
British English-speaking societies). More generally in research, the polite-
ness cultures of England are often said to be characterised by off-record or
negative politeness (e.g. Blum-Kulka et al. 1989b; Stewart 2005; Ogiermann
2009) (e.g. Could you make me some tea or simply I’m thirsty as requests to
somebody to make tea). The emphasis on the individual, privacy and non-
imposition fits work in social anthropology. Kate Fox, in her book, Watching
the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour (2004: 173), writes:

The identification of England as a predominantly “negative-politeness”


culture – concerned mainly with the avoidance of imposition and
intrusion – seems to me quite helpful. The important point here is that
politeness and courtesy, as practised by the English, have very little to
do with friendliness or good nature.

For anybody familiar with the cultural practices of the people of England,
there is something that rings true about the claim that they have a prefer-
ence for negative politeness practices. However, it is a cultural generalisa-
tion, a stereotype (see Mills 2009, who elaborates on this point during her
discussion of culture and impoliteness). For anybody familiar with the North
of England, it is likely not to ring so true. Strangers are often met with terms
of affection (e.g. love, pet, darling) in conjunction with relatively direct utter-
ances, as well as banter – not the stuff of negative politeness. Unfortunately,
empirical research on the intra-cultural politeness practices of England is
lacking, so we cannot substantiate these intuitions. Incidentally, it is worth
pointing out here that cultures continually experience diachronic change
as well as synchronic, though this seems to have escaped the attention of
most researchers in cross-cultural pragmatics. The evidence points quite
strongly to early politeness practices in England being oriented towards
positive politeness rather than negative, the shift from one to the other
commencing in the early modern period (see Jucker 2008). Culpeper and
Demmen (2011) provide evidence showing that the current most common
negative politeness structures for achieving requests – namely, could you X
and can you X – were not established as politeness formulae before the 19th
century. They argue that Victorian values, with their emphasis on the self
(e.g. self-respect, self-sufficiency), did much to drive the rise of negative
politeness in the English cultures of Britain.
208 Pragmatics and the English Language

Face-Threatening Acts (FTAs)


Facework, according to Goffman, is made up of “the actions taken by a
person to make whatever he is doing consistent with face” (1967: 12). Any
action – though Brown and Levinson almost always discuss speech acts – that
impinges to some degree upon a person’s face (e.g. orders, insults, criticisms)
is a face-threatening act (hereafter, FTA). Facework can be designed to main-
tain or support face by counteracting threats, or potential threats, to face. This
kind of facework is often referred to as redressive facework, since it involves
the redress of an FTA. Facework, in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model, can
be distinguished according to the type of face redressed, positive or negative.
One might say that positive facework provides the pill with a sugar coating in
that one affirms that in general one wants to support the other’s positive face
(e.g. in saying Make me a cup of tea, sweetie, the term of endearment expresses
in-group solidarity with and affection for the hearer, thereby counterbal-
ancing the FTA). In contrast, negative facework softens the blow in that one
specifically addresses the FTA (typically, in British culture, this is achieved by
being less direct, as in I wondered if I could trouble you to make me a cup of tea).

Reflection: Beyond FTAs

It is important to note that Brown and Levinson’s work is oriented to acts


that threaten face, and facework that attempts to redress those threatening
acts. What about acts that simply enhance face? An important merit of
Leech’s Politeness Principle is that it is not confined to the management
of potentially “impolite” acts (i.e. FTAs), such as asking somebody to do
something for you, but also involves potentially “polite” acts (Leech 1983:
83) (i.e. face-enhancing acts), such as a compliment out of the blue. Leech’s
Politeness Principle allows for the minimisation of impolite beliefs and the
maximisation of polite beliefs. This helps account for why, for example, the
direct command Have a drink at a social occasion, which would appear to
be impolite in brusquely restricting the hearer’s freedom of action, in fact
maximises the polite belief that the hearer would like and would benefit
from a drink but might be too polite to just take one. And what about acts
that simply attack face – threats, insults, put-downs, sarcasm, mimicry and
so on? Goffman (1967: 24–26) mentions “aggressive facework”. Clearly,
politeness is not the issue here but rather “impoliteness”, an area we will
attend to near the end of this chapter. Recent “relational” approaches (e.g.
Locher and Watts 2005; Spencer-Oatey 2008; see also section 7.4.2) within
politeness studies are based on the full range of facework, and locate poten-
tially polite behaviours within that framework.
We should also note here that FTAs are acts, reflecting the fact that speech
act theory underpins Brown and Levinson (1987). We already discussed
Interpersonal Pragmatics 209

the limitations of speech act theory in Chapter 6. Speech act theory is


discussed in relation to single short utterances with single functions, single
speakers and single addressees. This ignores the multi-functionality and
complexity of discourse situations, and the fact that speech acts are often
constructed over a number of turns (see section 6.6). Brown and Levinson
(1987: 10) recognise that the adoption of speech act theory as a basis for
their model has not been ideal: “speech act theory forces a sentence-based,
speaker-oriented mode of analysis, requiring attribution of speech act cate-
gories where our own thesis requires that utterances are often equivocal in
force”. The sort of decontextualised speech acts they use do not reflect the
indeterminacies of utterances and the face-threatening ramifications they
may have for any of the participants in a particular speech event. Their
work includes no extended examples.

Variables affecting face threat


Brown and Levinson argue that an assessment of the amount of face threat of
a particular act involves three sociological variables, the first two of which are
much-discussed social relations: (1) the social distance between participants,
(2) the relative power of the hearer over the speaker, and (3) the absolute
ranking of the imposition involved in the act (see, in particular, 1987: 74–78).
For example, Brown and Levinson would predict that asking a new colleague
for a cup of tea is more face-threatening than asking a long-standing colleague
(the distance variable); asking one’s employer for a cup of tea is more face-
threatening than asking a colleague (the power variable); and asking for a
glass of vintage port is more face-threatening than asking for a glass of water
(the ranking variable). They claim that these three variables subsume all other
factors that can influence an assessment of face threat, and also that numer-
ical values could be attached to each variable, so that the degree of face threat
can be summed according to a formula (ibid.: 76). The point of calculating
face threat, according to Brown and Levinson, is that it will lead to “a deter-
mination of the level of politeness with which, other things being equal, an
FTA will be communicated” (ibid.). They do not, however, attempt to apply
this formula in a quantitative analysis of face threat.

Reflection: Beyond sociological variables

Note that Brown and Levinson’s book was published in a sociolinguistics


series. It is perhaps not surprising then that the methodological flavour of
the dominant sociolinguistics paradigm, that of Labov, with its emphasis
on quantification had affected subsequent politeness studies (and we
should note the role of studies in social psychology, which traditionally
210 Pragmatics and the English Language

emphasise quantification). Numerous researchers began administering


questionnaires (a favourite though not the only methodology) to quantify
the kind of politeness strategies used by people of different relative power,
social distance and so on (see Spencer-Oatey 1996, for many references). In
general, the studies confirmed Brown and Levinson’s predictions for power
and to a lesser extent social distance, but generally avoided testing ranking.
However, the basis of these studies is now being questioned. Spencer-Oatey
(1996) demonstrated that researchers varied widely in what is understood
by power or social distance. In fact, these variables were subsuming other
independent variables. Baxter (1984), for example, showed that the atti-
tude affect (i.e. whether there is liking or disliking between participants)
was getting muddled up with social distance, despite the fact that it is an
independent variable. More fundamentally, research on social situations
and context generally has moved on. Social values, it is argued, are not
static but dynamic, and they are not given values (i.e. known by partic-
ipants) but negotiated in interaction (e.g. I may start by assuming that
somebody is more powerful than me but re-evaluate that in the course of
an interaction). To be fair to Brown and Levinson, they did acknowledge
this vision, stating that values on their variables “are not intended as soci-
ologists’ ratings of actual power, distance, etc., but only as actors’ assump-
tions of such ratings, assumed to be mutually assumed, at least within
certain limits” (1987: 74–76; original emphasis). But they did not back this
vision up with a suitable methodology (one which is more qualitative in
nature and thus able to handle the complexity), and certainly subsequent
researchers chose to ignore it.

Pragmatic and linguistic politeness output strategies


Brown and Levinson (1987) suggest that there are five pragmatic ­super-strategies
for doing politeness, the selection of which is determined by the degree of
face threat. We summarise these below (the examples are ours). They are
ordered from least to most face threat, and include examples of linguistic
output strategies:

Bald on record: The speaker performs the FTA efficiently in a direct,


concise and perspicuous manner, or, in other words, in accordance with
Grice’s maxims (1975). Typically used in emergency situations, or when
the face threat is very small, or when the speaker has great power over
the hearer.
Positive politeness: The speaker performs the FTA in such a way that
attention is paid to the hearer’s positive face wants. Includes such strategies
as paying attention to the hearer (Hello), expressing interest, approval or
sympathy (That was so awful, my heart bled for you), using in-group identity
markers (Liz, darling  ...), seeking agreement (Nice weather today), avoiding
Interpersonal Pragmatics 211

disagreement (Yes, it’s kind of nice), assuming common ground (I know how
you feel) and so on.
Negative politeness: The speaker performs the FTA in such a way that
attention is paid to the hearer’s negative face wants. Includes such strategies
as mollifying the force of an utterance with questions and hedges (Actually,
I wondered if you could help?), being pessimistic (I don’t suppose there would be
any chance of a cup of tea?), giving deference, that is, treating the addressee
as a superior and thereby emphasising rights to immunity (I’ve been a real
fool, could you help me out?), apologising (I’m sorry, I don’t want to trouble you
but ...), impersonalising the speaker and the hearer (It would be appreciated,
if this were done) and so on.
Off-record: The speaker performs the FTA in such a way that he can avoid
responsibility for performing it. The speaker’s face-threatening intention
can only be worked out by means of an inference triggered by the flouting
of a maxim.
Don’t do the FTA: The speaker simply refrains from performing the FTA
because it is so serious.

Reflection: The role of prosody

Brown and Levinson (1987) devote considerable attention to detailing


output strategies, their exposition extends to approximately 150 pages.
However, hardly any attention is devoted to how what is said sounds, how
the prosody can influence politeness (or impoliteness) interpretations. Yet,
it is not an unusual occurrence that people take offence at how someone
says something rather than at what was said. Consider this (reconstructed)
exchange between two pre-teenage sisters:

[7.1]  A: Do you know anything about yo-yos?


B: That’s mean.
(field notes)

On the face of it, Speaker A’s utterance is an innocent enquiry about Speaker
B’s state of knowledge. However, the prosody triggered a different interpre-
tation. Speaker A heavily stressed and elongated the beginning of anything,
coupled with marked falling intonation at that point (we might represent
this as: “do you know \ANYthing about /yo-yos?”). It signals to B that A’s
question is not straightforward or innocent. It triggers the recovery of impli-
catures that Speaker A is not asking a question but expressing both a belief
that Speaker B knows nothing about yo-yos (the prosodic prominence of
anything implying a contrast with nothing), and an attitude towards that
belief, namely, incredulity that this is the case − something which itself
implies that Speaker B is deficient in some way. Without the prosody, there
is no clear evidence of the interpersonal orientation of Speaker A, whether
212 Pragmatics and the English Language

positive, negative or somewhere in between. Yet, despite the importance


of prosody in communication, the vast bulk of research on politeness or
impoliteness pays woefully little attention to the role of prosody. The
single exception of note is the work of Arndt and Janney (e.g. 1987), whose
notion of politeness involves emotional support conveyed multi-modally
through verbal, vocal and kinesic cues (for prosody and impoliteness, see
Culpeper 2011b).

Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory has been applied, in full or part,
to a wide variety of discourses, situations and social categories, including
“everyday” conversation, workplace discourse, job interviews, healthcare
discourse, political discourse, media discourse, literary texts, historical texts,
gender and conflict, not to mention a huge literature examining intercultural
or cross-cultural discourses. For the purposes of exemplifying the kind of anal-
ysis that can be done, we will examine an example of healthcare discourse.
Our data is taken from Candlin and Lucas (1986), where politeness issues are
in fact only very briefly touched on. The lineation has been slightly changed.
The context is an interview at a family planning clinic in the USA. CR is a
counsellor, who interviews clients before they see the doctor. CT is a client,
who is pregnant.

[7.2] 1 CR: have you ever thought about discontinuing smoking?


2 CT: uh. I’ve thought about it (laughs)
3 CR: do you think you’d be able to do it?
4 CT: I don’t know (laughs) I guess if I really wanted to .. I’ve been
smoking for a long time.
5 CR: are you under more stress now?
6 CT: um. I guess you could say so. yeah, because it was last year
that I started smoking more.
7 CR: do you think if you worked on those things you might be
able to cut down?
8 CT: on the stress you mean?
9 CR: well. I don’t know what the stress is and I don’t know if
you’re open to talking about that but .. from your facial
expressions .. it seems like you’re really hesitant to make
a decision to discontinuing smoke. I mean smoking, that
gonna have to be something up to you .. do you think if the
stress was eliminated that maybe ..
10 CT: I could cut down.
11 CR: or quit

[A few more turns elapse, with minimal contributions from CT]

12 CR: well. you know it’s not easy. cause everybody. well I’ve got
my bad habits too. so I know it’s not easy ... I smoked for
eight years too so I know it’s not easy.
Interpersonal Pragmatics 213

13 CT: Did you quit?


14 CR: yeah.
(adapted from Candlin and Lucas 1986: 32–33)

CR’s goal is to get CT to stop smoking. She repeatedly uses the speech act
of request. However, this request is realised indirectly. A very direct request
might be “quit smoking”. In contrast, in turn 1 her request is couched as a
question about whether CT has ever thought about stopping, and in turn 3 it
is a question about what CT thinks of her ability to stop. This does not meet
with success, so in turn 5 CR tries another tack, engaging CT in talk about a
possible cause of the smoking, rather than directly talking about stopping.
Then in turn 7 CR links the cause to cutting down. Note how indirect this is:
it is phrased as a question about whether she has thought about whether she
would be able to cut down. CR’s strategy thus far is largely off-record politeness:
by flouting the maxim of Relation (it is improbable in this context that CR is
only inquiring about CT’s thoughts) and the maxim of Quantity (what is to
be cut down is not specified), she leaves it to CT to infer that she is requesting
her to stop smoking (i.e. CR’s implicature).2 Turn 7 is further modified by
hedging the possibility that she has the ability to cut down (cf. might), and
making it conditional (cf. if you worked on those things). These linguistic strate-
gies – conditionals and hedges – are the stuff of negative politeness. Note that
a downside of this kind of indirectness is the loss of pragmatic clarity. In turn
2 CT either chooses to ignore or possibly was not aware of CR’s implicature
requesting her to stop, and just replies to the literal question (I’ve thought about
it). Similarly, after turn 7 CT either exploits or is simply confused by the lack
of clarity regarding what she should cut down (on the stress you mean). In turn
9 CR probes what the reasons for not giving up might be. The frequent hesi-
tations signal tentativeness, a reluctance to impose, and thus can be consid-
ered a negative politeness strategy. In the final part of that turn, she again
uses a question, but notably she refrains from completing the question and
spelling out the other half of the if-structure (i.e. if the stress is eliminated,
the smoking will be). This could be considered an example of don’t do the
FTA. Thus far, CR does not seem to be making much progress with her goal,
and in the following turns (not presented in the text above) she makes only
minimal responses. In turn 12 CR tries a completely different tack. She not
only self-discloses (I’ve got my bad habits too ... I’ve smoked for eight years too so
I know it’s not easy), but reveals information that (a) is negative about herself,
and (b) is something that she has in common with CT. The kind of strategy
in (a) is not well covered in Brown and Levinson, but could be accounted
for by Leech’s Modesty maxim (minimise praise of self/maximise dispraise of
self); the strategy in (b), claiming common ground, is an example of positive

2
See Haugh (in press, 2014) for an alternative account of such phenomena through the lens of
the notion of “politeness implicature”.
214 Pragmatics and the English Language

politeness. Importantly, note the effect of this on CT. For the first time, CT has
engaged CR in conversation: instead of simply responding in a fairly minimal
way, she asks a question (Did you quit?).

7.4  Recent developments

While over the decades there has been a strong chorus of critical comment
on the classic politeness theories, including the issues raised in the boxes
above, no single replacement model has yet emerged. Instead, over the last
decade three different, yet partly overlapping, approaches have emerged,
approaches which we will label discursive, relational and frame-based. We
will give the flavour of these approaches in the following subsections. These
will be followed by (1) a section on what might be seen as the opposite to
politeness, namely, impoliteness, an area of study that has grown rapidly in
the last decade, and (2) a section on the interactional approach to politeness,
an approach that has made an appearance in recent years and is in tune with
the interactional thread running through this book.

7.4.1  Discursive
Generally, recent work on politeness has usefully stressed that politeness
is not inherent in linguistic forms but is a contextual judgement (see also
comments at the end of section 7.2.1). More fundamentally, Eelen (2001)
and Watts (e.g. 2003) argue vigorously that the classic pragmatic approaches
articulate a pseudo-scientific theory of particular social behaviours and label it
politeness (so-called politeness2), while ignoring the lay person’s conception
of politeness (so-called politeness1) as revealed, for example, through the use
of the terms polite and politeness to refer to particular social behaviours. The
key issue here is who decides that some piece of language counts as polite? Is
it the analyst applying a politeness theory to a recording of language or is it
the actual user of the language making comments about it?
Discursive politeness approaches lean towards politeness1, and indeed
share some of its characteristics (see, for example, the discussion of politeness1
in Eelen 2001: 32–43). For example, they share a dislike of universalising gener-
alisations. A key feature of discursive approaches is that they emphasise that
the very definitions of politeness itself are subject to discursive struggle (what
might be polite for one participant might be impolite for another). Discursive
approaches typically have at least some of the following characteristics:

• the claim that there is no one meaning of the term “politeness” but that it
is a point of discursive struggle;
• the centrality of the perspective of participants;
Interpersonal Pragmatics 215

• an emphasis on situated and emergent meanings rather than pre-defined


meanings;
• the claim that politeness is evaluative in character (that it is used in
judgements of people’s behaviours);
• an emphasis on context;
• the claim that politeness is intimately connected with social norms, which
offer a grasp on the notion of appropriateness (note here the connection
with the socio-cultural view of politeness discussed in section 7.2.1);
• the reduction of the role of intention in communication (it is rejected, or
at least weakened or re-conceptualised);
• a focus on the micro, not the macro; and
• a preference for qualitative methods of analysis as opposed to quantitative.

Works that might claim to be discursive include: Eelen 2001; Locher and
Watts 2005; Mills 2003; Watts 2003 (Locher 2006 is a very useful outline of
the approach). In 2011 the volume Discursive Approaches to Politeness, edited
by the Linguistic Politeness Research Group (LPRG), appeared.3 However, one
problem for this approach is that the publications which cover it vary widely
in what they take to be discursive, often mixing discursive elements with non-
discursive elements (see Haugh 2007b). For example, work by Richard Watts
and Miriam Locher incorporates the notion of “politic behaviour”, which will
be discussed in the following section. Politic behaviour is not a label that is at
all familiar to the lay person. Further, discursive analyses of data sometimes
seem suspiciously reminiscent of the kinds of analyses undertaken by scholars
who are considered non-discursive (e.g. because they deploy intuitions and
interpretations flowing from the analyst rather than the lay person).
The discursive approach is concerned with “developing a theory of social
politeness” (Watts 2003: 9, et passim; our emphasis), though creating a
“theory” of politeness seems not to be the objective for the discursive polite-
ness approach (cf. Watts 2005: xlii). A consequence of focusing on the dynamic
and situated characteristics of politeness is that politeness is declared not to be
a predictive theory (Watts 2003: 25), or, apparently, even a post-hoc descrip-
tive one (ibid.: 142). This is unlike classic politeness theories, especially Brown
and Levinson (1987), which predict the choice of pragmatic strategies in the
light of the degree of face threat as determined by sociological variables. A
pragmatic approach has a different agenda:

The starting point of pragmatics is primarily in language: explaining


communicative behaviour. By studying this we keep our feet firmly on the

3
Whilst it is clear that this volume did much to set the agenda for the new discursive approach to
politeness, it should be noted that not every paper within it could be described as discursive.
216 Pragmatics and the English Language

ground, and avoid getting lost too easily in abstractions such as “face” or
“culture”. The basic question is: what did s mean [to convey] by saying X?
It is useful to postulate the Politeness Principle (PP), I claim, not because it
explains what we mean by the word “politeness” (an English word which
in any case doesn’t quite match similar words in other languages), but
because it explains certain pragmatic phenomena.
(Leech 2003: 104–105)

Bearing in mind section 7.2.1, one can see that the discursive approach is
more sympathetic to the prescriptive social norm view (etiquette manuals,
for example, provide insight into what the lay person would label polite). In
contrast, the pragmatic approach is more sympathetic to the experiential
social norm view, given that it often focuses on regular usages (cf. strate-
gies) in context – usages which have usually become regular because they are
expedient.

Reflection: The discursive approach and relevance theory

Watts (e.g. 2003) embraces relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson


[1986]1995; see sections 4.3.2 and 5.3.1) as an explanatory framework.
Mills (2003) also argues, though not uncritically, that relevance theory can
make a contribution to the discursive approach (see also Christie 2007:
278–279). Given that relevance theory is a “grand” theory of universal
application, this would seem a rather odd move. It has been used to
account for politeness by a number of scholars (e.g. Escandell-Vidal 1996;
Jary 1998; Christie 2007). In particular, relevance theory can account
for the anticipated versus inferred distinction (see section 7.3.1). So few
cognitive effects arise from anticipated politeness (behaviour following
social norms) that it is not relevant enough to spend inferential effort
on it; but when there are sufficiently large cognitive effects to reward
processing effort, inferred politeness can take place. What makes it attrac-
tive to scholars pursuing the discursive approach is that it emphasises the
hearer and does not have generalised norms of behaviour as a starting
point, instead, it focuses on specific situated behaviours, “it provides an
extremely powerful interpretive apparatus” (Watts 2003: 212). However,
relevance theory has three problems for politeness-related studies. First,
the relevance theory account of communication still involves the recog-
nition of speakers’ intentions. It does not suit politeness to place a rela-
tively restricted notion of intention at its centre. Second, Haugh (2003:
406) points out that the notion of cognitive effects has not been suffi-
ciently characterised:

[T]here is no distinction made between cognitive effects which


have “positive effect” (such as feelings of approval or warmth and
so on), and those which have “negative effect” (such as antagonism
Interpersonal Pragmatics 217

or ­alienation and so on). For example, there is no distinction made


between showing that one thinks well of others (which can give rise
to politeness), and showing that one thinks badly of others (which can
give rise to impoliteness).

Third, no publication has shown how relevance theory can produce


effective analyses of stretches of naturally occurring discourse, a limi-
tation Watts (2003: 212) concedes: “[o]ne major problem with RT is
that it rarely, if ever, concerns itself with stretches of natural verbal
interaction”.

7.4.2  Relational
Relational approaches have a central focus on interpersonal relations in
common, rather than a central focus on the individual performing “polite-
ness” which is then correlated with interpersonal relations as variables, as
happens with Brown and Levinson (1987). This, in fact, has important impli-
cations. The term polite has been stretched, especially in the classic theories,
to cover a range of different phenomena, not all of which would readily be
recognised as polite by the lay person. In Britain, saying please or thank you
would readily be recognised as polite, but would giving someone a compli-
ment attract the same label? Perhaps the latter is just seen as an example of
“nice”, “kind” or “supportive” behaviour, or even “sneaky”, “manipulative”
or “arse-licking” behaviour. Of course, it is an empirical question as to what
perceptions and labels particular behaviours attract, but there is no doubting
that their discussions of politeness encompass such a breadth of phenomena
that the label polite is unlikely to be the descriptor of choice for each indi-
vidual phenomenon. Relational approaches avoid seeing everything through
the prism of politeness. In point of fact, they also encompass impolite behav-
iour. We will briefly outline the two main relational approaches, the relational
work approach of Locher and Watts’ (e.g. Locher 2004, 2006; Locher and
Watts 2005; Watts 2003) and the rapport management approach of Spencer-
Oatey (e.g. 2008).
Locher and Watts state that “relational work can be understood as equiva-
lent to Halliday’s (1978) interpersonal level of communication” (2005: 11)
and, further, that “[r]elational work is defined as the work people invest in
negotiating their relationships in interaction” (2008: 78). Relational work
is not switched off and on in communication but is always involved. The
concept of face is central to relational work, though not as defined by Brown
and Levinson (1987) but by Goffman (1967: 5). Face is treated as discursively
constructed within situated interactions. Watts (2005: xliii, see also Locher
and Watts 2005: 12; Locher 2004: 90) offers a diagram which usefully attempts
to map the total spectrum of relational work, reproduced in Figure 7.1.
218 Pragmatics and the English Language

politic/appropriate behaviour

“non-polite”

“polite”

unmarked behaviour positively marked


behaviour

negatively marked behaviour

“impolite”

“rude” “over-polite”

non-politic/inappropriate behaviour

Figure 7.1  Relational work (Watts 2005: xliii)

Relational work in this perspective incorporates the issue of whether behaviour


is marked or not. Markedness here relates to appropriateness; if the behaviour
is inappropriate, it will be marked and more likely to be noticed. Note that the
notion of appropriateness can be viewed in terms of acting in accordance or
otherwise with social norms (see section 7.2.1). Unmarked behaviour is what
Watts (e.g. 2003) refers to in his earlier work as “politic behaviour”: “[l]inguistic
behaviour which is perceived to be appropriate to the social constraints of
the ongoing interaction, i.e. as non-salient, should be called politic behaviour”
(Watts 2003: 19), and is illustrated by the following examples:

[7.3] A: Would you like some more coffee?


B: Yes, please.

M: Hello, Mr. Smith. How are you?


S: Hello David. Fine thanks. How are you?
(Watts 2003: 186, emphasis as original)

Politeness, on the other hand, is positively marked behaviour. Watts (2003:


19) writes that “[l]inguistic behaviour perceived to go beyond what is expect-
able, i.e. salient behaviour, should be called polite or impolite depending on
whether the behaviour itself tends towards the negative or positive end of
the spectrum of politeness”. By way of illustration, we can re-work Watts’s
examples accordingly:

[7.4] A: Would you like some more coffee?


B: Yes, please, that’s very kind, coffee would be wonderful.
Interpersonal Pragmatics 219

M: Hello, Mr. Smith. It’s great to see you. We missed you. How are you?
S: Hello David. I’m fine thanks. It’s great to see you too. How are you?

Reflection: To be politic or not to be politic?

Watts’s and Locher’s view that politeness is associated with a marked


surplus of relational work clearly rings true. One problem, however, is that
Watts’s definitions, as given in the previous paragraph, suggest a hard line
between politic behaviour and politeness: if it is not one, it is the other.
This seems unrealistic; surely there is a scale between politic behaviour and
politeness that captures degrees of difference between relatively “normal”
behaviours and situations, such as greetings and leave-takings in expected
contexts, and those which are more creative (see Leech 2007: 203, for a
similar comment). Indeed, contrary to the definitions, the dotted lines in
Figure 7.1 suggest fuzziness.

Spencer-Oatey (e.g. 2002, 2005, 2008) proposes a model of rapport manage-


ment, which concerns the management of harmony–disharmony amongst
people. A particular concern was that “Brown and Levinson’s (1987) concep-
tualisation of positive face has been underspecified, and that the concerns
they identify as negative face issues are not necessarily face concerns at all”
(2008: 13). Thus, her model not only consists of three types of face – “quality”,
“relational” and “social identity” – but also two types of “sociality rights”.
These are summarised in Table 7.1.
In addition to face and rights, Spencer-Oatey (2008: 17) argues for the
importance of interactional goals:

People often (although not always) have specific goals when they interact
with others. These can be relational as well as transactional (i.e. task-focused)
in nature. These “wants” can significantly affect their perceptions of rapport
because any failure to achieve them can cause frustration and annoyance.

Threats to positive rapport or harmony between people can be related to face,


rights/obligations or interactional goals. However, rapport management is not
confined, as in the case of Brown and Levinson (1987), to counterbalancing
threats. Spencer-Oatey (2008: 32) suggests that there are four orientations:

1. Rapport enhancement orientation: a desire to strengthen or enhance


harmonious relations between the interlocutors;
2. Rapport maintenance orientation: a desire to maintain or protect
harmonious relations between the interlocutors;
3. Rapport neglect orientation: a lack of concern or interest in the quality of
relations between the interlocutors (perhaps because of a focus on self);
4. Rapport challenge orientation: a desire to challenge or impair harmo-
nious relations between the interlocutors.
220 Pragmatics and the English Language

Table 7.1  Categories in the rapport management framework

Face Quality face


(defined with reference (related to the self as an individual): “We have a
to Goffman (1967: fundamental desire for people to evaluate us
5): “the positive positively in terms of our personal qualities, e.g.
social value a person our confidence, abilities, appearance etc” (Spencer-
effectively claims for Oatey 2002: 540).
himself [sic] by the Relational face
line others assume (related to the self in relationship with others):
he has taken during “[s]ometimes there can also be a relational application;
a particular contact” for example, being a talented leader and/or a kind-
(2008: 13). hearted teacher entails a relational component that is
intrinsic to the evaluation” (2008: 15).
Social identity face
(related to the self as a group member): “We have a
fundamental desire for people to acknowledge and
uphold our social identities or roles” (2002: 540);
“[social identity face involves] any group that a
person is a member of and is concerned about. This
can include small groups like one’s family, and larger
groups like one’s ethnic group, religious group or
nationality group” (2005:106).

Sociality rights Equity rights


defined as the “We have a fundamental belief that we are entitled to
“fundamental social personal consideration from others, so that we are
entitlements that a treated fairly: that we are not unduly imposed upon,
person effectively that we are not unfairly ordered about and that we
claims for him/herself are not taken advantage of or exploited” (2008: 16).
in his/her interactions Association rights
with others” (2008: “We have a fundamental belief that we are entitled
13). to social involvement with others, in keeping with
the type of relationship that we have with them”
(2008: 16).

Rapport enhancement tallies with Leech’s (1983) accommodation of acts that


simply enhance politeness, for example, to strengthen friendship. Rapport
maintenance could be simply a matter of performing politic behaviour, or a
matter of restoring relations in the light of threatening behaviour. Rapport
neglect accommodates Brown and Levinson’s (1987) observation about the
bald on record strategy that in emergency situations politeness is not an issue,
along with the many other reasons why somebody may neglect relations (e.g.
weighting their own concerns above those of others). Finally, rapport chal-
lenge accommodates impoliteness, to be discussed in the next section.
Interpersonal Pragmatics 221

Spencer-Oatey (e.g. 2008) devotes considerable space to elaborating how


these three components are linked to pragmatic, linguistic and contextual
features. This elaboration goes well beyond simple lexically and grammati-
cally defined output strategies or simple social variables. The important point
for the model is that Spencer-Oatey provides a detailed analytical framework
which we can apply to language data.

7.4.3  Frame-based
Terkourafi (e.g. 2001) is certainly not the first, or indeed only, scholar to
have related politeness to the notion of a (cognitive) “frame” (Watts 2003;
Locher 2004; and Locher and Watts 2005 do likewise). However, Terkourafi
produces the most elaborate account of the frame-based approach to polite-
ness, anchoring it in pragmatic theory. For this reason, we will focus on her
work in this section.
Terkourafi argues that we should analyse the concrete linguistic realisations
(i.e. formulae) and particular contexts of use which co-constitute “frames”.
This avoids problematic notions like directness (see section 7.3). Moreover,
“[i]t is the regular co-occurrence of particular types of context and partic-
ular linguistic expressions as the unchallenged realisations of particular acts
that create the perception of politeness” (2005a: 248; see also 2005b: 213;
our emphasis). It is through this regularity of co-occurrence that we acquire
“a knowledge of which expressions to use in which situations” (2002: 197),
that is, “experientially acquired structures of anticipated ‘default’ behaviour”
(ibid.). Note that we are tapping into experiential norms, and also that we
are dealing with anticipated politeness. The fact that the expressions are not
only regularly associated with a particular context but also go unchallenged
is an important point. This feature seems to be similar to Haugh’s point that
evidence of politeness can be found in, amongst other things, “the reciproca-
tion of concern evident in the adjacent placement of expressions of concern
relevant to the norms in both in that particular interaction” (2007b: 312).
That we are dealing with regularities means that we can deploy quantitative
as well as qualitative methodologies (a simplistic quantitative methodology,
such as counting up a particular form, is not possible, however, as we must
count up forms in particular contexts that are unchallenged).
Of course, it is not the case that such conventionalised formulae – the stuff
of anticipated politeness – constitute the only way politeness is conveyed and
understood. Terkourafi (e.g. 2001, 2005b) develops neo-Gricean pragmatics
(see section 4.3.1) to account for more implicational/inferential modes.
Hitherto, standard, classical Gricean accounts of politeness (e.g. Leech 1983)
have made no explicit connection with generalised implicatures, instead
discussing politeness in terms of the recovery of the speaker’s intentions in
deviating from Gricean cooperativeness on a particular occasion (i.e. in terms
222 Pragmatics and the English Language

of particularised implicatures). In the introduction to their second edition,


Brown and Levinson (1987: 6–7) concede that they may have underplayed the
role of generalised conversational implicatures. Terkourafi, in contrast, argues
that, while politeness can involve full inferencing in a nonce context, what
lies at its heart is a generalised implicature, that is, a level of meaning between
particularised implicatures and fully conventionalised (non-defeasible) impli-
catures (cf. Levinson’s utterance-type meaning; see section 4.3.1). More specif-
ically, she argues that generalised implicatures arise from situations where
the implicature is weakly context-dependent, requiring a minimal amount
of contextual information relating to the social context of use in which the
utterance was routinised and thus conventionalised to some degree. Her argu-
ment is neatly summarised here (Terkourafi 2005a: 251, original emphasis):

Politeness is achieved on the basis of a generalised implicature when an


expression x is uttered in a context with which – based on the addressee’s
previous experience of similar contexts – expression x regularly co-occurs.
In this case, rather than engaging in full-blown inferencing about the
speaker’s intention, the addressee draws on that previous experience
(represented holistically as a frame) to derive the proposition that “in
offering expression x the speaker is being polite” as a generalised impli-
cature of the speaker’s utterance. On the basis of this generalised impli-
cature, the addressee may then come to hold the further belief that the
speaker is polite.

7.5  Impoliteness

Although the study of impoliteness has a fairly long history (usually in the
guise of the study of swearing), and although early scientific attempts to address
the topic (e.g. Lachenicht 1980) did not galvanise scholars, momentum has
been increasing, with the arrival of Lakoff (1989), Culpeper (1996), Tracy and
Tracy (1998), Mills (2003), Bousfield (2008), Bousfield and Locher (2008) and
Culpeper (2011a), to mention but a few. A key question is: should a model
of politeness account for impoliteness using the same concepts, perhaps
with an opposite orientation, or is a completely different model required?
Impoliteness phenomena are not unrelated to politeness phenomena. One
way in which the degree of impoliteness varies is according to the degree
of politeness expected: if somebody told their University Vice-Chancellor
to be quiet, most likely considerably more offence would be taken than if
they told one of their young children to do the same. Moreover, the fact
that sarcasm trades off politeness is further evidence of this relationship. For
example, thank you (with exaggerated prosody) uttered by somebody to whom
Interpersonal Pragmatics 223

a great disfavour has been done, reminds hearers of the distance between
favours that normally receive polite thanks and the disfavour in this instance.
There are, however, also some important differences between politeness and
impoliteness. Recollect that both of the relational frameworks discussed in
section  7.4.2 accommodate, explicitly or implicitly, both politeness and
impoliteness. It is true that within a relational approach such as Locher and
Watts (2005) there is a ready opposition: impoliteness can be associated with a
negative evaluation as opposed to a positive evaluation, which can be aligned
with politeness. However, the categories “positive” and “negative” are very
broad. When we look at the specifics, the polite/impolite opposition runs into
some difficulties.
One possible characteristic of politeness, as noted in section 7.2.1, is consid-
eration. In a very broad sense any impoliteness involves being inconsiderate,
but defining something in terms of a negative (i.e. what it is not) is not very
informative about what it actually is. Moreover, Culpeper (2011a) reports a
study of 100 impoliteness events narrated by British undergraduates. 133 of
the total of 200 descriptive labels that informants supplied for those events
fell into six groups (in order of predominance): patronising, inconsiderate, rude,
aggressive, inappropriate and hurtful (see Culpeper 2011a: chapter 3). Clearly,
being inconsiderate is a descriptive label that strikes a chord with participants.
However, patronising, by far the most frequent label, does not have a ready oppo-
site concept in politeness theory. Presumably, it relates to an abuse of power,
a lack of deference, but neither power nor deference are well described in the
classic politeness theories. Similarly, aggressive, with overtones of violence and
power, has only a very general opposite in politeness theory, namely, harmo-
nious. And there are yet other differences or cases where there do not appear
to be easy diametric opposites between impoliteness and politeness. Anger is
one of the most frequent emotional reactions associated with impoliteness,
particularly when a social norm or right is perceived to have been infringed
(see Culpeper 2011a: chapter 2). But anger lacks a similarly specific emotional
opposite associated with politeness. Furthermore, taboo lexical items appear
relatively frequently in impolite language. Lexical euphemisms, however,
while they are associated with politeness, play a minor role.4
An important point is that relational frameworks are not models of polite-
ness or impoliteness themselves; they are models of interpersonal relations
which may accommodate at least some aspects of politeness, impoliteness,
and so on. So, while they will provide insights, we cannot expect a complete
apparatus for accommodating or explaining the rich array of communicative

4
Leech (2009) argued that taboo language is one of two impoliteness areas which politeness
theory, specifically his own, cannot adequately account for. The other concerns the negative
acts, threats and curses.
224 Pragmatics and the English Language

action undertaken to achieve and/or perceived by participants as achieving


impoliteness (see, for example, the descriptions in Culpeper 1996; Bousfield
2008). One obvious difference between politeness and impoliteness is that
impoliteness has its own set of conventionalised impolite formulae. We under-
stand conventionalisation here in the same way as Terkourafi (e.g. 2003),
namely, items conventionalised for a particular context of use. As we saw in
section 7.4.3, for such items to count as polite, they must go unchallenged
(e.g. Terkourafi 2005a; see also Haugh 2007b, for a related point). Conversely,
then, a characteristic of conventionally impolite formulae is that they are
challenged. In Culpeper’s (2011a) data, by far the most frequent impolite
formulae type is insults. These fall into the following four groups (all exam-
ples are taken from naturally occurring data; square brackets give an indica-
tion of structural slots, which are optional to varying degrees, and slashes
separate examples):

1.  Personalised negative vocatives:


[you] [fucking/rotten/dirty/fat/little/etc.][moron/fuck/plonker/dickhead/
berk/pig/shit/bastard/loser/liar/minx/brat/slut/squirt/sod/bugger/etc.] [you]
2.  Personalised negative assertions:
[you] [are] [so/such a] [shit/stink/thick/stupid/bitchy/bitch/hypocrite/
disappointment/gay/nuts/nuttier than a fruit cake/hopeless/pathetic/fussy/
terrible/fat/ugly/etc.]
[you] [can’t do] [anything right/basic arithmetic/etc.]
[you] [disgust me/make me] [sick/etc.]
3. Personalised negative references:
[your] [stinking/little] [mouth/act/arse/body/corpse/hands/guts/trap/
breath/etc.]
4. Personalised third person negative references (in the hearing of the target):
[the] [daft] [bimbo]
[she] [‘s] [nutzo]

Apart from insults, other important impoliteness formulae types are: pointed
criticisms/complaints; challenging or unpalatable questions and/or presup-
positions; condescensions; message enforcers; dismissals; silencers; threats;
curses and ill-wishes; non-supportive intrusions (further detail and exemplifi-
cation can be found in Culpeper 2011a).

Reflection: Impoliteness and cultural variation

Culpeper et al. (2010) investigated the cross-cultural variation of impolite-


ness. Their data consisted of 500 impoliteness events reported by students
in England, China, Finland, Germany and Turkey. Of course, there is no
Interpersonal Pragmatics 225

claim to be comparing all the cultural communities that live in England


with all those in China, and so on, but rather groups of students of similar
age who are geographically separated and likely to be influenced by
different cultural practices. The main analytical framework adopted was
Spencer-Oatey’s (e.g. 2008) Rapport Management, as outlined in section
7.4.2 and specifically Table 7.1, covering various types of face as well as
sociality rights. Their quantitative analysis reveals some distinct differ-
ences amongst the groups. For example, China-based data had the highest
number of impoliteness events involving either relational face or equity
rights (or sometimes both together). Here is an example from the Chinese-
based data involving relational face:

[7.5] I saw her immediately after I went to the cafeteria. I told her
ideas for some activities for our class. I intended to collect some
suggestions from my classmates by telling them the activities
ahead of the schedule. I was shocked at her answer. She rejected
the ideas loudly with a tone of ordering in front of all the people
in the cafeteria. Despite explaining to her softly and humbly,
she rejected them more disrespectfully than before, paying no
attention to my good manner. I was greatly annoyed because my
classmates all respected me and I had never come across situa-
tions like that before.

This informant comments thus on this interaction: My good intention was


rejected coldly and rudely. That was a great threat and puzzle to a leader of a
class (our emphasis). What troubled this informant is that her relational
value as a leader of her classmates had been threatened. Here is an example
from another China-based informant involving equity rights:

[7.6]  In a cafeteria I greeted my classmate. But he did not respond.

One key principle underlying equity rights is reciprocity, the principle


that costs and benefits should be fairly balanced amongst participants.
Here, one participant has made the effort to greet another, but this has
not been reciprocated. Of course, none of this is to say that the same kind
of event could not have caused offence to the England-based informants.
The point is simply that the greater frequency with which this occurs in
the China-based group may be evidence of greater cultural sensitivity
to the relational and equity of social interactions in China. This tallies
in fact with points made about face and cultural variation in section
7.3.2, specifically that Chinese cultures may be less focused on the indi-
vidual. Certainly, this would tally with the long-standing influence of
Confucianism, which advocates reciprocity, in Chinese cultures (cf. Pan
and Kádár 2011 for another view on impoliteness in Mainland China).
226 Pragmatics and the English Language

Of course, whether or not impoliteness formulae result in impoliteness


will depend on the hearer’s assessment of its usage in context. Consider this
example:

[7.7] [ Lawrence Dallaglio, former England Rugby captain, describing the


very close family in which he grew up]
As Francesca and John left the house, she came back to give Mum a
kiss and they said goodbye in the way they often did. “Bye, you bitch,”
Francesca said. “Get out of here, go on, you bitch,” replied Mum.
(It’s in the blood: My life (2007), from an extract given in
The Week, 10 November 2007)

Here, in the direct speech, we see a conventionalised insulting vocative, you


bitch, and also a conventionalised dismissal, get out of here. McEnery (2006:
39, 236) provides corpus evidence that there is a strong tendency in British
English for bitch to be used between women, as here. Nevertheless, these items
project contexts that are dramatically at odds with the situation within which
they are uttered. Rather than antagonistic relationships, hate, coercion and so
on, we have a strong loving family unit (Francesca has just demonstrated her
affection by giving her mother a kiss). The recontextualisation of impolite-
ness formulae in socially opposite contexts reinforces socially opposite effects,
namely, affectionate, intimate bonds amongst individuals and the identity
of that group. Here we have the opposite of genuine impoliteness, that is,
mock impoliteness, which consists of impolite forms whose effects are (at
least theoretically for the most part) cancelled by the context (the term “mock
impoliteness” is used in Leech 1983). Banter is a key everyday label (at least
in English), though most types of teasing and some jokes and types of insults
also have in common the fact that they involve mock impoliteness. One of
the lacunae in Brown and Levinson (1987) is that they do not treat banter
at all; in contrast, Leech (1983: 144) describes mock impoliteness within his
Banter Principle:

“In order to show solidarity with h, say something which is (i) obviously
untrue, and (ii) obviously impolite to h” [and this will give rise to an inter-
pretation such that] “What s says is impolite to h and is clearly untrue.
Therefore what s really means is polite to h and true.”

Banter, of course, also exists in a heavily ritualised form as a kind of language


game – a specific activity type. In America some forms of this activity are
known as “sounding”, “playing the dozens” or “signifying”, which takes
place particularly amongst black adolescents (e.g. Labov 1972; for a nuanced
account of banter in a community in France, see Tetreault 2009).
Interpersonal Pragmatics 227

Reflections: Mock impoliteness in Britain and Australia

Haugh and Bousfield (2012) undertook a cross-cultural study of banter in


interactions amongst British (specifically North England) and Australian
speakers of English. They focused on two particular forms of banter,
jocular mockery and jocular abuse, and analyse how these can give rise
to understandings of mock impoliteness (as opposed to genuine impo-
liteness) amongst participants. Jocular mockery and abuse are pragmatic
acts. The former is a specific form of teasing where the speaker diminishes
something of relevance to the target within a non-serious or jocular frame.
The latter refers to a specific form of insulting, where the speaker casts
the target into an undesirable category or as having undesirable qualities,
using conventionalised impoliteness formulae within a non-serious or
jocular frame. Both jocular mockery and jocular abuse are interactionally
achieved, that is, they emerge as a joint effort of two or more participants.
It is suggested that when they arise in a non-serious or jocular frame
these pragmatic acts can be evaluated as having particular relational and
attitudinal implications. These include reinforcing solidarity, disguising
repressive intent, or amusing (at least some of) the participants (Culpeper
2011a). The existence of multiple interpersonal implications allows for
slippage between evaluations of these pragmatic acts as mock impolite
or as genuinely impolite in some cases. Haugh and Bousfield found that
jocular mockery and jocular abuse were recurrent practices in both the
British and Australian datasets, with only limited variation arising in the
target themes of such forms of banter. They traced this to a shared soci-
etal ethos that places value on “not taking yourself too seriously” (Fox
2004; Goddard 2009). This contrasts with banter being treated as a kind
of competitive activity where individuals attempt to “outdo” each other,
as found in at least some situational contexts in American English (Butler
2007). However,  this latter type of more competitive banter can also be
observed in British and Australian English. There thus remains consider-
able research to be done to better understand the relational and attitu-
dinal implications of banter across varieties of English, and indeed across
other languages more generally.

Needless to say, impoliteness is frequently achieved and understood without


the use of formulae; in other words, through implicit means, as illustrated in
the following example (a diary report from a British undergraduate):

[7.8]  A
 s I walked over to the table to collect the glasses, Sarah said to Joe
“come on Joe lets go outside”, implying she didn’t want me there.
This was at the pub on Sunday night, and I just let the glasses go
and walked away.
228 Pragmatics and the English Language

I didn’t particularly feel bad, but angry at the way she had said that
straight away when I got there. We aren’t particularly friends but
she was really rude in front of others.

The interpretation of Sarah’s utterance partly rests on assumptions about for


whom the message is intended. Clearly, the informant assumes that, while
the addressee is Joe, the target is her, something which seems to be supported
by the fact that it was said “straight away when I got there”. It is possible,
of course, that the offender also used non-verbal means to clarify the target,
such as looking at her while she spoke. Taking the informant as the target,
the utterance “come on Joe lets go outside” seems to have no relevance at all
for her: it flouts the maxim of relation. The informant draws the implicature
that going outside entails moving away from where she is, in other words,
she is being excluded (see Haugh 2014 for further discussion of impoliteness
implicatures).
In Culpeper’s (2011a) data, the most frequent implicit strategy by which
impoliteness is understood is sarcasm. Sarcasm can be evaluated as mock
politeness, that is, politeness which is not understood to be genuine (cf.
Culpeper 1996, who draws on Leech 1983). The message conveyed is partially
mixed: some aspects, such as the use of politeness formulae, suggest polite-
ness; other aspects, typically contextual or co-textual, suggest impoliteness.
For example, a member of staff at Lancaster University, writing to complain
about somebody backing into her car in the car park and then disappearing,
concludes her complaint: Thank you SO VERY MUCH. Note the capitalisation
here. The parallel in spoken language is the prosody. Mixed sarcastic messages
often involve multi-modality; specifically, the verbal content conflicting with
the prosody or visual aspects. In all such cases, the overall assessment must
be weighted towards aspects suggesting impoliteness, leaving the aspects
suggesting politeness (typically the formulaic polite words) as a superficial
veneer, reminding the target of the distance between a polite context and the
current impolite one.

7.6  The interactional approach to politeness

As an antidote to the classic politeness theories, discursive politeness work


has been valuable. In particular, it has drawn attention to the fact that (im)
politeness is not inherent in particular forms of language, in the sense that
a judgement of politeness is solely determined by the usage of particular
language. It argues instead that it is a matter of the participants’ evaluations
of particular forms as (im)polite in context. However, discursive approaches
have generally emphasised social aspects at the expense of close consideration
Interpersonal Pragmatics 229

of pragmatic aspects of politeness. The interactional approach to politeness


(and interpersonal attitudes more generally) has much in common with the
discursive, relational and frame-based approaches we discussed in section 7.4,
but it also advocates a number of theoretical and methodological moves that
mark it as distinct from those approaches. One key claim is the idea that user
(cf. politeness1) and observer (cf. politeness2) perspectives on politeness are
both equally important, so we very often have to deal with multiple under-
standings of behaviour vis-à-vis im/politeness (see Kádár and Haugh [2013]
for more detailed discussion).
To see what we mean by multiple understandings of politeness, consider
the following apology that arose in an intercultural setting (Chang and
Haugh 2011). The background to the apology is that Wayne (an Australian)
and his wife had been invited by Joyce’s mother (a Taiwanese) to go out with
her family to a restaurant for dinner, as they had just met and found they
shared a common interest in vegetarian food. Wayne and his wife did not,
however, turn up, and did not respond to Joyce’s call from the restaurant.
It was only the next day that Wayne sent an SMS text to Joyce saying Sorry I
forgot I was busy with something. Joyce decided to call Wayne and the entire call
was recorded.5 The excerpt below features the head act of Wayne’s apology
and the first part of the interaction that followed:

[7.9] (Joyce has just apologised for calling Wayne)


13 W: it’s just, a:h, I really apologise for not getting back
14 to you the other day but we couldn’t make it?
15 J: oh, that’s okay. yeah, yeah, yeah. I- I just
16 thought oh probably you are busy with something
17 so you ah probably were easy to- to (0.2)
18 for(hhh)get it.
19 W: yeah we were pretty busy actually?
20 J: oh, okay, yeah, yeah that’s fine. I just want to
21 call you, that- that- that’s oka:y.
(Chang and Haugh 2011: 420)

The question is: is Wayne’s apology polite (or not)? Asking such a question
already presupposes a number of different perspectives. You, the reader, may
form your opinion about this particular incident. Your perspective (as the
analyst) is grounded as an observer (although sometimes the analyst can also
be a participant), specifically, an overhearer. Your footing therefore differs from
that of the speaker (Wayne) and the addressee (Joyce). You evaluate it without
having direct access to the minds of either participant and so, inevitably, draw

5
The permission of the researchers to use this recording was gained from both participants.
230 Pragmatics and the English Language

more from generalised or shared perspectives on the kinds of apologies that


arise when one does not turn up to a social occasion. The participants them-
selves, Wayne and Joyce, not only draw from their own cultural perspectives,
but also draw from their shared interactional history with each other, and
perhaps with other Australians and Taiwanese. The recipient footing of Joyce
is also somewhat complex as, while she is the interpreter and accounter in this
interaction, she is not the exclusive target (i.e. the apology is for Joyce’s family
as well, not just Joyce).
The first footing to consider is that of Joyce. Did she consider it polite or not?
Clues to this can be observed in the interactional data. After Wayne issues the
apology in lines 13–14, Joyce responds in line 15 with an absolution (that’s
okay) that is oh-prefaced, thereby increasing the level of absolution, at least in
English (Robinson 2004). In framing it as a preferred response, it appears on
the surface that Joyce displays acceptance of Wayne’s apology. However, in
the subsequent talk, a more complex picture emerges. Joyce offers a proposed
account for why Wayne did not turn up (lines 15–18), and then subsequently
repeats her absolution (that’s fine, that’s okay) in lines 20–21, in spite of the
fact that Wayne hasn’t actually apologised again. Joyce repeats this absolu-
tion two more times before the call ends (data not shown). We need to turn
to studies of apologies in Chinese to consider what might be meant by the
repetition of this absolution. What we find is that typically in Chinese, apolo-
gies are repeated in order to show sincerity (Hua et al. 2000). The repeated
absolutions from Joyce therefore open up interactional space for Wayne to
repeat his apology. He does not do this, which lends support for the inference
that Joyce found Wayne’s apology to be inadequate and thus impolite. This
was independently verified by Joyce herself; she claimed she found it impolite
in subsequent talk with the researchers.
The second footing to consider is that of Wayne. Did he consider his apology
polite? From close examination of the interaction it appears that his under-
standing was that it was sufficiently polite. To begin with, the choice of the
performative verb apologise is a marked IFID, as it appears only very infre-
quently in corpora of spoken discourse in English (Aijmer 1996; Deutschmann
2003). It is also preceded by an intensifier (really) which arguably increases the
illocutionary force of this apology, as well as an account (we couldn’t make it),
the latter being a standard feature of apologies in English (see section 6.4). That
Wayne does not perceive this apology to be inadequate is evident from the fact
that he does not take up the interactional opportunities to repeat the apology
created by Joyce. It is also evident from his attempts to “catch up” with Joyce
despite her moving to close down the conversation at a number of points (data
not shown), thereby displaying genuine (on the surface at least) interest in
Joyce and her family (see Chang and Haugh 2011 for further discussion).
Interpersonal Pragmatics 231

The third footing to consider is that of you, the reader. Here we would
suggest, based on Chang and Haugh’s (2011) study, that your understanding
is likely to vary. Chang and Haugh elicited metapragmatic evaluations of the
apology as (very) polite, neither polite nor impolite, or (very) impolite from a
sample of Australian and Taiwanese respondents. While there was interesting
intra-group variation found across these evaluations, particularly amongst
the Australians, there was nevertheless a very clear inter-group difference.
Overall, the Australians found it not impolite, while the Taiwanese found it
impolite. This difference results from different cultural perspectives on the
apology that these respondents brought to bear. The Australian respondents
emphasised Wayne’s attempts to show friendliness as increasing the level of
sincerity (and thus acceptability) of his apology. The Taiwanese respondents,
on the other hand, emphasised the lack of repetition as indicative of a lack of
sincerity, which was one of their main reasons for evaluating the apology as
impolite. Both the Australian and Taiwanese respondents shared the view that
the account Wayne gave was somewhat inadequate, but ultimately judged the
apology overall quite differently.
From this brief analysis a number of issues emerge. One key question that
needs to be asked according to the interactional approach is whose under-
standing of politeness is it that we are analysing. In section 5.2.1, we outlined
the multiple participation footings that underlie pragmatic meaning. This
complex array of participation footings is also relevant to interpersonal atti-
tudes such as politeness. Recipients may be addressees, side participants,
overhearers or bystanders, for instance, and their evaluations of a particular
pragmatic meaning or act may vary not only with those of the speaker but
also amongst themselves (see Haugh 2013c for further discussion).
A second key question according to the interactional approach is how is it
that participants (and so analysts as well) know something counts as polite,
mock polite, mock impolite, impolite, over-polite, and so on. In other words,
what are the moral grounds for making such an evaluation? To date a tech-
nical notion of “face” has generally been invoked in analysing politeness (see
sections 7.3 and 7.4). In the interactional approach, however, we argue that
there are other possible explanations of politeness from an emic perspective,
namely, that of members of the (sub)cultural group in which the interaction is
situated. The notion of face as a publicly endorsed social image of individuals
is just one. There are others, including an orientation to one’s sense of “place”
relative to others or the heart/mind of others, for instance (see Haugh 2013a
for further discussion).
A third question is how do we as analysts establish that evaluations of
politeness, impoliteness and so on have indeed arisen. In the interactional
approach we argue that the study of politeness (at least in interaction)
232 Pragmatics and the English Language

necessarily involves very close analysis of the dynamics of interaction,


including not only what is said, but also how it is said, that is, issues of
prosodic and non-verbal delivery. The latter can provide important clues for
the analyst in making inferences about attitudes on the part of participants.
Such an approach also directs the analyst to examine responses to potentially
polite (or impolite) meanings or acts to gather further evidence for making
such inferences. However, as interpersonal attitudes often remain tacit rather
than visibly surfacing in interaction, we also propose that the analyst needs
to make recourse to metapragmatics in the study of politeness (see Kádár and
Haugh 2013: chapter 9), and to interpersonal attitudes more generally. We
will discuss metapragmatics in more detail in Chapter 8, but suffice to say
at this point that it involves drawing from evidence that language users are
aware of (potential) evaluations of politeness.
An interactional approach to politeness thus not only considers the under-
standings of participants in particular situated instances of interaction, but
also draws from the understandings of users and observers over time. In this
way, we can arguably build a much richer and more nuanced understanding
of politeness and, more broadly, interpersonal attitudes.

7.7  Conclusion

This chapter has surveyed various approaches to politeness, and also briefly
considered impoliteness. As we have identified the phenomena that pertain
to (im)politeness, we have shown how they are culturally variable and, in
particular, pointed to some distinctive aspects of British politeness. Readers
may be wondering how exactly we conceive of politeness. So we will recap
and clarify. We see politeness as an interpersonal attitude. Attitudes, of
course, are well established in social psychology, and especially in language
attitude research. An attitude involves a favourable or unfavourable reaction
to stimuli, and has cognitive, affective and behavioural elements (see Bradac
et al. 2001, and references therein). Note that conceiving of politeness as an
attitude accommodates the frequently stated point that politeness is subjec-
tive and evaluative (e.g. Eelen 2001; Watts 2003; Spencer-Oatey 2005; Ruhi
2008). However, it should be noted that simply referring to “positive” evalua-
tive beliefs is not sufficiently specific. It is unlikely that politeness involves any
positive belief. For example, amusing somebody is an interpersonal activity
that is generally viewed positively, but it is not at all clear that it would
normally be considered a matter of politeness. A key objective for researchers
is to understand the subset of positive evaluative beliefs that count as polite-
ness on a particular occasion. The concept of face (Goffman 1967) is one
Interpersonal Pragmatics 233

mechanism for trying to doing this. However, we are not convinced that face
easily accommodates all politeness-relevant positive beliefs. People also have
such positive evaluative beliefs about social organisation and behaviours
within social organisations – how people should be treated; what is fair and
what is not; and so on. Some of these morality-related beliefs are associated
with politeness. Spencer-Oatey’s (e.g. 2008) Rapport Management framework
does a good job of accommodating this array of evaluative beliefs, incor-
porating as it does the notion of sociality rights, although it will perhaps
inevitably require further adjustments as our understanding of politeness
continues to evolve in light of work that further teases out alternative emic
perspectives on politeness.
Linguistic politeness refers to linguistic or behavioural forms that are
(conventionally) associated with contexts in which politeness attitudes are
activated (this view is consistent with, for example, Terkourafi e.g. 2001,
outlined above). We acquire linguistic politeness from our experience of
social interactions (e.g. Ervin-Tripp et al. 1990; Escandell-Vidal 1996; Snow
et  al. 1990). It involves the use of expressions that are both contextually
appropriate and positively evaluated by the target (cf. Locher and Watts
2005). Remember the use of please, as discussed towards the beginning of
this chapter. It is not used by anybody to anybody, or in any context, and
when it is used it is generally considered interpersonally positive. The point
about politeness routines/markers is that knowledge of both their appro-
priate context and their positive social meaning has become convention-
ally associated with the form. Of course, this does not mean that simply
using a politeness routine/marker will result in politeness being achieved.
Politeness always involves a contextual judgement; as is frequently pointed
out, politeness is not solely determined by forms alone (e.g. Watts, 2003: 168;
Locher and Watts, 2008: 78). Not only this, politeness is not some fixed value
waiting to be retrieved. It emerges dynamically in interaction, and different
participants may make different judgements. So, how do we tap into these
judgements? It makes sense to examine the interaction in which they are
mediated, as well as the broader societal milieu in which these interactions
are situated, as, for example, happens in the interactional approach to polite-
ness outlined in section 7.6.
Impoliteness has been accommodated by recent frameworks designed more
with politeness in mind. In fact, it is also accommodated by Leech’s (1983)
Politeness Principle, which has a “negative” side to it. It clearly has some
connections with politeness, as evidenced not least by the phenomena of
mock politeness and mock impoliteness. But it is also obvious that it is not
the same as politeness. The interesting issue is to specify in what ways. A key
feature is that impoliteness involves emotion – especially emotions such as
234 Pragmatics and the English Language

hurt and anger – in a much more intense way than politeness. Impoliteness
obviously has its own set of conventionalised formulae and pragmatic strat-
egies. It is also the case that the social contexts that give rise to impolite-
ness are not the same as those that give rise to politeness. As far as at least
some British cultures are concerned, perceived abuses of power relations,
resulting, for example, in patronising behaviours, are key to many instances
of impoliteness.

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