Understanding Politeness

Understanding Politeness
Politeness is key to all of our relationships and plays a fundamental part in

the way we communicate with each other and the way we define ourselves. It
isn’t limited only to conventional aspects of linguistic etiquette, but encom-
passes all types of interpersonal behaviour through which we explore and
maintain our relationships. This groundbreaking exploration navigates the
reader through this fascinating area and introduces them to a variety of new
insights. The book is divided into three parts and is based on an innovative
framework which relies on the concepts of social practice, time and space.
In this multidisciplinary approach, the authors capture a range of user and
observer understandings and provide a variety of examples from different
languages and cultures. With its reader-friendly style, carefully constructed
exercises and useful glossary, Understanding Politeness will be welcomed by
both researchers and postgraduate students working on politeness, pragmatics
and sociolinguistics more broadly.
d ániel z. k ád ár is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the

University of Huddersfield.
michael haugh is an Associate Professor in Linguistics and International
English at Griffith University, Brisbane.
Understanding Politeness
Dániel Z. Kádár
University of Huddersfield
Michael Haugh
Griffith University, Brisbane
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.
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www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107626942

C Dániel Z. Kádár and Michael Haugh 2013
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2013
Printed in the United Kingdom by MPG Printgroup Ltd, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Kádár, Dániel Z., 1979–
Understanding politeness / Dániel Z. Kádár and Michael Haugh.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-03168-5 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-107-62694-2 (pbk)
1. Politeness (Linguistics) 2. Grammar, Comparative and general – Honorific.
3. Interpersonal relations. 4. Sociolinguistics. I. Title.
P299.H66K33 2013
306.44 – dc23 2013009545
ISBN 978-1-107-03168-5 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-107-62694-2 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of figures page viii

List of tables ix
Foreword xi
francesca bargiela-chiappini
Acknowledgements xiii
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Why this book? 1
1.2 Contents 5
1.3 Features 9
I Theoretical framework
2 The roots of politeness research 13
2.1 Introduction 13
2.2 Concepts 16
2.3 Methodology 28
2.4 A sample analysis 33
2.5 Summary 34
2.6 Key readings 35
3 Recent developments in politeness research 36

3.1 Introduction 36
3.2 Concepts 39
3.3 Methodology 52
3.5 Summary 56
3.6 Key readings 56
4 Politeness as social practice 57

4.1 Introduction 57
4.2 Politeness and interpersonal evaluation 60
4.3 Politeness and social practice 65
4.4 Politeness and time 73
4.5 Politeness and social space 77
4.6 Summary 80
v
vi Contents
5 Understandings of politeness 81
5.1 Introduction 81
5.2 Participant/metaparticipant understandings 87
5.3 Emic/etic understandings 93
5.4 Analyst/lay-observer understandings 98
5.5 Theoretical/folk-theoretic understandings 102
5.6 Summary 103
II Politeness and time

6 Politeness in interaction 109
6.1 Introduction 109
6.2 Key concepts 112
6.3 Key studies 133
6.4 Summary 134
6.5 Exercises 135
7 Politeness, convention and rituality 137

7.3 Key studies 152
7.4 Summary 153
7.5 Exercises 153
8 Politeness and history 156

8.3 Key studies 176
8.4 Summary 176
8.5 Exercises 177
III Politeness and social space: from mind to society

9 Politeness and metapragmatics 181
9.3 Key studies 203
9.4 Summary 204
9.5 Exercises 205
10 Politeness, cognition and emotion 207

10.3 Key studies 227
10.4 Exercises 228
Contents vii
11 Culture, identity and politeness 231

11.4 Summary 247
11.5 Exercises 248
12 Conclusion 251
12.1 Politeness as social practice 251
12.2 Looking forward 256
Notes 259
Glossary 263
References 275
Index 288
Figures
2.1 Types of politeness strategy (Brown and Levinson 1987) page 25

3.1 Szervusz üdvözöllek [Hello and welcome] by Szergej Tamis 40
4.1 Politeness-related evaluators in English 63
4.2 Politeness and evaluation (Peanuts C 1965 Peanuts
Worldwide LLC) 65
5.1 Loci of understandings of politeness 87
5.2 Types of participation status 89
5.3 Types of recipient and meta-recipient participation status 91
5.4 Reflexive layers of the moral order 95
5.5 Procedures in interpreting observations of evaluative moments
of politeness 99
5.6 Overall ratings of the degree of (im)politeness by lay observers 100
6.1 Punctuated versus emergent understandings of politeness 118
6.2 Types of participation footings 128
6.3 Instrumental analysis of ‘agitated’ pitch contour 130
6.4 Key steps in analysing understandings of politeness in interaction 134
7.1 A Taiwanese invitation letter written in Chinese 141
9.1 Metapragmatics of politeness 187
9.2 An emic/etic model of ‘politeness’ evaluators 190
9.3 Semantic field of reigi in Japanese 191
10.1 Key intentional state-processes in understanding politeness 211
viii
13:59:04 GMT 2014.

Tables
2.1 Sentence types and speech acts page 24

9.1 Approaches to analysing the metalanguage of politeness 192
9.2 Approaches to analysing (im)politeness metacommunication 196
9.3 Approaches to analysing politeness metadiscourses 202
ix
Foreword
‘What is it you are researching?? Politeness?!? You teach ‘politeness’? You

teach others how to be polite?! Mention ‘politeness’ as one of your research
interests or topics you teach, and the reaction of many colleagues and friends
is likely to be a mixture of incredulity, disbelief, mild condescendence and a
hint of disapproval. Serious social scientists cannot possibly invest time and
intellectual resources in the pursuit of what sounds like a topic for genteel
conversation among members of a gone-by civil society inhabiting drawing-
rooms and parlours!
Politeness as a topic of multidisciplinary inquiry has attracted the sustained
attention of scholars for at least four decades; the effects of the discursive turn
that has invested the social sciences have been felt in many of the recent mono-
graphic studies on manifestations of (im)politeness in various social contexts,
a development that is indicative of a new vitality in the field. It is against this
background that this book emerges to address new and non-expert readerships
and to invite them on an exploration of the conceptual and empirical richness
that have come to characterize politeness studies.
If we suspend for a minute the assumptions evoked by the term ‘politeness’ in
English, and the taken-for-granted connotations invoked by the commonsense
notion of ‘polite behaviour’, and turn probing incredulity towards the obser-
vation of everyday human interaction, a set of challenging and to date only
partially answered questions begins to emerge. Why are we ‘polite’ to each
other? What happens when ‘politeness’ is perceived to be missing? Ultimately,
what is politeness?
In one of the rare definitions of politeness available in the English scholarly
literature, Penelope Brown (2001: 11,620) observes that ‘Politeness is essen-
tially a matter of taking into account the feelings of others as to how they should
be interactionally treated, including behaving in a manner that demonstrates
appropriate concern for interactors’ social status and their social relationship’
(added emphasis). Almost in the same breath, Brown unambiguously states
that: ‘Since politeness is crucial to the construction and maintenance of social
relationships, politeness in communication goes to the very heart of social life
xi
xii Foreword
and interaction; indeed it is probably a precondition for human cooperation in

general’ (p. 11,620), added emphasis).
If we accept Brown’s bold understanding of the hugely influential role of
politeness in human interaction and, ultimately, in the construction of the social
order, it is somewhat surprising that it should have taken so long for scholars
to write a research-based book that seeks to examine the manifestations of this
elusive yet pervasive phenomenon in a language accessible to (post)graduate
readers, and which at the same time provides an innovative framework for
researchers.
It is not mere chance that filling this gap in the literature has befallen two
outstanding scholars of the ’new wave’ of politeness studies, Dániel Kádár
and Michael Haugh. Their innovative, energetic approach to politeness is the
hallmark of their comprehensive book, addressing the interests of a broad-
based multidisciplinary readership. Without compromising on theoretical and
analytical depth, and judiciously drawing from an established tradition of ded-
icated scholarship, this volume has the essential qualities to become ‘the’ new
authoritative book on Politeness published in English, and therefore accessible
to readerships worldwide.
francesca bargiela-chiappini
university of warwick
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our gratitude to Andrew Winnard for inviting us

to publish this volume with Cambridge University Press. We are indebted
to Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini for reading the manuscript and sharing her
insightful comments with us. We would like to say thanks to Francesca also for
writing a Foreword for the present work. We are also grateful to the following
colleagues (in alphabetical order) for their invaluable comments: Bob Arundale,
Jonathan Culpeper, Saeko Fukushima, Andrew John Merrison and Sara Mills.
We would like to say thanks to the anonymous referees for their insightful
comments, which helped us to improve the quality of the present work. Last
but not least, we are thankful to our families for their patience while we worked
on this book.
We are grateful to the Hungarian blogger Szergej Tamis for permitting us to
use the comic strip in Figure 3.1.
On the institutional level, we would like to express our gratitude to the Chiang
Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, for supporting
our collaboration through a joint research grant (RG025-P-10).
xiii
1 Introduction
1.1 Why this book?

This book provides an overview of politeness. Politeness is a key means by
which humans work out and maintain interpersonal relationships. Many of us
have been educated how to behave politely since childhood; we only have to
think about parents prescribing to their children when and how to apologise,
to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ (at least in English), or to call (jiao) people by
familial titles when greeting them (at least in Chinese). However, politeness is
not limited to conventional acts of linguistic etiquette like formal apologies,
so-called ‘polite’ language and address terms, although it includes all of these
acts. Rather, it covers something much broader, encompassing all types of inter-
personal behaviour through which we take into account the feelings of others
as to how they think they should be treated in working out and maintaining our
sense of personhood as well as our interpersonal relationships with others.
However, while this book relies on this broad definition of politeness, in
accordance with its title Understanding Politeness we propose that there are in
fact often multiple different understandings of politeness at play in discourse.
Various different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives are necessitated,
in turn, in order to tease out these multiple understandings of politeness. In
this book we suggest that these various understandings offer different insights,
which may at times be complementary, and so instead of singling out any
one of these understandings, we aim to introduce a variety of them, with the
aim of helping readers to make their way into this fascinating area. Our aim,
then, is to discuss these different understandings of politeness in a systematic
and organised way, with our aim being to point out interconnections between
various views on and perceptions of politeness.
There is an important rationale behind authoring an overview of this field, as
our aim is not just to summarise but also to provide an analytical framework by
means of which one can successfully situate the analysis of politeness across
time and space. Currently, politeness research is struggling with a fundamen-
tal difficulty that tends to face all work in the social sciences and humani-
ties: namely, how to systematically analyse and describe the phenomena in
1
2 Introduction
question without falling into the trap of overgeneralising. Politeness research

has gone through several stages. Until the beginning of the twenty-first century,
most politeness researchers attempted to systematise the analysis of polite-
ness through different theoretical frameworks. However, critiques of these
theories began very soon after they were first proposed, and since the 2000s
these critiques have been gaining steam to the point that to talk about a sci-
entific or theoretical understanding of politeness without consideration of the
understandings of the participants themselves, at least in some respect, seems
simply out of step with the times. Yet because of this, politeness research has
been left in somewhat of a theoretical limbo. Indeed, although early theories
of politeness are often claimed to be highly problematic, we have nevertheless
(sometimes unwittingly) inherited many of the underlying assumptions of those
first attempts at theorising politeness. And despite the numerous critiques no
similar systematic account of politeness has yet been created to take their place.
It is therefore perhaps not surprising that politeness researchers often continue
to employ these assumptions, either as is, or in some modified form. Indeed,
in the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia one of the first-wave theories,
namely, Brown and Levinson’s (1987; see Chapter 2) continues to be equated
with ‘politeness theory’ as if there were no other valid perspectives in existence
(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politeness theory). From the perspective of
many, this lack of a systematic theoretical approach to politeness is under-
standable and even acceptable. As Mills (2011a) argues, it is not a pre-evident
objective that we need to systematically describe linguistic politeness, which is
by its very nature diverse and contested, while Watts (2005) questions whether
a theory of politeness is even possible. And yet an account of politeness, espe-
cially a book on politeness, cannot function without being able to determine
what politeness involves, how it arises and how understandings of it can vary
between individuals and across various social groups.
We argue that if there is such a thing as politeness it goes beyond the bound-
aries of language, and so an overview of how we can analyse politeness – like
the one provided by this book – necessitates a multidisciplinary approach that
goes beyond the boundaries of traditional linguistic pragmatics and sociolin-
guistics, drawing also from insights into politeness that can be gained from
work in semantics, corpus linguistics, historical linguistics and pragmatics,
phonetics and phonology, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, soci-
ology, (intercultural) communication, cognitive science and psychology and so
on and so forth. This means we need to observe politeness as a social practice,
and to bring together first-order (language user) and second-order (language
observer) understandings of it. We also need to capture the pervasiveness of
politeness, which is more often than not noted for its absence rather than for
its presence. This is very much in accordance with recent arguments in the
field that call for research that explores politeness from multiple perspectives
1.1 Why this book? 3
through interdisciplinary analyses by reflexively aware researchers (Haugh,

Kádár and Mills 2013). Developing an understanding of politeness as social
practice reflects this fast-growing body of research, which offers more credible
alternatives to the traditional politeness paradigm in two key ways.
First, it allows for a much more nuanced range of approaches and method-
ologies to be drawn upon in furthering our understanding of politeness. We
build here on the well-known first-order/second-order distinction in politeness
research (see Chapters 3, 4 and 5) in proposing a framework that helps readers
situate different perspectives on politeness, and see how they can be integrated
into a more holistic approach to the analysis of politeness. Instead of defining
first-order politeness as simply reflecting ‘commonsense’ or ‘lay’ perspec-
tives, and second-order politeness as reflecting ‘scientific’ perspectives, we
argue that any productive understanding of politeness is necessarily rooted in
both, consistent with well-developed understandings of social practice in eth-
nomethodology and related fields. We propose a framework that breaks down
different ways of understanding politeness into distinct perspectives, and which
should, therefore, be useful for those approaching the complex field of polite-
ness for the first time. In essence, our claim is that politeness can be analysed
from the perspective of both participants (versus metaparticipants) and emic
or ‘insider’ (versus etic or ‘outsider’) understandings (which are both first-
order user perspectives), as well as from the perspective of analysts (versus
lay observers) and theoretical (versus folk-theoretic) understandings (which
are both second-order observer perspectives). These terms and the perspectives
that they imply will be introduced in detail in Part I. Crucially, we do not place
any inherent greater value on any one of these perspectives, but rather argue that
all of these can in principle contribute to a holistic understanding of politeness.
Second, it allows us to go beyond the traditional focus on linguistic mani-
festations of politeness behaviour. We claim that a systematic presentation of
politeness cannot ignore what has often been treated as something ‘remaining’
for future work because politeness permeates the very ways in which people
interact: it is more than simply the use of linguistic forms. We only need
to consider rituals (Kádár 2013) and the relationship between language and
the senses (see Levinson 2003) or the rise of multimodal forms of computer-
mediated interpersonal communication, for instance, to see that politeness often
manifests itself as a social behavioural phenomenon beyond the boundaries of
language. This broader focus is reflected in the wide range of data we use to
illustrate and exemplify points in this book, which will include not only analy-
ses of spoken face-to-face interaction, but also other modalities and modes,
including various forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) as
well as different types of historical texts such as letters and invitation cards.
Our model of politeness as social practice also integrates various perceptions
of politeness, thereby acknowledging the different worldviews they inevitably
4 Introduction
encompass. In accordance with our claim that politeness is a social practice

rather than a simple manifestation of language usage, we argue that politeness,
as with any other practice, has to be described with reference to time and space.
The concept of time underpins the claim that any understanding of politeness
always arises relative to time, and so politeness in ongoing and historical inter-
actions is necessarily interlinked. Our argument is that while politeness in inter-
action involves an understanding in the here-and-now, this here-and-now can
also be understood in the sense of a current moment of talk being constrained
and afforded by prior and subsequent talk. Furthermore, in many cases polite-
ness does not come into existence simply through what is said in the moment,
as many social actions and pragmatic meanings that are understood in locally
situated contexts in fact follow pre-existing (often formalised) patterns. Finally,
certain manifestations of politeness are historically situated, and so should be
properly analysed in retrospection to trace how understandings of politeness
in the here-and-now can never be totally divorced from understandings in the
there and then. The importance of time should not be underestimated because
these different temporal occurrences of politeness necessitate different concep-
tual and methodological approaches. For example, projecting an analysis of
what took place diachronically from a synchronic perspective (or vice-versa)
is problematic because such an approach may inadvertently decontextualise
diachronic manifestations of politeness (see Chapter 8).
The concept of space here refers specifically to social space, which operates
with reference to time, given that there is no space without time. Space in our
understanding refers to the relationship between the individual and the society
in which he or she lives, and thus provides a suitable grounding for the analysis
of politeness with reference to cognition and culture. A linguistic phenomenon
like politeness is an example par excellence of a social phenomenon that
emerges through the ongoing, interlinked interactions of individuals. Just like
language, then, we cannot trace politeness to any one single person or group
of persons, but rather to the self-organising and emergent properties of the
complex systems that form through ongoing interactions between persons over
time and social space.
To sum up, it is hoped that the framework we offer here for analysing the
multiple understandings of politeness, which inevitably arise when politeness is
understood as social practice, and the conceptual links to time and social space
we are making in grounding the analysis of these practices, will provide a
working model by means of which the reader can approach politeness in differ-
ent languages and contexts, without falling into the trap of overgeneralising. A
treatment of politeness as arising from particular behaviours or linguistic forms
can lead to overgeneralisations and even stereotyping. Approaching politeness
as social practice, on the other hand, means that politeness can be systematically
theorised and analysed within a wider research framework.
1.2 Contents 5
It is pertinent to note that, perhaps like any other book, the present volume has
its limitations. Most importantly, we are primarily focused here on politeness.
It can be observed that since the 2000s politeness researchers have increas-
ingly recognised the importance of studying both politeness and impoliteness,
and various frameworks (for example, Culpeper 2011a) have been exclusively
devoted to the latter area. It has even been suggested that they require distinct
theoretical frameworks. However, we are doubtful that it is really possible, in
the final analysis, to talk about impoliteness without implicitly invoking polite-
nesss, and vice-versa. For that reason, while much of our discussion focuses
on instances where politeness is involved, we nevertheless draw from data that
also include impoliteness phenomena. Indeed, in many instances the two are
intertwined to the point that it makes little sense to rigidly separate them. In any
case, it is our view that to focus exclusively on ‘politeness’ or ‘impoliteness’
ignores the multitude of other kinds of understandings vis-à-vis politeness that
evidently arise in interaction. In some instances, something might be consid-
ered to be mock polite or mock impolite by participants. And it does not stop
there. If asked for particular evaluations, participants may start talking about
something being ‘not polite’ or ‘not impolite’, or ‘neither polite nor impolite’,
‘overpolite’ and so on and so forth. One wonders where such evaluations fit in
if politeness and impoliteness are treated as completely distinct areas of theori-
sation. When we talk about politeness in this volume, then, we mean politeness
as it is inevitably contextualised relative to impoliteness, mock politeness and
the like by participants themselves.
1.2 Contents
The present book has three parts. Part I, ‘Theoretical framework’, is comprised
of four chapters which give the reader an account of previous research on
the field of politeness, and in which we introduce our analytical framework.
Chapter 2 ‘The roots of politeness research’, overviews the history and concepts
of politeness research from its beginnings in the 1970s until the so-called
recent discursive turn in the 2000s. We suggest that, like many other scholarly
fields with history, politeness research can be metaphorically described as a
tree. Current theories of politeness have been influenced by earlier models,
which benchmarked the birth of the field, and indeed many of the underlying
assumptions and concepts in those first-wave approaches to politeness continue
to exist in various guises in more recently developed frameworks.
Chapter 3, ‘Recent developments in politeness research’, introduces more
contemporary approaches to the study of politeness, from the 2000s onwards,
an area that has generally been missing in most accounts of politeness in books
on pragmatics to date. The new wave of research in this period is often referred
to in the field as the ‘discursive’ turn, which was kick-started by Eelen’s (2001)
6 Introduction
influential monograph, and subsequently grounded in important monographs

by Watts (2003) and Mills (2003). The discursive turn brought with it various
important changes in the field, including, to mention just a few, an increas-
ing reliance on longer fragments of authentic discourse (e.g. Watts 2003), and
the exploration of (im)politeness as an interactionally constructed phenomenon
(Locher 2004; Haugh 2007a). A focus on participants’ understandings of polite-
ness and a greater awareness of the analyst’s role in elucidating these thus
emerges as a key contribution of recent scholarship.
Chapter 4, ‘Politeness as social practice’, introduces an approach to under-
standing politeness as ultimately located in evaluations of social actions and
meanings by persons that are situated relative to both time and social space.
It is suggested that politeness constitutes a social practice because it involves
evaluations that (implicitly) appeal to a moral order: a set of expectancies
through which social actions and meanings are recognisable as such, and con-
sequently are inevitably open to moral evaluation. It is proposed that, when
understood in this way, politeness can be approached from the perspective of a
number of disciplines and employ a wide range of methodologies. While var-
ious influential concepts and approaches have been proposed (see Chapter 3),
there is not yet a clear overarching theoretical framework in which to situate
these different understandings or perspectives. Theorising politeness as social
practice enables us to account for the inherent diversity in understandings of
politeness, without an appreciation of which we are likely to form essentialised
or overgeneralised views on politeness.
Following Chapter 4’s train of thought, Chapter 5, ‘Understandings of polite-
ness’, explores the understandings of different users on politeness from various
disciplinary perspectives by observers, including researchers who are aware
of their own evaluations vis-à-vis those of the participants. Building on the
overviews of traditional and more recent approaches to politeness in the previ-
ous chapters, we propose a framework that situates understandings of politeness
relative to four key loci of understanding. It is suggested that the way in which
the first-order/second-order distinction is generally drawn between participant
and scientific understandings masks other important distinctions. Starting from
the basic idea that the first-order/second-order distinction involves a distinction
between user and observer understandings of politeness, it is proposed that
there are in fact four key loci of understanding vis-à-vis politeness:
(i) participant/metaparticipant understandings (first-order)
(ii) emic/etic conceptualisations (first-order)
(iii) analyst/lay-observer understandings (second-order)
(iv) theoretical/folk-theoretic conceptualisations (second-order)
This framework allows readers to approach politeness from one perspective (or
more) with greater awareness of what such a perspective offers as well as its
natural limitations.
1.2 Contents 7
The three chapters in Part II, ‘Politeness and time’, are centred on how
understandings of politeness inevitably arise relative to time. We focus on how
such understandings can span different temporal settings, namely, the ongo-
ing here-and-now in interaction (Chapter 6), the there-and-then projected into
here-and-now through recurrence (Chapter 7) and the there-and-then histor-
ically situated in its own right (Chapter 8). Chapter 6, ‘Politeness in inter-
action’, argues that understandings of politeness, impoliteness and so on are
co-constructed by two or more participants over the course of an interaction.
To be co-constructed means that not only the speaker but also other partici-
pants can influence the trajectory of social actions/meanings and the evalu-
ations of politeness they reflexively occasion as they develop in interaction.
The upshot of this is that politeness must be analysed as situated in interac-
tion, although it is important to note here that we conceptualise interaction not
as isolated moments of the here-and-now but rather as inextricably linked to
understandings of politeness in the there-and-then. In Chapter 6 we thus con-
sider more deeply the various ways in which interaction in this broader sense,
whether it be direct or mediated, both constrains and affords understandings of
politeness.
Chapter 7 ‘Politeness, convention and rituality’, examines conventions and
rituals, and it introduces a concept of time that differs from that in Chapter
6. If we put politeness on a time scale, it can be argued understandings of
politeness localised in a particular interaction involve an interlinking cycle of
participant action and reaction, albeit drawing from a certain underlying set
of moral expectancies. However, understandings of politeness are not always
completely localised in this way: they can be formalised and pre-determined.
Indeed, many contexts do not necessitate such localised understandings. A
formal interaction between political leaders, for instance, represents a context
in which understandings of politeness are less localised given the interactants
are expected to follow certain (often scripted) expectations. In such contexts
politeness tends to clearly follow certain underlying schemata: an organised
pattern of thought and behaviour. These schemata reduce uncertainty in the
formation and interpretation of linguistic politeness, due to the simple reason
that by relying on them the interactants can invoke pre-existing ways of com-
municating and interpreting politeness. It can be argued that understandings
of politeness drawing from such schemata represent a kind of pre-existing
interpretive framework for understandings of politeness in the here-and-now.
Chapter 8, ‘Politeness and history’, argues for the relativity of politeness
by examining understandings of politeness in historically situated interactions.
Through exploring the notion of historicity, we argue that what we mean by
‘historical’ must be interpreted broadly, as historical interactions can include
interactions that occurred a millennium before or just a few days ago (given
we do not normally have access to prior interactions with the same mindset
8 Introduction
as we had at the time of their occurrence). An analysis which is based on this

broad definition of ‘historical’ can include various data types. For example,
an email written some time ago can be regarded as ‘historical’ as a medieval
codex. In terms of politeness and time, historical politeness constitutes the
realm of there-and-then. Examining this there-and-then necessitates a specific
approach, as the mindsets of interactants who communicated with each other
before our time are often not readily accessible to us.
Finally, Part III, ‘Politeness and social space: from mind to society’, com-
prises three chapters which analyse the relationship between politeness and
social space, spanning the realm of the individual to society and culture. Chapter
9, ‘Politeness and metapragmatics’, focuses on the study of awareness on the
part of ordinary or lay observers about the ways in which they interact and
communicate with others. It is argued that without systematically analysing
the ways in which participants themselves generally conceptualise their own
behaviour, we are not able to understand the social practices through which
politeness arises. A focus on different forms of metapragmatic awareness
also allows us to go beyond idiosyncratic understandings and to analyse the
moral order that underpins politeness as social practice as an object of study in
its own right.
Chapter 10, ‘Politeness, cognition and emotion’, overviews the key cognitive-
state processes that have been held to underpin politeness from the perspective
of individual cognition (subjectivity) and how it is interlinked with that of
others (intersubjectivity). We focus, in particular, on notions that feature in
sociocognitive or psychological accounts of politeness, such as attitude, infer-
ence, intention, as well as making links with Chapter 9 on metapragmatics.
We conclude by arguing that politeness not only involves rationality and states
of mind, as originally assumed in pre-2000 theories (or first-wave approaches
to politeness, see Chapter 2), and indeed in much of the work on politeness to
date, but is in fact inherently emotive.
Chapter 11, ‘Culture, identity and politeness’, examines the notion of culture
from a critical perspective. We argue that in order to go beyond essentialist
views on culture, one needs to analyse culture as a culturally constructed rather
than an inherited property. Culture is inevitably construed as part of one’s
identity, and because of this it is relative to the individual’s perception of
her or his identity, even though this is also influenced by one’s perceptions of
norms. One’s cultural identity is worked out primarily through the practices
of association and dissociation: interactants take on certain cultural identities
and refuse other ones in localised interactions. In discourse, then, culture can
be used as a so-called discursive resource: it is invoked in order to gain the
upper hand in an interaction or to focus on difference as opposed to similarity
amongst persons, and in this sense also inevitably involves understandings of
politeness and the like.
1.3 Features 9
Chapter 12, ‘Conclusion’, briefly summarises the contents of the previous

chapters and then discusses our views on the future direction of politeness
research. The Conclusion is followed by a Glossary, an annotated list of the
most important technical terms in politeness research.
1.3 Features
The present research-based volume is written for advanced readers and above
who have a command of at least some key notions in pragmatics, such as the
importance of context for understanding meaning, including meaning beyond
what is said (for a useful introduction to basic concepts in pragmatics see,
for example, Culpeper and Haugh, forthcoming). This book is thus primarily
designed for academic readers wanting to brush up their understanding of the
field in which they work, as well as senior undergraduate and postgraduate
students who intend to make their way into linguistic politeness research.
While this book aims to propose a model for researchers, it is also meant
to have educational value, and it thus includes a number of reader-friendly
features. Along with the previously discussed innovative approach of treating
politeness from multiple perspectives, we provide recommended readings in
the form of annotated titles at the end of each chapter. Key concepts in the
annotated Glossary are highlighted in bold on the first instance of their use,
and thence in italics along with other key terms. In relation to data, we draw
from a variety of different data types, including naturally occurring face-to-face
conversational and CMC data, textual data and extracts from films. It is hoped
that studying politeness arising in these different data types will provide insight
for the reader into the diversity of politeness phenomena. Every chapter in Parts
II and III thus also includes exercises at the end, by means of which readers can
work through how one might analyse politeness in different types of discourse.
Part I
Theoretical framework
2 The roots of politeness research
2.1 Introduction
Like many other scholarly fields with a history, politeness research can be
metaphorically described as a tree. Current theories of politeness have been
influenced by earlier models which benchmarked the birth of the field. Indeed,
earlier models continue to have an influence on the way in which politeness is
described and studied, either directly, as some of these models continue to be
used by researchers, or indirectly, as many of the approaches that have been
subsequently developed clearly position themselves as counter or alternatives
to these early theories. Using the tree analogy, earlier models of politeness are
akin to the roots: they provide the fundamental starting point for understanding
the field. In this chapter we will refer to these early models, following Jonathan
Culpeper (2011b), as first-wave approaches. However, rather than reviewing
the entire history of their development and reception in the field, we will
concentrate on highlighting the key theoretical and methodological assumptions
underlying these first-wave approaches.
In general, the first-wave approaches aimed to model politeness on a some-
what abstract, theoretical level. This reflects the way in which scientists
usually approach hitherto unknown realms: they tend to rely on theoretical
models, even though they maintain that the model is an abstraction of real-
ity, and not the reality itself. Accordingly, it is an implicit assumption in
all first-wave approaches that linguistic politeness can and should be mod-
elled in abstract terms. While these various approaches differ in their detail,
they all build on the seminal work of the language philosopher Herbert Paul
Grice (1989[1975]) on pragmatic meaning, in particular, the so-called Coop-
erative Principle (CP), as the underlying conceptual basis of the models
proposed.
According to Grice, interactants figure out what others are meaning, although
not necessarily saying, in a principled way, based on normative expectations
about communication. These normative expectations were summarised in the
CP, which he formulated as follows:
13
Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs,
by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
(1989[1975]: 26)
The basic idea is that we all have expectations about the kinds of things people
will say, how they will say things, how specific we need to be, the order
in which things are said, and so on, when engaging in talk. The CP was
further elaborated in the four conversational maxims: quality (the expectation
that one will be truthful), quantity (the expectation that one will supply the
right amount of information), relevance (the expectation that the information
provided will be relevant) and manner (the expectation that information will be
clear). Conversational maxims are not rules, however, as speakers who interact
do not necessarily need to follow them. Instead, Grice’s claim was that a speaker
can make available a pragmatic meaning (i.e. something beyond what is said)
through the normative expectation that he or she is observing the CP overall,
and either observing or not observing specific conversational maxims in order
to maintain the former assumption. The maxims can thus be violated in various
ways in Grice’s framework, but one of the most common ways of not observing
them is through what Grice labelled flouting.
In example (1), Homer, a protagonist of the renowned cartoon The Simpsons,
and his father are talking at a certain Bea’s funeral after Grampa missed saying
goodbye to Bea (a friend of Grampa’s) because of Homer. Grampa implies that
he does not want to talk to Homer and that he does not accept Homer’s apology
by markedly flouting what Grice defined as the quality maxim (‘do not say
what you believe to be false’).
(1) Homer: I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Dad.

Grampa: Is someone talking to me? I didn’t hear anything.
Homer: Oh no! Dad’s lost his hearing!
(‘Old money’, The Simpsons, Season 2, Episode 17, 1991)
It is quite evident that Grampa can hear what Homer is saying (although
Homer, being Homer, thinks otherwise). In order to maintain the assumption
that Grampa is observing the CP, then, something must be implicated, an infer-
ence that is strengthened by Grampa pointedly saying something he obviously
does not believe to be true. In flouting the quality maxim by pretending he can-
not hear Homer’s apology, Grampa thereby implicates that he does not want to
listen to Homer. This, in turn, indicates that Grampa does not accept Homer’s
apology and remains upset and angry about what has happened.
Grice’s approach to meaning was focused primarily on information: the
propositional content of what is said, implied and so on. However, he acknowl-
edged, in passing, that the CP could be maintained with reference to other kinds
of maxims, including the expectation that the speaker will ‘be polite’ (Grice
2.1 Introduction 15
1989[1975]: 28). The idea was that such a maxim could rise to other kinds of
pragmatic meaning relating to moral issues such as politeness. For example,
when delivering bad news such as failing an exam, the speaker is likely to intro-
duce this news in an indirect way, using formulations such as ‘I am sorry to be
the bearer of bad news but . . . ’ instead of directly saying ‘You have failed.’ In
this way, the speaker flouts the maxims of quantity (i.e. saying more than what
is needed) and manner (i.e. not being as clear as possible) in order to implicate
that he or she is being polite. Although Grice himself did not develop these
ideas any further, it was assumed in all first-wave approaches to politeness that
it was possible to model politeness based on this Gricean framework. That is,
the hearer can infer that the speaker has flouted one or more of the maxims
in order to implicate that he or she is being polite, instead of flouting them
in order to be ‘uncooperative’ and, vice-versa, the speaker can assume that by
flouting one or more of the maxims the hearer will infer that he or she is being
polite.
In order to illustrate how this Gricean conceptualisation operates, let us
analyse the brief interaction in example (2):
(2) Medway drew closer. Halting, she fixed him with respectful eye
and extended the cigar-stump between dainty fingers.
‘Would you be requiring this any further, sir?’
‘Eh?’
‘You left it in moddom’s room, and I thought perhaps you would
be needing it.’
(P. G. Woodhouse, Hot Water, Chapter 8, 1963)
In this brief example, cited from the British author P. G. Woodhouse (1881–
1975), the maid’s style represents traditional British indirectness, which is
often associated with politeness. Upon returning a cigar-stump to a guest who
has left it in her lady’s room, the maid flouts the maxim of manner: instead of
making a clear statement such as ‘You have left your cigar-stump in the room
and I have brought it back to you,’ she inquires indirectly as to whether the
guest, an American senator, still requires it. This implicature seems to invoke
the power difference triggered by the hierarchical social relationship between
a high-ranking guest and a maid, a point which is reinforced by the use of the
deferential form of address ‘sir’.
The most influential first-wave theory of politeness was introduced in
the monograph Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, written by
Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson (1987).1 Brown and Levinson’s
framework aims to model politeness as implicated through forms of linguistic
behaviour that flout the conversational maxims in order to avoid conflict.
This framework has still has an unprecedented status both within and outside
the field of pragmatics. In fact, even now, when politeness is discussed in other
areas of linguistics as well as disciplines such as social and anthropological stud-
ies, Brown and Levinson’s approach continues to be regarded as the definitive
work on linguistic politeness, a point which is evident from it being referred to as
‘politeness theory’ in many circles as if there were no other plausible approach
to theorising politeness. It is for this reason that in the following overview
of the conceptualisation of linguistic politeness in first-wave approaches,
Brown and Levinson’s framework will occupy a predominant position,
though we will also make reference to other frameworks in the course of our
discussion.
2.2 Concepts
Universality
A central concept in first-wave approaches is the notion of universality.
Universality refers to the claim that linguistic politeness can be systematically
described across languages and cultures using the same underlying theoretical
framework. The idea of describing manifestations of language and language
usage through universal parameters is not at all unique to theories of polite-
ness. It appears, perhaps most representatively, in the work of the linguist Noam
Chomsky (e.g. 1957, 1965) on so-called Generative Grammar. The theory of
Generative Grammar claims that it is possible to develop theoretical descrip-
tions of syntactic properties of a language through abstraction and by means
of data focusing on the underlying competence of speakers rather than actual
performance. As Chomsky notes,
a grammar is based on a finite number of observed sentences (the linguist’s cor-
pus) and it ‘projects’ this set to an infinite set of grammatical sentences by estab-
lishing general ‘laws’ (grammatical rules) framed in terms of such hypothetical con-
structs as the particular phonemes, words, phrases, and so on, of the language under
analysis. (1965: 1)
The idea of hypothetical models based on datasets limited to utterances was

adopted by pioneers of politeness research who were heavily influenced by
Chomsky’s thinking. As a pragmatic answer to the grammatical parameters
studied by adherents of Generative Grammar, first-wave politeness theorists
echoed Chomsky’s claims in proposing that politeness, which is a means of
avoiding conflict, largely operates through flouting universally applicable Con-
versational Maxims.
The idea of universality appeared first in the framework of Robin Lakoff
(1973, 1977), which represents perhaps the earliest attempt to theorise
2.2 Concepts 17
politeness. Lakoff argues that politeness has ‘rules’, just as the CP has maxims.
These rules include the following: ‘Don’t impose’ (Rule 1), ‘Give options’
(Rule 2) and ‘Make A feel good, be friendly’ (Rule 3) (Lakoff 1973: 298).
The conversational maxims are flouted when these rules are observed, as one
is acting according to the normative expectations associated with the Gricean
maxim ‘Be polite.’ Lakoff claims that politeness behaviour can be described
universally, and the basic difference among cultures is that they put more
emphasis on one of these rules than on the others. For example, people from
Asian cultures were claimed by Lakoff to be more likely to act deferentially
when being polite (Rule 1), while in Australian culture the strategy of
camaraderie (Rule 3) was claimed to dominate.
A claim to universality is also present, although in a less explicit form, in
the framework of politeness maxims developed by Geoffrey N. Leech (1983).
While Leech makes an argument that politeness operates variably in different
cultures or language communities, he nevertheless claims that a uniform bind-
ing factor behind culturally different manifestations of politeness behaviour
is their overall function of cooperative conflict avoidance. Leech’s theory
describes politeness as a means to avoid conflict, which operates via decreasing
the cost and increasing the benefit for the hearer, while increasing the cost and
decreasing the benefit for the speaker. That is, the less the action proposed in an
utterance ‘costs’ and the more ‘benefit’ it brings to the hearer, the more polite it
becomes. For example, ‘Make the sandwiches’ is less polite than ‘Have another
sandwich’ because the former implies a cost to the hearer (i.e. he is requested
to do some work), while the latter involves something of potential benefit to the
hearer (i.e. something is offered). Politeness is, according to Leech, a means of
symbolically decreasing the cost incurred or the benefit accrued to the hearer.
For instance, the form ‘Would you mind making some sandwiches?’ is a sym-
bolic expression of the speaker’s intention to decrease the cost to the hearer, and
the hearer is assumed to be able to infer this intention based on the assumption
that he is maintaining the Politeness Principle (i.e. ‘Be polite’). On the analytic
level, then, Leech’s theory describes the politeness value of an utterance by
means of a ‘cost–benefit scale’: a scale which represents the cost–benefit value
of actions.
Universality is also a key notion in Brown and Levinson’s framework. In
a similar manner to other first-wave approaches, Brown and Levinson claim
that politeness universally functions as a means of conflict avoidance, and even
though the ways in which it manifests itself differ across languages and cultures,
underpinning it are exactly the same operational assumptions. These include,
most importantly, a so-called universal notion of face and the assumed universal
applicability of rationality in theorising politeness, two points to which we shall
now turn.
Face and rationality

The concept of face as a technical term is derived from work in sociology and
anthropology (see below) and, according to Brown and Levinson, consists of
two specific kinds of desires (‘face-wants’) attributed by interactants to one
another: the desire to be unimpeded in one’s actions (negative face), and the
desire to be approved of (positive face). According to Brown and Levinson,
some acts intrinsically threaten face. For example, a request is said to threaten
negative face, while a criticism threatens positive face. Politeness arises through
strategies that minimise the threat to face when such an act, which is labelled
a face-threatening act, occurs, thereby avoiding conflict. Politeness strategies
can be directed at either (1) the hearer’s negative face, as when the speaker
avoids presuming, coercing, personalising, and emphasises the hearer’s status;
or (2) the hearer’s positive face, as when the speaker claims common ground
with the hearer, conveys that they are co-operators, and when he fulfils a want
of the hearer and so on. The former is termed negative politeness, while the
latter is termed positive politeness.
The notion of face is claimed to allow for politeness to be modelled uni-
versally, because it helps the researcher to make distinctions between cultures
and smaller groups of language users according to whether they prefer polite-
ness that appeals to the other’s positive face or negative face; that is, so-called
‘positive politeness’ and ‘negative politeness’ cultures (see Chapter 11 for an
alternative to this view). It is important to note, however, that positive and neg-
ative politeness reflect preferences rather than hard-and-fast rules, as they can
differ across situations, even though cultures are claimed to have a preference
for either negative or positive politeness patterns overall. According to Brown
and Levinson,
the bare bones of a notion of face which (we argue) is universal, but which
in any particular society we would expect to be the subject of much cultural
elaboration. (1987: 13)
One key debate in politeness research has centred on whether this claimed uni-
versal notion of face does actually allow for cultural elaboration or is too tightly
bound to a view of interaction as arising between independent, autonomous
individuals who are fully rational.
Influenced by Brown and Levinson’s theory, the assumed connection
between politeness and face has become axiomatic in the field over time, to the
point that it now seems impossible to talk about politeness without examining
the notion of face. This assumption is rooted in a specific interpretation of the
practices by means of which face is maintained. These practices were orig-
inally termed facework by the renowned scholar Erving Goffman, who first
introduced the notion of face into academic discourse. However, it is worth
2.2 Concepts 19
noting that in Goffman’s original work, facework actually refers to ‘the actions
taken by a person to make whatever he is doing consistent with face’ (1967:
12). Facework thus includes a wide variety of practices, including among others
so-called corrective facework and avoidance facework. Early theories of polite-
ness gave pre-eminence to these forms of facework, but in doing so excluded
many other aspects of facework originally noted by Goffman.
The second key universalistic assumption made in Brown and Levinson’s
theory of politeness centres on the notion of rationality. Face is claimed to be
a universal property of the human psyche because human beings are, for the
most part at least, considered to be rational. Rationality means that whenever
a certain form of politeness is chosen to address the hearer’s face needs, the
speaker is making a rational choice to observe the ‘face-wants’ of the hearer.
Brown and Levinson argue that rationality means ‘the application of a specific
mode of reasoning . . . which guarantees inferences from ends or goals to means
that will satisfy those ends’ (1987: 64). Essentially, this means that in order to
get things done without creating unnecessary conflict it is rational to respect
the face-wants of others, and thus we reason about the behaviour of others
based on this assumption of rationality. This means–ends conceptualisation thus
directly incorporates the Gricean CP into Brown and Levinson’s framework:
it is claimed that an implicature of politeness arises when a conversational
maxim is flouted because it is rational for the hearer to believe that the speaker
is acting politely when flouting this maxim, and it is also rational for the hearer
to maintain the assumptions inherent in the CP in doing so (i.e. to interpret
flouting as politeness, at least in some instances).
Rationality plays a key role in universalistic theorisation because it helps
the analyst to systematise what appears to be endless variation in linguistic
behaviour. A major challenge facing politeness researchers is to account for
the ways and extent to which politeness behaviour changes across various
contexts. A key claim in first-wave approaches to politeness is that this ever-
fluctuating phenomenon becomes easier to capture and model if its production
is described as resulting from a rational means–ends process, which follows
certain societal norms. Brown and Levinson argue that such contextual vari-
ation can be systematically accounted for by means of three social variables,
namely, relative power (P), social distance (D) and ranking of imposition in
that culture (R). Speakers are claimed to be sensitive to these variables due
to socialisation processes: e.g. we are educated since our childhood to employ
rational means–end reasoning to choose politeness strategies according to these
social factors (see more on ‘strategy’ later in this chapter). Consequently, on this
view, since these variables are held to influence the rational choice of politeness
strategy, it becomes possible for the analyst to systematically describe polite-
ness in any interaction simply by ‘calculating’ the contextual effects of these
variables.
Universality versus culture-specificity

Universality is a common scholarly concern in the social sciences. The emphasis
on identifying universals in relation to politeness can create problems, however,
in that it inevitably involves foregrounding outsider or etic perceptions of
politeness and it ignores culture-specific, insider interpretations of what counts
as polite. Although the etic description of politeness-related phenomena is a
seemingly reasonable standpoint to take, universality is a very ambitious claim
because it downgrades or even bleaches out these insider or emic differences in
understandings of politeness. The notions of face and rationality as described
by Brown and Levinson, for instance, reflect specific understandings of the
human psyche which do not apply in every culture and society, at least not in
the way they are interpreted in these universalistic frameworks. It thus may not
be surprising that the claim to universality, in spite of the great popularity it
garnered after its appearance, has been criticised and even rejected by scholars
who have come from cultures in which the aforementioned notions differ from
their Anglo-American counterparts.
In fact, the universalistic Brown and Levinsonian framework has provided a
rich soil for inquiries which have applied the universal claims of first-wave
approaches to culturally situated data. Several scholars have attempted to
describe cross-cultural differences in terms of the universalistic notions of
face and rationality. The most representative research among these inquiries
has been undertaken by the Greek scholar Maria Sifianou (1992), who has
explored cross-cultural differences between British and Greek politeness phe-
nomena. Her analysis illustrated that the British tend to prefer politeness strate-
gies that appeal to the hearer’s negative face, and the Greeks tend to prefer
to appeal to the hearer’s positive face. This is a noteworthy finding because it
contributes to deconstructing common stereotypes, according to which the
British are held to be more polite than the Greeks. As Sifianou reveals, the
situation is simply that approaches that appeal to the hearer’s negative face are
more popularly associated with politeness than their positive-face counterparts,
and this is why various lay observers claim that the British are more polite than
the Greeks. According to Brown and Levinson’s view, then, there can be no
objective verification of the view that one nation is more polite than another.
However, many researchers who have an interest in emic concepts and
‘insider’ perceptions of linguistic politeness have refuted claims to univer-
sality in first-wave approaches to politeness. They have claimed, instead, that
politeness is an inherently culture-specific phenomenon. A major point in these
criticisms was that rationality, as it is understood in the universalistic frame-
works, reflects a modern Western interpretation of rational behaviour as an
individualistic form of action. One of the most influential critiques has come
from the Japanese sociolinguist Sachiko Ide (1982, 1989), who criticised the
2.2 Concepts 21
universalistic model primarily because it relies on the idea that politeness

comes into existence as the speaker flouts conversational maxims through the
means–ends reasoning of individuals. Drawing from the Japanese emic notion
of wakimae dd (lit. ‘discernment’), Ide (1989) argues that in Japanese one’s
behaviour is judged to be polite when one discerns the appropriate commu-
nal norm, and that this overrides pure individual rationality. The operation of
‘discernment’ can be illustrated by the examples (3) and (4).
(3) * Sensei-wa kore-o yonda.
‘The professor read this.’
(4) Sensei-wa kore-o o-yomi-ni-natta.
‘The professor read[Hon] this.’
(adapted from Ide 1989: 227, underscore added)
These are both references to a lecturer’s activity (i.e. that he has read some ma-
terial) by students. However, example (3) is claimed to be improper in Japanese
communication, irrespective of context, because students are expected to use an
elevating honorific inflection when referring to a lecturer (i.e. oyomi-ni-natta
instead of yonda), who is their social superior, as seen in example (4). In other
words, in Japanese the use of honorifics and other formal forms of politeness
is not necessarily bound to what universalistic frameworks describe as rational
individual choices in relation to achieving certain goals or ends, but rather to pat-
terns normatively expected in certain situations and hierarchical relationships.
According to Ide, then, the Japanese tend to perceive the so-called rationality of
politeness as a means to fulfil communal rather than individual strategic goals,
even if these two goal types may coincide. The culture-specificity of politeness
thus poses a serious challenge to universalistic claims, particularly in cultures
which emphasise communality and normativity over individuality and agency.2
Universalistic rationality is problematic in certain cultural settings also
because it is described as an other-oriented phenomenon, in the sense that a
choice of a certain form of politeness depends on the estimation of the hearer’s
face-wants. Nevertheless, as Ide demonstrated, politeness is often a form of
self-display because ‘discerning’ appropriate behaviour in interaction, from an
emic perspective, shows verbally one’s sense of place or role in a given situation
according to social conventions. The appropriate use of Japanese honorifics can
signal the speaker’s relative rank in a given interaction just as much as being
a form of other-oriented politeness. In fact, even the omission of honorifics
and other formal forms signals a relative stance on the part of the speaker, and
because of this there is no ‘politeness-neutral’ situation in Japanese interactions.
The claim to universality has also been criticised with reference to the notion
of face. The two perhaps most influential criticisms of face as a universal
notion were written by two Chinese researchers Yueguo Gu (1990) and LuMing
Mao (1994). It is perhaps not coincidental that it was East Asian scholars
who revisited face because this notion originates in Chinese, even if western
anthropology and sociology has transformed it into an etic term.
Gu, in a similar way to Ide, applied an emic term, mianzi (‘face’), to draw
attention to the inappropriateness of applying individualistic universals to com-
munalistic societies and cultures. As Gu argues, Brown and Levinson’s theory
fails to describe Chinese politeness behaviour because in the Chinese cultural
context, face is a societal rather than a psychological property. That is, while in
Brown and Levinson’s approach, face is a private property of the individual and
consequently choices of politeness strategies are bound to the psychology of
individuals, in China mianzi is a social and consequently shared phenomenon.
Naturally, different perceptions of face necessitate different practices of polite-
ness, which explains cross-cultural differences in terms of politeness behaviour.
For example, Gu illustrates that the Chinese traditionally tend to express polite-
ness by denigrating themselves and elevating their speech partners.
Mao’s description of Chinese face accords with that of Gu in that he also
draws attention to the communal value of Chinese face, pointing out that
in China group harmony is privileged over individual freedom. Therefore,
to be a respected member of a society means to be included in a group,
rather than emphasising one’s independence as an agentive individual. This
focus on relationality blurs the difference between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’
face as described by Brown and Levinson because negative face implies that
persons are distinct, autonomous individuals rather than relationally involved,
interdependent individuals. Mao also argues that emic notions of face should
not be neglected, all the more because in Chinese there is a rich metalanguage
of face-related notions.
Speech acts and indirectness

In its formative period, politeness research was heavily influenced by the notion
of speech acts. The notion of speech act is a concept that arose out of the work of
the language philosophers John L. Austin (1962) and John Searle (1969, 1975)
on the performative function of language. The performative function means
that language is used to do things like requests, offers and invitations, rather
than simply being a means of delivering information. For example, although
the sentence ‘It’s hot in here’ can be a simple statement, or locutionary act as it
is called in the field, it can also be understood as a request to open the window,
which is its communicative function, or what is termed an illocutionary act.
Speech acts tend to have outcomes in the real world when the hearer reacts to
them: that is, they accomplish perlocutionary acts. For example, the window
is likely to be opened as a result of the indirect request above. Speech acts
function according to the so-called felicity conditions, which refer to real-world
2.2 Concepts 23
conditions that must be met in order for a particular speech act to be regarded
as (felicitously) intended in a particular communicative setting.
The concept of speech act has proven to be a powerful explanatory notion in
politeness research. This is partly because various speech acts such as requests
and apologies are commonly associated with acts of politeness, and so focusing
on these speech acts made it possible to describe a certain aspect of linguis-
tic politeness in a relatively systematic way. The renowned Israeli researcher
Shoshana Blum-Kulka (1987) conducted extensive research on apologies and
their relationship with politeness, and apology research continues to exist as a
relatively independent subfield within politeness research.
A further reason why speech acts have been extensively studied is that they
explain the function of communicative indirectness, a claim originally made in
passing by Searle (1975). That is to say, there are many speech acts that attain
their illocutionary, and thus perlocutionary, effects indirectly, as we saw in the
above example of a request arising through saying ‘It’s hot in here.’ The notion
of indirect speech acts fits nicely with the claim that politeness serves to avoid
conflict by minimising imposition. The felicity conditions of indirect polite
speech acts can also be explained with reference to the Gricean CP: the hearer
is expected to interpret the speaker’s ‘indirectness’ as an expression of polite
intention. In other words, in being made indirectly they trigger implicatures of
politeness. To provide a simple example, a request can be made more indirect
by using the mitigating strategy of hedging: using forms such as ‘would you
mind’ or ‘I was wondering if’ before making a request. Indirect hedging does
not change the content of the request and ideally the hearer understands that the
question is not to be understood at the level of its potential direct locutionary
force but rather with reference to its indirect illocutionary force: the speaker
is not inquiring about the hearer’s state of mind but simply wants something.
On the other hand, the hearer will also perceive that the speaker used this
indirect approach in order to decrease the impact of the request on the hearer’s
negative face, and through flouting the conversational maxims will under-
stand the speaker is being consistent with the overall CP via an implicature of
politeness.
However, despite its prominence in first-wave approaches to politeness, the
notion of the indirect speech act is one that continues to generate disagreement
in the field, particularly as to whether it can be successfully operationalised in
examining politeness across different languages. One reason for this ongoing
debate is that the notion of indirect speech acts is closely tied to the notion
of grammatical mood. In English, at least, there are generally assumed to be
three major grammatical moods or sentence types that are associated with
speech acts: indicative, interrogative and imperative. The basic idea is that a
direct speech act arises when the grammatical mood prototypically associated
with the speech act is used, while an indirect speech act arises when another
Table 2.1 Sentence types and speech acts.
Sentence type Example Speech act
Imperative Pass me the salt. Direct request

Interrogative Could you pass me the salt? Indirect request (via question)
Indicative This could do with a little salt. Indirect request (via assertion)
grammatical mood is employed. We can see how this works in relation to

requests in Table 2.1 below.
Essentially, when there is a ‘mismatch’ between the grammatical mood and
the illocutionary point of the speech act we are dealing with a case of an indirect
speech act. Thus, a direct request is accomplished via the imperative mood,
while an indirect request is accomplished via the interrogative or indicative.
A more general way of putting this is that an indirect speech act arises when
one illocutionary act is performed by means of performing another. In the case
of ‘It’s hot in here’, two illocutionary acts arise, one which is direct (i.e. an
assertion that is it is hot), and one which is indirect (i.e. a request that the hearer
do something about this situation of being hot).
Another point that we might notice about the two examples of indirect
requests in Table 2.1 is that the second example (‘This could do with a little
salt’) seems more indirect than the first example (‘Could you pass me the
salt?’). In terms of politeness, then, it is widely held, following the work of
Blum-Kulka and colleagues on speech acts across cultures, that the speaker
can choose among various degrees of (in)directness when formulating a speech
act (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). The three basic categories of (in)directness are
direct, conventionally indirect and non-conventionally indirect. A direct speech
act is where the grammatical mood and speech act are in accord: for example,
a request is syntactically marked as such through the imperative mood. A
conventionally indirect speech act is where particular expressions have become
conventionally associated with the act in question, for example, a request can
be marked as such through modal expressions like ‘can/could you . . . ’, ‘would
you . . . ’ and so on. Finally, a non-conventionally indirect speech act is where
the target of the speech act is not made explicit. In the example above, ‘This
could do with a little bit of salt’, the target action of ‘passing’ is not mentioned.
If the target object were to be not mentioned as well, ‘this is a little bland’, this
would make the speech act even more indirect on this view.
A number of approaches in the first wave made the strong claim that the more
indirect a speech act is, the more polite it will be. This is most apparent in Brown
and Levinson’s distinction between ‘on record’ and ‘off record’ politeness
2.2 Concepts 25
Lesser
1. without redressive action, baldly
Estimation of risk
on record 2. positive politeness

of face loss
Do the FTA with redressive

action
4. off record 3. negative politeness
5. Don’t do the FTA
Greater
Figure 2.1 Types of politeness strategy (Brown and Levinson 1987: 60).
strategies. Being ‘off record’ implies that some aspect of the target of a speech
act such as a request is not explicitly mentioned, and so the hearer’s face is
not threatened through what is said. A speech act can be accomplished off
record in a non-verbal way, as for example when at a dinner table one only
looks at a piece of cake instead of requesting it. It can also be accomplished off
record through implying a request to have some cake without clearly referring
to it; for example, where one hints that one would like some cake by saying
something like ‘Gee, I’m still a bit peckish.’ Although off record indirectness
is certainly useful, it cannot be applied in every context, and so often the
interactants go ‘on record’: the illocutionary point of the speech act has a
clear mention in the utterance in question. Brown and Levinson distinguished
between three strategies for accomplishing speech acts on-record: bald on-
record, positive politeness and negative politeness. For example, to return to
the different sentence types (outlined in Table 2.1) through which requests
can be accomplished, the piece of cake can be requested directly through a
bald on-record strategy (‘Gimme that cake!’) or accomplished using various
different positive and negative politeness strategies. By its very nature, positive
politeness is held to involve a lesser degree of indirectness than its negative
counterpart, as the former assumes closeness between the speaker and hearer,
even though it is not fully direct (cf. bald on-record). For example, a positively
polite dinner table sentence like ‘Would you gimme that cake?’ follows the
pattern of a question, even if its illocutionary function is not questioning, and
so is in some respects indirect. However, a negatively polite counterpart of this
request such as ‘I was wondering if you could perhaps give me some of that
cake, please?’ is generally regarded as more indirect.The various degrees of
(in)directness of speech acts are represented in Figure 2.1, which reproduces
Brown and Levinson’s (1987: 60) summary of politeness strategies.
However, it has become clear that the relationship between politeness

and indirectness is not as straightforward as initially claimed in first-wave
approaches to politeness. For instance, in a seminal study on this issue, Blum-
Kulka (1987) demonstrated that a more indirect speech act is not necessarily
interpreted as more polite in Israeli interaction, a finding that has subsequently
been extended to many other languages. As a matter of course, then, it is not
always considered more polite to make a request or indeed any kind of speech
act more indirectly. We only have to think about the relationship between close
friends, where indirectness might be evaluated negatively, to appreciate this
point. Politeness by its nature necessitates some degree of indirectness in many
cases as an absolutely direct form could imply that no politeness strategy is
being employed, but the actual degree of indirectness is a matter influenced in
large part by the context. That is, speech acts necessitate varying degrees of
(in)directness in different interactional situations, depending on the relation-
ship between the interactants, as well as depending on the type of imposition
that the speech act involves (see Figure 2.1).
Forms and strategies

We have inherited from first-wave approaches to politeness a general tendency
to describe linguistic politeness as a system of forms and strategies. A form is
broadly defined as a meaningful unit of language, such as a morpheme, word,
phrase or sentence. A focus on politeness forms thus entails an analysis of the
linguistic structures by which politeness is conventionally accomplished. A
strategy, on the other hand, is broadly defined as a plan or series of moves
for obtaining a specific goal or result. A focus on politeness strategies thus
presumes that speakers have particular goals in mind, and employ rationale
means-to-ends reasoning to formulate a series of moves in order to achieve
that goal in a way that is considered ‘polite’, and that hearers must employ
ends-to-means reasoning in order to figure out what that goal might be,
as well as recognising the speaker’s polite intention. In other words, when
the speaker’s underlying plans or series of moves are recognisably oriented
to a politeness maxim or the hearer’s face, we are dealing with politeness
strategies.
Linguistic forms of politeness have been studied by both Western and East
Asian researchers. The former were predominantly interested in terms of
address and pronominal forms, while the latter focused on honorific forms,
including self-denigrating and other-elevating forms of address, humble and
deferential verbal forms, and other aspects of honorific language. Perhaps
the most influential study on the polite usage of Western terms of address
was written by Roger Brown and Albert Gilman in 1960. Brown and Gilman
examined the duality of the so-called T/V pronominal distinction, namely
2.2 Concepts 27
the finding that in certain languages there are ‘respectful’ (V, derived from
the French vous) and a ‘plain’ (T, derived from the French tu) pronominal
forms. Their claim was that the choice of a T or a V form is governed by
the social factors of ‘power’ and ‘solidarity’, depending on the relationship
and the culture of the speakers. Brown and Gilman’s study has generated
extensive descriptive research on the systems of deferential and ‘plain’
pronouns across languages. Brown and Levinson subsequently integrated
T/V theory into their framework by associating respectful term of address
forms with negative politeness and plain term of address forms with positive
politeness.
East Asian scholars have studied honorific forms throughout history. A study
which has had strong influence on modern linguistics is the book by Susumu
Kuno (1973), which describes Japanese honorifics from the perspective of
generative linguistics. The Japanese pragmatician Yoshiko Matsumoto (1989)
also used Japanese honorifics to illustrate the complexity of the applicability
of the T/V distinction in Japanese, as honorifics in fact have multidimensional
applications. This means that instead of operating within a duality of deference
and non-deference, Japanese provides many registers, spanning from humble to
deferential, which are accomplished by means of a range of different honorific
forms. Japanese scholars have thus been predominantly critical of universalistic
frameworks of politeness (e.g. (Ide 1989).
The term strategy, which figures most prominently in Brown and Levinson’s
framework, refers in that model to the various ways the potential face-threat
arising from a speech act, which the speaker wants to accomplish, is reduced
in order to save the hearer’s face. For example, off-record politeness strategies
include giving hints, communicating via presuppositions, or using metaphors
and rhetorical questions. On-record positive politeness can be realised by means
of strategies such as seeking agreement, avoiding disagreement, making jokes
and presupposing shared knowledge with the hearer. On-record negative polite-
ness can come into existence via strategies such as giving deference, emphasis-
ing the speaker’s want to not impinge on the hearer, and by making one’s speech
impersonal.
An important rationale behind the idea of strategies is that they help to
describe the diverse ways in which politeness is conveyed in communication
in a systematic way. Furthermore, the view that various forms of politeness
are chosen in order to strategically cope with certain interpersonal situations
provides an analytic explanation as to why a particular form of politeness is
preferred in a given setting. To provide an example, Brown and Levinson note
that the positive politeness strategy ‘seeking agreement’ involves looking for
those aspects of topics on which it is possible to agree and sticking to them.
This explains why people appraise only a slice of reality, as, for example,
when one compliments a neighbour on his new car by saying ‘Isn’t your new
car a beautiful colour?’ Obviously, if the speaker finds the hearer’s car to be
ostentatious or overly pollution-producing, it is strategic to refer positively to a
part of it which he or she finds acceptable, like its colour, instead of appraising
the whole object.
One difficulty for the strategy model, however, resides in its descriptive
nature: one can only capture the most representative techniques of politeness in
a certain language or culture, and such a description may not apply to politeness
in other languages and cultures, as various criticisms of first-wave universalistic
frameworks have made clear. Furthermore, a strategy is a behavioural rather
than a formal aspect of language usage, one consequence of which was that
linguistic forms associated with politeness were relatively neglected in early
universalistic theories.
As the present description has illustrated, first-wave approaches represented
politeness as a duality of strategies and forms. This duality reflects a concep-
tual stance: namely, that politeness is perceived in these frameworks as the
speaker’s ‘product’, an isolated and ‘measurable’ unit which is produced by
the speaker and interpreted by the researcher in light of contextual factors. As
we argue in Section 2.3, these conceptual assumptions are also reflected in the
methodologies of first-wave approaches to politeness.
2.3 Methodology
Utterance-level analysis
In the field of pragmatics, the expression utterance refers to the smallest unit
of communication. Unlike units in descriptive linguistics, which traditionally
span from a morpheme to a sentence, an utterance is not defined by its size but
rather with respect to its function: it is a communicative unit produced by a
single speaker. For example, the exclamation ‘Huh?’, the expression ‘Pardon
me?’ and a longer piece of monologue are all, potentially, utterances. First-
wave approaches describe politeness at the utterance level due to the afore-
mentioned conceptual stance of observing politeness as the speaker’s product.
An utterance-level analysis facilitates the identification of politeness forms and
strategies because when they are relatively isolated vis-à-vis utterances, the
function of strategies and forms tends to be easier to generalise about, while in
longer stretches of interaction the function of politeness forms and strategies
tends to become more complex. A focus on the utterance level does not in
principle exclude analysis of longer interactions such as dialogues. A set of
utterances can, in fact, be studied through this approach; it is simply that the
analyst has an interest primarily in the utterances, themselves, rather than in
the relationship between the utterances, and the wider discursive context. To
explain this point further, let us consider the brief dialogue in example (5).
2.3 Methodology 29
(5) A: I had a flat tyre on the way home.

B: Oh God, a flat tyre!
(Brown and Levinson 1987: 113)
Brown and Levinson cite this interaction as a representative example of the pos-
itive politeness strategy of repetition: when the hearer repeats part or all of what
the speaker has just said in order to seek agreement. The question emerges as to
how it is possible to regard this dialogue as an example of politeness, consider-
ing that these utterances could mean something different. For instance, it could
be that A is the wife of B, and the latter utters ‘Oh God, a flat tyre!’ as an ironic
reference to A’s inability to change wheels. The answer is simple: studying
politeness at the level of utterances requires us to examine the regular, routinised
use of polite utterances which, in turn, presupposes default interpretations.
Elicited data
The focus on the utterance level brought along with it certain preferred methods
of data collection in first-wave approaches to linguistic politeness. In order to
obtain data which are as illustrative as possible, various studies use carefully
selected pieces of either (allegedly) naturally occurring data or, more often
than not, elicited data. Naturally occurring data are utterances that arise in
spontaneous interaction, while elicited data are utterances that arise in dis-
course or interaction facilitated through intervention by the researcher. Many
researchers set out with the methodological assumption that certain naturally
occurring utterances can and must be excluded from the analysis on theoretical
grounds. In practice this means, for example, that the analyst can ignore an
utterance that deviates from what is defined as the standard usage of polite-
ness. The idea that certain manifestations of language usage are ‘improper’
originates in Chomsky’s Generative Grammar (see above), which, at least to
some extent, has influenced the thinking of early theorists of politeness. In
generative studies, syntactic structures that deviate from grammatical rules are
described as ‘non-well-formed’ and so are excluded from the analysis. The
idea of ‘well-formedness’ appears, for instance, in Lakoff’s study when she
argues that in politeness research ‘we should like to have some kind of prag-
matic rules, dictating whether an utterance is pragmatically well-formed or not’
(1973: 296). While other first-wave approaches were less explicit in making
such claims, they nevertheless also assume an underlying criterion of pragmatic
well-formedness in that they present canonical examples of politeness strate-
gies in their analyses. In other words, by presenting a particular piece of data
as an example of a particular politeness strategy one is implicitly assuming the
utterance in question is pragmatically well-formed (i.e. would be accepted by
other competent speakers as a canonical instance of politeness).
‘Well-formed’ politeness data can either be naturally occurring, which

implies that the researcher collects them from datasets, or they can be elicited,
as we have briefly mentioned. Elicitation refers to methodologies by means
of which researchers can obtain data directly from the speakers, according to
criteria that suit the research project’s specific objectives. These methodologies
aim to vouchsafe for the given dataset’s ‘well-formedness’. For example, a
pragmatic research project dedicated to analysing polite lexemes, which was
conducted in the 1970s, instructed informants to ignore contexts, in order for
the researchers to obtain ‘standard lexical context’ for the forms studied.3 In lin-
guistic politeness research, data can be elicited through various methodologies,
including discourse completion tasks/tests (DCTs), questionnaires/surveys
and interviews.
A DCT refers to a one-sided situational role play designed by the researcher.
DCTs include situations by means of which the analyst can observe the ways in
which a ‘polite’ speech act is performed. For example, a typical DCT that elicits
data on speech acts, in this case apology, might consist of several questions
along the lines of example (6).
(6) You are late to a meeting and have made others wait for you.
Your colleague asks: ‘Where have you been?’
You respond: _________________________
DCTs allow researchers to investigate correlations between forms and strate-
gies that informants report they would use, and various sociological and linguis-
tic variables. For example, example (6) can be modified to address the influence
of rank, gender, frequency of interaction and so on, simply by altering the first
sentence in the following way:
You are late to a weekly meeting with your female section head and have made others
wait for you.
Changing the details of a given question pattern helps researchers to examine

the sociopragmatic variability of speech acts. Perhaps the most representative
work on the use of DCTs to elicit politeness-related speech act data has been
compiled by a team of three pragmaticians, Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Juliane
House and Gabriele Kasper (1989), who utilised this kind of elicited data to
analyse politeness forms and strategies across cultures.
Along with DCTs, which focus on how speakers produce certain utterances,
there are other, more general tools, such as questionnaires/surveys, which aim
to measure the speaker’s evaluation of certain forms of politeness. A typical
questionnaire/survey would, for example, ask the informant to evaluate the
politeness value of a request utterance like ‘Could you please lend me a pen?’
on a scale. Ethnographic interviews are another tool, by means of which the
analyst can elicit information from the informant in a less structured or formally
2.3 Methodology 31
bound way, by requesting, for instance, that the informant comment on a certain
politeness-related topic.
All of these approaches aim to generate data about the production of speech
acts that are specified in the research design: they are designed to elicit and
describe linguistic features, such as directness versus indirectness of a specific
speech act. An important rationale behind adopting these methodologies is that
they have enabled, and continue to enable, researchers to build up extensive
databases relatively quickly and without, perhaps even more importantly, gener-
ating analytical complexities. This latter practical aspect is an important reason
behind the lasting popularity of these various methodologies for eliciting data.
Although in the current age of the internet it often only takes a few clicks for
the researcher to search within large databases of naturally occurring data,
it continues to be difficult to identify speech acts in these databases. This is
because database searches are usually based on lexical items, and although
speech acts like requests and apologies may involve some typical expressions
such as ‘please’ and ‘excuse me’, they can be expressed in many alternative
ways. Obviously, this is not an issue in the case of elicited data.
However, one key challenge facing approaches that elicit data for politeness
research is the issue of validity. It is now well established in pragmatics that
what informants report they might say when data is elicited and what they
actually say in naturally occurring interactions are not always the same. This is
because it is difficult to establish with any great certainty whether informants
are recalling what they have said or predicting what they might say. There is
also the possible influence of social desirability effects: informants wanting
to be seen to be saying the ‘right’ thing, or wanting to think of themselves
as the kind of person who says the ‘right’ thing.4 Another problem is that
elicited data tend to remain at the level of utterances. For an utterance-based
analysis this is not in itself a problem, but if the aim is to investigate the
relationship between utterances and the wider discursive context, then clearly
this is a problem. Methods for eliciting longer interactions, in particular role
plays, have consequently been employed more frequently in recent years in
studies using first-wave theories of politeness. However, role plays still face
the problem of establishing the validity of the dataset given it is elicited rather
than naturally occurring. It is thus now considered prudent to triangulate elicited
data with data collected through other methods.
Observer coding
The above-discussed methodologies of data collection also presuppose reliance
on a certain analytical stance, namely observer coding of linguistic forms and
strategies vis-à-vis politeness. This essentially includes cases where ‘a cate-
gory system is established in advance on the basis of theory or research, and
the analyst decides which category applies to each utterance/behaviour’ (Arun-

dale 2010a: 152). The question thus arises as to what exactly is being coded.
As the sociologist Thomas P. Wilson (1970) points out, there are essentially
two ways in which we construct our interpretations of interactions involving
human beings. On the one hand, we may limit our understanding to our own
perspective or understanding of the interaction under study. This is generally
termed the analyst’s perspective. On the other hand, we may attempt to also
include within this interpretation the perspectives or understandings of the par-
ticipants themselves as they are engaged in that very same interaction. This is
generally termed the participant’s perspective. The problem then arises as to
how we might systematically examine these perspectives. Observer coding is
the most common method of systematising the analyst’s perspective on social
phenomena.
While all first-wave approaches to politeness rely on observer coding, Brown
and Levinson’s framework is an example par excellence of an approach to
politeness grounded in observer coding. Explicit definitions of various types of
politeness forms and strategies are formulated in the theory itself. The main job
of the analyst is thus first to assemble a dataset, second to apply these definitions
to categorise the data at hand, and finally to interpret what this coding of the data
might mean. For example, a prototypical study that has been carried out in the
context of the first-wave politeness paradigm has involved first collecting two
datasets of a particular speech act for the purposes of comparison (e.g. requests
in English and Japanese), then using Brown and Levinson’s framework to code
the utterances in these datasets vis-à-vis different kinds of politeness forms
and strategies and, finally, interpreting the relative frequency of the different
forms and strategies in the two datasets vis-à-vis general orientations to positive
and negative face. Often statistical techniques are applied to establish whether
differences in the frequency of forms and strategies are (statistically) significant.
The application of statistical tests and, in some cases, including measures
of the reliability of coding of data, certainly affords the analysis a veneer of
scientific credibility. However, a very significant question facing such studies is
just what are we coding and thus counting? Any coding system that is not tied
in some way to the understandings of the participants themselves is in danger of
generating analytical artifacts. Essentially, what this means is that we are coding
and counting up phenomena that do not reflect what is actually going on in those
interactions, at least not from the perspective of the participants themselves.
The upshot is that while observer coding is very strong on reliability in that it
generates analyses that can be replicated, the validity of the analyses it generates
is much more open to question: particularly the validity of the coding system
across languages and cultures from an emic perspective. The consensus in the
field now seems to be that while Brown and Levinson’s theory, in particular
the notions of positive and negative face, generate relatively sound (and thus
valid) analyses when applied to the examination of politeness in Anglo-English

interactions5 (e.g. British English, American English, Australian English, New
Zealand English and so on) and perhaps even some other western European
languages and cultures, its validity vis-à-vis the coding of politeness phenomena
in other languages and cultures around the world is much more problematic. It
is most telling that when defences of Brown and Levinson’s theory are mounted
from the perspective of other languages, such as Japanese, they invariably do
not address the validity of the notions of positive and negative face, but rather
appeal to the sociological variables of power and distance. In our view, then,
this means that observer coding grounded solely in Brown and Levinson’s
framework is just as likely to be generating analytical artifacts as it is to be
generating meaningful cross-cultural analyses, a point we will return to in
Chapter 11.
2.4 A sample analysis

In what follows, let us analyse example (7) in order to illustrate how early
theories can be employed in examining politeness phenomena. In doing so,
we wish to highlight not only what light they can shed on politeness, but also
what is neglected in such analyses. We have deliberately chosen an example
from English here because the validity of first-wave approaches is much less in
question in the case of Anglo-Englishes compared to data from other languages.
Nevertheless, as we shall see, there is still much that is left open to question in
this kind of analysis.
(7) Archie: All right, all right, I apologise.
Otto: You’re really sorry.
Archie: I’m really really sorry, I apologise unreservedly.
Otto: You take it back.
Archie: I do, I offer a complete and utter retraction. The imputa-
tion was totally without basis in fact, and was in no way
fair comment, and was motivated purely by malice, and
I deeply regret any distress that my comments may have
caused you, or your family, and I hereby undertake not to
repeat any such slander at any time in the future.
Otto: Okay.
(A Fish Called Wanda, 1988)
This interaction takes place between the assassin Otto West and the lawyer
Archie Leach, as Otto dangles Archie out a window to make him apologise for
a claimed offence (although it was Otto in fact who offended Archie).
From a Brown and Levinsonian perspective, Archie’s utterances employ
negative politeness strategies in formulating this apology speech act. On the
one hand, he uses several routine forms of apology, including ‘I’m really sorry’
and ‘I offer a complete and utter retraction’, in order to formalise the speech
act. On the other hand, he also utilises various politeness strategies, such as
‘The imputation was totally without basis in fact’, which Brown and Levinson
(1987: 68) define as a strategy for ‘indicat[ing] that he [the speaker] regrets
doing a prior FTA [face-threatening act]’, as well as the strategy of making a
joint promise of forbearance and apology when uttering ‘I hereby undertake
not to repeat any such slander at any time in the future.’ The occurrence of
these negative polite politeness strategies in accomplishing this apology is
in accordance with the immediate contextual requirements. Considering the
relative power between the interactants (Archie is being hung out of a window
and it is Otto who is deciding on his fate), it is clearly rational for Archie to be
attempting to appeal to the other’s face.
This analysis, however, leaves a number of questions open. Most importantly,
one wonders whether Archie’s politeness is appropriate in the present form. If
yes, for whom is it appropriate? That is, even though Otto might take Archie’s
utterances as proper and thus sufficiently polite forms of apology, we have to
keep it mind that it is not so much him as we, the audience of the film, who
need to decide on the appropriateness of these manifestations of apology. The
question, then, is whether we evaluate them in way similar to Otto.
If we perceive an apology to be an inherently polite speech act, Archie’s
utterances are of course polite (in fact, extremely polite). On the other hand,
the wording of his apologies – Archie, as a lawyer, uses super-formal language,
which does not seem to fit with a situation where he is begging for his life –
suggests that we need to examine the personality and states of mind of the
interactants, the history behind this interaction, the comedy genre in which
this interaction takes place, and other contextual factors, in order to understand
what is exactly going on in this interaction vis-à-vis politeness. In Chapter 3
we will start to address a number of these issues.
2.5 Summary
The theories of politeness studied in the present chapter, in particular the Brown
and Levinsonian framework, have dominated the field for three decades since
the late 1970s. At the beginning of this chapter we defined early theories
as the ‘roots’ of politeness research. Although in Chapter 3 we will discuss
frameworks that not only criticise these first-wave theories, but also approach
the theorisation and analysis of politeness from new angles, we nevertheless
maintain that the theories discussed here constitute the basis of the field. In that
sense they cannot be disregarded as outdated, because many of the underlying
assumptions embodied in these first-wave approaches continue to exert a very
strong influence on the field. Indeed, not only do Brown and Levinson’s theory
2.6 Key readings 35
and other first-wave approaches continue to be widely cited, both in other areas
of linguistics such as language teaching, and in other major fields in the social
sciences, such as psychology, sociology and anthropology, but the notions of
rationality, face, speech acts, observer coding and other related assumptions
still influence the way in which many researchers theorise linguistic politeness.
2.6 Key readings

A chapter by Culpeper (2011b), ‘Politeness and impoliteness’, provides a
detailed but comprehensible, and indeed very useful, overview of the history
of linguistic (im)politeness research. It is recommended particularly to those
who have interest in both politeness and impoliteness.
Earlier papers by Bruce Fraser (1990) and Kasper (1990) offer more technical
but illuminating summaries of approaches to politeness that were developed
in the first wave of approaches. A noteworthy characteristic of these studies is
that, as far as we are aware, they constitute the first critical overviews of the
field to be published.
Finally, Chapters 2 and 3 of the monograph Politeness by Watts (2003)
provide a very detailed critical retrospection of the development of, and key
topics in, politeness research. These chapters are recommended primarily to
those who intend to pursue further studies in the field.
3 Recent developments in politeness research
3.1 Introduction
The field of politeness research has increased in scope and diversity since the
beginning of the second millennium. In the past decade, certain critical ideas
on linguistic politeness which had been latent in the field for some time, such as
the importance of making a distinction between lay and technical understand-
ings of politeness, have been combined with a far-reaching methodological
shift towards examining politeness situated in discourse and interaction. This
methodological shift in politeness research is often referred to in the field as
the discursive turn.
It is often argued that the discursive turn started with the publication of
Gino Eelen’s (2001) A Critique of Politeness Theories, a monograph which
in some sense has become as influential as Brown and Levinson (1987) (see
Chapter 2). Eelen’s (2001) work, in turn, has its roots in an earlier edited
collection by Watts, Ide and Konrad Ehlich (1992a). However, while enor-
mously influential amongst politeness researchers, the impact of this work has
not yet reached the stature of the first-wave approaches since, as was argued in
Chapter 2, thus far no theory has been able to significantly dent the popularity
of Brown and Levinson’s framework across various disciplines. Furthermore,
Eelen did not attempt to elaborate a framework per se, but instead was engaged
in a self-reflexive exercise, essentially focusing on a critique of theoretical
and methodological issues in the field. Yet while Eelen’s book did not, like
Brown and Levinson, create a theoretical paradigm for examining politeness,
it successfully drew attention to the need to devote greater attention to the
participants’ perspective in studying linguistic politeness. This focus on the
participant has become a cornerstone in the major body of post-2000 politeness
research.
The examination of longer stretches of interaction has a number of important
implications. Perhaps most importantly, it necessitates examining the behaviour
of both the speaker and the hearer. As illustrated in Chapter 2, in first-wave
approaches to politeness research, the focus was predominantly on the speaker.
However, insofar as we analyse politeness in interactions between speakers and
36
3.1 Introduction 37
hearers, it becomes necessary to examine the discursive effect of an utterance.

Eelen put this point in the following way:
in everyday practice im/politeness occurs not so much when the speaker produces
behaviour but rather when the hearer evaluates that behaviour. (2001: 109)
Although this view will be challenged to some extent in Chapter 4, since it

goes without saying that interactions are co-constructed by both the speaker
and the hearer, Eelen’s main argument that there needs to be a greater focus
on evaluations of politeness, not simply linguistic forms and strategies used by
speakers, is one that has been enormously influential.
The most important rationale behind examining politeness in longer stretches
of interaction is that when considered in the wider context in which they arise,
seemingly clear usages of politeness turn out to be rather complex. For example,
let us revisit an excerpt we discussed previously in Chapter 2:
(1) Medway drew closer. Halting, she fixed him with respectful eye and
extended the cigar-stump between dainty fingers.
‘Would you be requiring this any further, sir?’
‘Eh?’
‘You left it in moddom’s room, and I thought perhaps you would be
needing it.’
(P. G. Woodhouse, Hot Water, Chapter 8, 1963)
In Chapter 2 we argued, following the key principles of first-wave approaches

to politeness, that this interaction between a high-ranking guest (an American
senator) and a British maid (Medway) represents a clear usage of politeness,
which comes into operation due to rank and consequent power differences.
That is, it constitutes a prototypical instance of ‘negative politeness’, in Brown
and Levinson’s sense. This conversation functions very well as a representative
example if we pick it out from its immediate discursive context. However, the
transparency of the interpretation of this interaction as involving a straightfor-
ward case of politeness becomes problematic if the conversation is placed in a
wider context: if we examine (a) contextual factors and the interactional rela-
tionship between the interactants, as well as (b) the way in which the interaction
itself is constructed.
In regard to (a), although Brown and Levinson’s framework does not ignore
context completely, it encourages the analyst to examine only basic contextual
factors without analysing the interactional history behind a certain conversation.
For example, in the case of example (1) it is important to know that Senator
Opal is a guest in a chateau in France, and his hostess is blackmailing him
with a document that may end his career. The Senator attempts to search the
hostess’ room in her absence to find and steal the document, and although this
attempt turns out to be unsuccessful, the Senator believes, until he meets the
maid, that he was at least unseen. Thus, although the conversation could be
explained as a typical instance of negative politeness, if one observes the wider
discursive context another plausible explanation becomes evident. That is, the
Senator has been caught in a criminal act, and his abrupt response may not so
much be due to his powerful position but perhaps arises simply out of shock.
Looking at this point from another angle, although the Senator’s social rank
could imply interactional power, in this specific context he is not at all powerful.
It is Medway who holds power, and this twist in their power relationship affords
further interpretative possibilities for her utterances, which may be just as much
menacing as deferential.
This latter point becomes evident if we read the subsequent conversation
between Senator Opal and Miss Medway; that is, if we analyse how the inter-
action unfolds.
(2) A great deal of Senator Opal’s effervescence evaporated. An

almost automatic and unconscious smoker, he had forgotten that
he had been half-way through a cigar when he embarked on that
search of his. A well-defined feeling of constriction in the muscles
of his throat caused him to utter a faint sound like the gurgle of a
dying duck.
‘You weren’t there!’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I didn’t see you.’
‘No, sir.’
The Senator cleared his throat noisily. There were several ques-
tions he would have liked to ask this calm-bowed girl, but he felt
that asking would be injudicious. The salient fact, the one that
must be dealt with immediately, was that she had seen him nosing
about the Venetian Suite. Where she had been concealed was a side
issue.
‘H’r’r’mph!’ he said awkwardly.
Medway awaited his confidences with quiet respect. And yet, the
Senator asked himself as he gazed into it, was the eye of hers
quite so respectful as he had supposed? A demure girl. Difficult
to know just what she was thinking.
‘I dare say,’ he said, ‘it seemed a little strange to you that I should
be in Mrs Gedge’s room?’
Medway did not speak.
‘The fact is, I am a man with hobby. I am much interested in
antiques.’
3.2 Concepts 39
Medway remained quiescent.

‘An old place like this . . . a historic old house like this . . . a real
old-world Château like this, full of interesting subjects, is – er –
interesting to me. It interests me. I am interested in it. Most inter-
ested. It – er – interests me to – ah – potter around. I find it
interesting.’
A fly settled on his snowy hair. Medway eyed it in silence. He
cleared his throat again. He was feeling that he would have to do
a little bit better than this.
(P. G. Wodehouse, Hot Water, Chapter 8, 1963)
Example (2) illustrates that (i) Miss Medway’s previous utterances are indeed
more menacing than negatively polite, but (ii) this is a complex point, because
from an interactional perspective, polite utterances are open to interpretation
by the interactants, and so various meanings and evaluations can potentially
emerge over the course of an exchange (see Chapters 4 and 5 for more on
emergence). For instance, the section:
Medway awaited his confidences with quiet respect. And yet, the Senator asked himself
as he gazed into it, was the eye of hers quite so respectful as he had supposed? A demure
girl. Difficult to know just what she was thinking.
illustrates that although Miss Medway acts according to the norms of appropri-
ateness – and thus that her silence would imply deference in many contexts –
in this specific setting it is not necessarily polite: it is open to interpretation by
the hearer (i.e. Senator Opal) as menacing.
As we can see, then, the discursive turn, by looking into longer stretches of
interaction, starts to paint a much more complex and nuanced landscape for
analysing politeness than was represented in first-wave approaches. In what
follows, we will overview the main concepts and methodologies underlying
broadly discursive approaches to politeness. It is pertinent to note that in this
discussion Eelen (2001) will play a central (but not exclusive) role, in a some-
what similar way to our focus on Brown and Levinson (1987) in Chapter 2.
3.2 Concepts
First-order versus second-order politeness

As discursive approaches have gained increasing traction in politeness research,
more and more scholars have become interested in the self-reflexive question of
just how we should conceptualise linguistic politeness. As various researchers
have argued, a basic problem in first-wave approaches is that they rest on an
Figure 3.1 Szervusz üdvözöllek [Hello and welcome] by Szergej Tamis (http://
udvozollek.blogspot.co.uk).
analytic standpoint that implicitly favours the analyst’s view over that of ‘lay’
people. One consequence of this is that theories such as Brown and Levinson
(1987) can only accept certain usages of politeness as ‘proper’ ones given it
essentially prescribes what counts as positive and negative politeness, and so
inadvertently dismisses other interpretations as due to indiosyncracises on the
part of individuals. In other words, data produced by ‘laymen’ go through a
scholarly sieve, and if certain pieces of data do not conform with the theory
they are regarded as inappropriate. While this approach is understandable in
the light of the assumptions prevalent in pragmatics at the time (see Chapter 2),
it is problematic in the sense that a selective treatment of data raises the very
real question of whether we are studying the interactants’ linguistic behaviour
and their understandings of politeness, or rather our (i.e. the researchers’) own
understanding of politeness. This is because the selective treatment of data
in itself reflects a certain perception of politeness, namely, the researcher’s
perception.
The problematic nature of dismissing certain perceptions of politeness can
be illustrated by Figure 3.1, from a Hungarian comic:
(3) Frame 1: ‘My heartfelt greetings, Mr Department Chair’, ‘At your
service.’
Frame 3: ‘Mother fucker.’ ‘Prick.’
In the first frame of the cartoon, which represents an imaginary workplace inter-
action, both interactants utilise lexical items that are generally categorised by
semanticians as old-fashioned polite expressions. Perhaps most importantly, the
second speaker’s form ‘Szervusz üdvözöllek’ (lit. ‘At your service, greetings’)
is often represented as a traditional and rather conventional jovial greeting in
Hungarian. However, this cartoon in fact ridicules the insincerity of such con-
ventional greetings at workplaces, as becomes apparent in frame 3, and through
this it becomes obvious that there is a certain perception of such Hungarian
3.2 Concepts 41
forms that contradicts their normative perception as traditional lexical repre-

sentations of politeness. If one dismisses this alternative perception on any
grounds – e.g. the interactants in the cartoon cannot represent proper language
usage due to the low level of civility (swearwords are used here) – they will
automatically dismiss various important alternative pragmatic implications of
such forms, such as being interpreted as ‘outdated’ and ‘insincere’.
This problem motivated researchers to distinguish between two different
perspectives on politeness, the distinction between so-called first-order and
second-order politeness. The terminology of first-order and second-order is
used in various fields of linguistics, as well as other areas. In general, a first-
order conceptualisation refers to the way in which a phenomenon is perceived
by its users, while second-order describes a more abstract, scientific conceptu-
alisation of the given phenomenon. In relation to politeness, as Watts, Ide and
Ehlich first argued, first-order politeness involves ‘commonsense notions of
politeness’ (1992b: 3): the ‘various ways in which polite behaviour is perceived
and talked about by members of sociocultural group’ (1992b: 3). Second-
order politeness, on the other hand, is a technical term ‘within a theory of
social behaviour and language usage’ (1992b: 3): the way in which politeness
is defined and conceptualised by theorists. For example, the anthropologist
William Foley (1997: 270) defines politeness as ‘a battery of social skills
whose goal is to ensure everyone feels affirmed in a social interaction’. While
this is a useful definition, it is obvious that it is a technical description, and if a
man or woman on the street were asked to provide a definition he or she would
provide a quite different description.
As alluded to above, while first-order and second-order perspectives involve
conceptualisations of politeness, the first-order perspective also reflects certain
practices. In the case of example (3), there is a standard and a non-standard
practice of usage of the forms in frame 1: in other words, there are different
first-order practices at play here. On the one hand there is the use of these forms
sincerely as a traditional and rather conventional jovial greeting. On the other
hand, there is the use of these forms to highlight the apparent insincerity or
outmoded nature of this practice.
From this point, we can note that there are further important nuances in
the way in which the first-order and second-order perspectives are interpreted
in different discursive theories of politeness. The most important one among
these differences is that while, according to Watts et al. (1992b; see above),
first-order politeness is a commonsense or lay conceptualisation of politeness,
Eelen (2001) argues that it is not just a concept talked about by people, but is
also a phenomenon inextricably linked to their behaviour. First-order politeness
is thus a mixture of politeness as a lay concept of which speakers are con-
sciously aware, and politeness in practice, which is implicit only in discursive
practices, and thus at times people are not necessarily consciously aware of it.
Second-order politeness, on the other hand, is a theoretical construct, a term

within a theory of social behaviour and language use. In some cases, politeness
comes under a broader technical notion. For example, the intercultural expert
Helen Spencer-Oatey (2008[2000]) uses the term ‘rapport management’, while
Watts (1989, 2003) proposes the notion of ‘politic behaviour’.
The distinction between first-order and second-order politeness also echoes
differences in the assumptions underlying research on politeness. Research
based on first-order notions of politeness proceeds on the assumption that
differences in the forms and strategies that give rise to politeness reflect diver-
gences in the ways in which politeness itself is conceptualised in different
cultures. In contrast, it is often assumed in research based on second-order
notions of politeness that politeness is essentially conceptualised in the same
way across cultures, and that differences in politeness forms and strategies are
simply a reflection of divergences in the relative weight placed on the various
structures that constitute different languages and the norms governing the usage
of those structures.
As the discussion in Chapters 4 and 5 will illustrate, the relationship between
first-order and second-order politeness needs to be teased out further in a
somewhat more complex way than indicated in the present discussion. However,
at this point it can be argued that in general the drawing of the first-order/second-
order distinction has given a pivotal boost to the field, as it has challenged
the dominance of inadvertently prescriptive approaches to politeness, which
accepted only certain usages of politeness as ‘appropriate’.
Variability and contestedness

As the politeness theorist and gender researcher Mills (2003) argues in her
seminal monograph on politeness and gender, politeness is always subject to
variability. While it was implicitly assumed in first-wave approaches to polite-
ness that people within the same cultural group would have the same inter-
pretations of a given utterance as polite (or impolite) – for instance, when the
perceptions of members of the same cultural group are examined empirically –
they are not always the same, a point first noted by Eelen (2001). In fact, there
can be significant variability in the ways in which members from the same group
evaluate the very same event vis-à-vis politeness, as Haugh (2010a) demon-
strates, for instance, in an analysis of evaluations of an email sent by a lecturer
to an international student that entered the public domain when the said lecturer
was dismissed. In a sense such variability should not come as surprise to us.
After all, the idea that 120 million Japanese or 310 million Americans would
all agree about what counts as ‘polite’ in their respective societies is rather
preposterous even when considered on first principles (i.e. based on what the
ordinary user might observe). Yet it is worth reiterating that this is an implicit
3.2 Concepts 43
claim in first-wave approaches where Japan is characterised as a ‘negative

politeness culture’ and the US is claimed to be a ‘positive politeness culture’
(see Chapter 11 on the problematic aspect of ‘culture’ as a prescriptive notion).
What this variability means is that no preconceived assumptions can be
straightforwardly applied to the analysis of linguistic politeness in naturally
occurring data, without a careful examination of the details of situated contexts.
What close examination of real-life interactions reveals is that the perceived
social order – and consequently normative usage of so-called politeness forms
and strategies – is often violated in real interactions. In this sense variability
is closely interwoven with the first-order and second-order distinction, as it
implies that ‘local’ (first-order) perceptions of politeness, must be incorporated
into scholarly and technical (second-order) descriptions. In order to illustrate
the function of variability in politeness practices in terms of how we map
out positions in relation to interactional power, Mills (2003: 174–5) discusses
the example of an older white, working-class female server at a coffee bar
who openly defied all the behavioural norms of university academics, but the
latter nevertheless tolerated her behaviour in spite of her ‘low’ position in the
university hierarchy. As Mills concludes,
She had a fairly ‘low’ position in the university hierarchy, and yet she simply flouted all
of the linguistic ‘rules’ of interaction of how one should behave with senior staff. Thus,
positions of power mapped out by one’s role in an institution may not relate directly to
the interactional power that one may gain through one’s access to information, one’s
verbal skill, or one’s display of care and concern for other group members.
Variability has two-fold implications: apart from questioning the absolute

validity of norms of linguistic politeness due to interactants’ potential opposi-
tion to this perceived order, as in the case above, it also means we should as
analysts question the validity of cases, which seem to neatly fit into a certain
second-order conceptualisation of politeness. In other words, even in cases in
which the interactants behave exactly according to the researcher’s expecta-
tions vis-à-vis a particular theoretical framework, one still needs to be cautious
as the interactants may have myriads of reasons for behaving in that way. Thus,
it is dangerous to make claims about the interactants’ politeness behaviour
without a detailed contextual analysis, as the motivating factor behind a certain
form of behaviour might be entirely different from what we normally assume
(as Chapter 8 on history illustrates, this is markedly the case in interactions
which took place a long time ago). While this may seem to be an overly cau-
tious standpoint, it cannot be ignored because politeness, by its very nature, is
what Eelen (2001) originally termed argumentative, but which might be more
straightforwardly described as contested.
Example (4) illustrates the contested nature of politeness. It comes
from a nineteenth-century cross-cultural epistolary interaction between two
intellectuals from China and Japan.1 The extract is from a letter written in
Classical Chinese by Kotaro Munakata (1864–1923), a sinologist and secret
agent of the Japanese government, to the renowned Chinese intellectual Wang
Yiwu (1842–1917). Munakata, who had an excellent command of this lan-
guage, starts with the following words (sections of interest are squared in the
Chinese text and underlined in the English translation):
(4) ddd ddd dd :

d dddddddddddddd dd dd dd ddd
dddddddddddddddddddddddd
dd . . . dd dddd dd ddddd ddd dd ddd
[To His Excellency Wang Yiwu, the Great Scholar:
This humble servant is a reclusive scholar of Japan who learnt
the books of the sages from youth. I humbly envied the grandios-
ity of your great country’s renowned Confucian teachings, the
prosperity of [outstanding] personae, and so I left my home to
study [in China], and until the present day I have travelled in
the country for five years . . . I humbly am afraid that I will be
brusque when attending an audience [i.e. visit you], or that I will
violate the etiquette in front of your high-ranking person, and thus
I solemnly write this brief letter].
(Mills and Kádár 2011: 22)
Example (4) is representative of the style of the letter as a whole. For experts of
Chinese politeness, an interesting feature of the work is that the author applies
an overtly deferential style. Whilst the genre of historical Chinese private let-
ters presupposes the use of deferential lexicon, this letter is heavily loaded
with such forms. The excerpt, which does not even include the formal opening,
contains as many as eight honorific expressions, alongside some discursive
techniques of self-denigration (such as the author’s symbolic claim that his
letter is brief, which contrasts markedly with its actual length). When reading
this work initially, it is possible to assume that these features are due to inter-
cultural differences between Chinese and Japanese politeness. This seems to
be confirmed by modern empirical research: many case studies suggest that the
Japanese can be more indirect and formal than the Chinese, which would explain
Munakata’s application of an extensive number of honorific forms. However,
this interpretation is rooted in a pre-existing, scientific (second-order) under-
standing of present-day Chinese and Japanese politeness behaviour, and if we
adopted it without looking at the context and other particulars of this histori-
cally situated interaction, we would unwittingly project it on the data without
understanding the full implications of its appearance here. In fact, an analysis
of this work has shown that contextual factors made it prudent for Munakata
3.2 Concepts 45
to be deferential: he was asking a favour from and wanted to establish a working

relationship with Wang, who was considerably more highly ranked than him-
self. If one examines the letters of native Chinese authors it becomes evident
that in similar contexts and interpersonal relationships, native Chinese authors
also used honorifics. Thus, although Munakata’s style is considerably more
deferential than on average, his letter nevertheless is consistent with practices
of Chinese in similar situated contexts. In fact, there is not any clear evidence
that Munakata’s style is due to his cultural background. Furthermore, if his
cultural background was manifested in his style, one would to have to assume
that there is an influence from Japanese in this text. However, some of the
honorific items used in this letter actually suggest the opposite: Munakata,
having an excellent command of Classical Chinese, applied a style exempt
from Japanese influence. In sum, although on the basis of an alleged difference
between present-day Japanese and Chinese politeness it might appear easy to
argue that, in this example, Munakata follows a Japanese polite speech style,
on closer examination we can observe that there is no evidence to support such
a claim, or even the idea that Japanese and Chinese politeness systems really
differed in terms of the perceived norms of indirectness/deference at the time
of this interaction.
In sum, variability and contestedness are always potentially relevant to the
analysis of any given piece of data. After theorising more carefully the rea-
sons for the variability and contested nature of understandings of politeness in
Chapters 4 and 5, we will revisit such issues in relation to culture in Chapter 11.
Beyond culture as the unit of analysis

As Eelen explains, first-wave approaches tended to use units of analysis
focused at the level of languages, societies or cultures, instead of analysing
politeness behaviour at the level of localised individuals and smaller groups.
Most commonly they adopted culture as the key notion for explaining dif-
ferences in politeness forms and strategies. In Brown and Levinson’s (1987)
universalistic framework, cultures are categorised into positive and negative
politeness cultures, depending on their broad preference for mitigating face-
threatening acts either by negative or positive politeness strategies. However,
this broad reliance on culture results in some degree of terminological fuzziness.
As Eelen notes,
in Brown and Levinson’s discussion of ‘cultural variation’ . . . the terms ‘culture’, ‘soci-
ety’ and ‘group’ are used interchangeably. Sometimes the term ‘subculture’ is also
encountered, although it is not clear how it relates to the other three. (2001: 159–60)
Furthermore, as we discussed in Chapter 2, many early critiques of the

Brown and Levinsonian framework appealed to a notion of culture-specific
politeness in order to decompose the universalistic framework, and so they,

similar to Brown and Levinson, adopted a broad and thus vague definition of
culture. The problem with this broad and vague notion is that it is inherently
normative, an essentialist approach to culture and politeness, which presup-
poses that members of a certain culture tend to share these claimed values (see
Chapter 2). This concept has often been criticised by discursive scholars. For
example, the Japanese expert Naomi Geyer (2008: 65) argues that – if we want to
retain culture as a unit of analysis – we need to adopt methodologies that observe
culture as an interactionally constructed notion rather than as an inherited
property.
However, the question may rightly emerge as to why we should get rid
of generalisations. After all, if the majority of Japanese behave in one way,
and the majority of Americans in another way, does it make sense to refrain
from comparing general trends? However, while this point might be tempting,
critical research reveals that even in terms of major patterns of politeness
there are large-scale differences within a single culture. While culture will be
analysed in considerable detail in Chapter 11, let us discuss a simple case to
illustrate this point.
Consider, for instance, the politeness norms associated with so-called ‘blunt
Yorkshiremen’, where there are recognisable regional norms that are quite
distinct from the wider cultural norms (see Kádár and Mills, forthcoming). On
the basis of stereotypical thinking about themselves, many Yorkshiremen feel
enabled to speak in a way which, if used by people from other regions in the
UK, might be considered impolite or overly direct. However, within Yorkshire,
there is a pride in using certain speech styles which are classified by speakers
as ‘plain speaking’ or ‘speaking your mind’ and are thus not considered
impolite. Use of these speech styles is valued for the sense that it gives of a
strong regional identity for certain groups of people within the county, and
this speech style seems to transcend some of the class boundaries within the
region. In Yorkshire, what are seen as ‘soft Southern ways’, epitomised by
so-called negative politeness strategies, are often characterised as affected
and undesirable. This illustrates that it is difficult to make general claims
about a single culture, and thus culture is often a problematic unit of analysis.
If we follow culture-specific generalisations and describe the British as a
negative politeness culture, for instance, the question emerges as to how to
describe the blunt behaviour Yorkshire people without disqualifying them as
British.
Due to this problem, discursive theorists have proposed alternative units of
analysis. The perhaps most important one among these units is the so-called
community of practice, developed by the educational theorist Etienne Wenger
(1998). This notion will recur in the present volume and will be discussed in
some detail in Chapter 7, so at this point it will only be briefly noted that a
3.2 Concepts 47
community of practice refers to a group of people, who are brought together

through engagement in a joint (often but not always professional) activity
or task. The notion of community of practice has become very popular in
discursive approaches to politeness research, as this notion allows researchers
to analyse politeness in a relatively contextualised way. As Wenger notes,
Communities of practice exist in any organization. Because membership is based on

participation rather than on official status, these communities are not bound by organi-
zational affiliations; they can span institutional structures and hierarchies. (1983: 3)
In spite of the advantages of this notion, its value is somewhat limited because
it presupposes a specific contact between interactants focused on a common
task or activity. That means there are many interactional relationships that do
not fall under the category of community of practice (see Mills 2011b).
It is pertinent to note that in this book, as the following chapters will make
clear, we devote particular attention to politeness as it is constituted in relational
networks. Relational networks are sets of intersecting social links between
persons that collectively form the basis of an identifiable group for those per-
sons who constitute the relational network in question (see Milroy and Milroy
1992 on ‘social’ networks). The politeness theorist Watts (2003) suggests that
relational networks can be either emergent or latent. An emergent relational
network is one where such social links are maintained, reactivated or changed
through interaction, while a latent relational network is one that is objectified by
persons that constitute that network (i.e. one they talk about as if it had a ‘real’
existence independent of interaction). Relational networks are a useful level of
analysis in relation to politeness for two reasons. First, they allow us to study
politeness in a contextualised way, but in more settings than communities of
practice. Second, they help us to examine so-called cultural practices, as it can
be argued that a culture is constituted through multiple intersecting networks
of more localised relational networks (see e.g. Chapter 7), thereby avoiding
overgeneralisations.
It should be also noted, however, that no unit can capture every interactional
relationship, and so a self-reflexive analysis should avoid claiming that a given
unit is suitable to every analysis. Indeed, while, post-2000 theories of politeness
have devoted more attention to localised, individual politeness behaviour – one
of the most important units of analysis is regarded to be the individual – other
units such as communities of practice, social groups, sub-cultures, cultures and
societies still continue to be used. However, given the difficulties faced when
dealing with larger, more diffuse groups, many researchers tend to utilise these
units carefully, often using fairly nuanced definitions. Accordingly, while in this
book we will address other units of analysis including culture (see Chapter 11),
we will do so largely through the lens of the concept of relational networks.
Politeness as situated: contexts, text types and genres

As Haugh, Davies and Merrison argue,
As a pragmatic and sociolinguistic concept im/politeness has always been seen as
dependent on context. This situatedness comes in many forms. It can involve consid-
ering contrasts (across cultural groups, languages, dialects or genres), but this is not
essential. The in-depth study of politeness phenomena within a particular setting – such
as educational, medical, or legal settings – can also deepen our knowledge of how
im/politeness functions, and contribute to the theorising of the discipline. The text type
within which the communication is situated (e.g. computer-mediated discourse, media
discourse, advertising texts) also affects (and thus tells us more about) the functions of
im/politeness. (2011: 1)
In post-2000 thinking, the claim that politeness is situated relative to contexts,

text types and genres has gained prominence (see also Blitvich 2009). Various
scholars argue that no prediction can be made about the interactional effect of
a certain form of politeness because both the function and the interpretation of
an utterance depend on its context (see the first part of the present section), as
well as the text type (e.g. email versus letter) and genre (e.g. personal versus
work-related email) in which it occurs.
In order to illustrate this point, let us cite an online interaction in Chinese,
which has been analysed by Kádár, Haugh and Chang (2013):
(5) ddddd, dddd!
Post 1 (dddd 07/19/2010 02:30:25):
ddddd, ddddd!
dddddd! dddddddddd! dddddddd
dd, dddddddddd?
ddddddd, dddd! ddddddddddddd
dddd? ddddddddddd! dddddddd? d
dddddddddd, ddddddddddddddd
dddd? ddddddd, dddddddd! ddddd
ddddddddddddddd! ddddddd! dd
ddddddd! dddddddddddddddddd
d! dddd, dddd!
Post 3 (Deltablue 2. 07/29/2010 07:14:29):
ddddddddddddddddddddddddddd
ddddddddddddd, ddddddddd
ddddddd dddddd
dddddddddddddddddd(d)ddd dddd
dddd dddd dd??
[Taiwanese compatriots, please read this post!
Post 1 (Fengkuang Haijun [Insane Navy]):
3.2 Concepts 49
We have the same national roots, so why we should shoot on each

other so quickly?
[All Taiwanese compatriots! Please forgive us mainland Chinese
players! We are your brothers and sisters, why should you harm
us? This is nothing to do with politics, it is all about history!
Don’t we have the same ancestors? We are the descendants of the
Mythical Emperors! Why don’t we unite? Let us give a lesson
to those [South] Korean hoodlums who cannot unite with their
compatriots [i.e. North Koreans]. We are members of the same
family, from ancient times until present. We should unite and not
allow outsiders to divide us! Taiwanese brothers and sisters! We
will always be a family! From now on we should not insult each
other because of small matters. Let us unite and play together!
Post 3 (Deltablue 2.):
‘Have the same national roots’, ‘all Taiwanese compatriots’, ‘have
the same ancestors’, ‘the descendants of the Mythical Emperors’,
‘we are members of the same family, from ancient times until
present’
In my view these are all terms of ‘cultural aggression’.
Keep out ‘politics’ and ‘cross-Strait’ and all this kind of ‘cultural
aggression’ from our game, will you?]
The interaction in example (5) took place on a thread on the online game
‘battle.net’s’ discussion board relating to the simulated battle ‘Decisive Battle
for the Senkaku Islands’, which is an island chain claimed by Taiwan, Japan
and Mainland China. Importantly, while battle.net is a multilingual and mul-
ticultural game website, and is officially politics-free, players sometimes do
discuss real political matters on the discussion board on this website, although
such ‘hostilities’ do not generally stir metapragmatic debates or generate wider
attention.
Example (5) illustrates the contextual and the generic situatedness of lin-
guistic politeness, as well as the fact that politeness cannot be predictively
described even in single language settings (this interaction takes place between
native speakers of Chinese). In order to understand what is happening in this
interaction, it is pertinent to note that there are political tensions between Main-
land China (People’s Republic of China) and Taiwan (Republic of China),
which originate in China’s claim that Taiwan is part of China, and Taiwan’s
(current) refusal of this claim. In example (5), the Mainland Chinese player
Fengkuang Haijun’s call to Taiwanese players – to ‘unite forces’ with Main-
land Chinese players both in the game and in discussions relating to the game –
seems to be spontaneous. Fengkuang Haijun claims his post has ‘nothing to do
with politics’, and he also attempts to ‘give face’ to the Taiwanese players by
performing a collective apology on behalf of Mainland Chinese. However, his

posting is received in an extremely critical way by other players, apparently
because his post (e.g. ‘Taiwanese compatriots’, ‘Why don’t we unite?’, etc.)
implicitly conveys China’s claim of sovereignty over Taiwan, and in this way is
perceived as a threat towards the claimed identity of Taiwanese players. In other
words, although in many other contexts such expressions would be interpreted
as markers of politeness, they do not function in this way in the present context.
Altogether six players responded to this post, with all of them being critical
(although due to space constraints we only cite one response). The Taiwanese
player Deltablue evaluates Fengkuang Haijun’s attempts to project association
with the Taiwanese as a form of ‘cultural aggression’, and he also reminds him
that in the present genre his seemingly polite behaviour is not acceptable, as
this specific site should be politics-free. This latter point illustrates that context
and genre often function together in giving rise to evaluations of a certain form
or strategy vis-à-vis (im)politeness.
Face and relationships

One important development in post-2000 politeness research has been the
increasing focus on interpersonal relationships, or what has been broadly termed
the relational shift in politeness research. Indeed, it is striking that almost
without exception every approach to politeness that has been proposed in the
past ten to fifteen years has had an explicit focus on relationships in some
shape or form, albeit with a variety of different terms being used, ranging from
‘rapport management’ and ‘relational practice’ through to ‘relational work’ and
‘relating’. Some of these approaches have remained more closely aligned with
the underlying theoretical commitments of first-wave approaches to politeness,
such as Spencer-Oatey’s (2008 [2000]) rapport management theory (dealing
with ‘rapport management’), or Holmes and colleagues’ (e.g. Holmes, Marra
and Vine 2012) neo-politeness theory (dealing with ‘relational practices’).
Other approaches have been more firmly situated within a broadly discursive
approach, such as Locher and Watts’ (2005) theory of relational work, or
Arundale’s (2006, 2010b) face constituting theory (dealing with ‘relating’).
As Spencer-Oatey notes in a useful overview, what all these approaches have
in common is ‘a central focus on interpersonal relations, rather than, as with
traditional models of politeness, a central focus on the individual performing
“politeness”, which is then correlated with interpersonal relations as variables’
(2011: 3565). It is clear, then, that politeness is conceptualised as part of a
much broader interpersonal tapestry albeit, we would maintain, an important
part of that tapestry.
A second, largely parallel development in post-2000 politeness research has
been the rise of research focusing on face as a topic in its own right, or what
3.2 Concepts 51
might be characterised as the increasing separation of face and politeness

research. While first-wave approaches to politeness, particularly Brown and
Levinson’s (1987) theory, treated face as inseparable from politeness, this
stance has been increasingly challenged in the past decade. While it is now
well accepted that not all facework amounts to politeness à la Brown and
Levinson, as was convincing argued by Watts (2003) in his overview of polite-
ness research, there have been a number of edited collections in recent years
dealing with face as an important topic in its own right (Bargiela-Chiappini and
Haugh 2009; Haugh and Bargiela-Chiappini 2010). The argument being made
is that face and politeness should be disentangled from each other such that
they constitute important areas of research in their own right (Haugh 2013a).
Let us consider for a moment example (6), which is from the American
comedy series Everybody Hates Chris. Here, Chris is trying to convince his
parents, Rochelle and Julius, to buy some new clothes for him to wear to the
school photo day. He has been complaining that he has to wear his younger
brother’s old clothes.
(6) Chris: Well, can I please wear something else?
Julius: As long as I don’t have to pay for it.
Rochelle: Just find something to wear and I’ll take a look at it,
okay?
Chris: I don’t have anything special.
Julius: When I was a kid we didn’t need any special clothes.
Just having clothes was special.
Narrator: The only way I was going to get my mom to spend
money on me was if not doing it would embarrass her.
Chris: Mom, I’m the only black kid in the whole school. They
already think I’m a crack baby. Wearing this sweater
they’ll probably think we’re on welfare.
Rochelle: Who said we were on welfare? Be home from school
on time tomorrow. We’re gonna go shopping.
Julius: I thought you said we didn’t have the money?
Rochelle: Oh, I’ll get it. Not havin’ people think we on welfare.
(‘Everybody hates picture day’, Everybody Hates Chris,
Season 1, Episode 13, 2006)
After Chris pleading to wear something other than what his mother had
picked out, his father indicates that he is not allowed to buy anything new. His
mother only suggests that he find something else (i.e. something he already
owns or can borrow from his brother). It is at this point that the narrator (the
grown-up version of Chris) comes up with a strategy, namely, alluding to the
potential embarrassment or threat to his family’s and thus his mother’s face,
if people were to think they are too poor to buy new clothes. Rochelle reacts
strongly to this potential face threat, and decides they will buy new clothes for
Chris in spite of protests from Julius. However, despite the obvious salience
of face in this interaction, it is quite clear that evaluations of politeness (or
impoliteness) are not at issue here. Rochelle does not decide to get new clothes
for Chris because it would be polite to do so, but because she wants to avoid
having others think badly of their family. In other words, she wants to protect
their face.
It is evident from example (6), then, that face and politeness need to be
carefully disentangled. However, this suggests that other alternative metaphors
for explaining politeness need to be sought. This is a theme which will reoccur
in various guises throughout the remainder of this book, and to which we will
explicitly return in Chapter 12.
3.3 Methodology
Naturally occurring interactions

As we illustrated briefly in Section 3.1, a fundamental difference between first-
wave theories and post-2000 discursive theories of politeness is that the latter
focus more on the participants’ perspective. For example, as the discursive
researchers Locher and Watts argue,
We consider it important to take native speaker assessments of politeness seriously

and to make them the basis of a discursive, data-driven, bottom-up approach to
politeness. (2005: 16)
Here, ‘bottom-up’ means that theories of politeness should be built up relying

on the participants’ perspective, instead of creating theories first and then using
them to analyse interactions.
Due to this methodological change, certain methodological approaches, such
as eliciting data with the aid of DCTs (see Chapter 2), have been treated as
less important in this research, and more attention has been given to naturally
occurring data. The importance of naturally occurring data was emphasised by
Eelen, who noted that we need to examine more:
examples of actual (im)politeness evaluations, but due to the situational embeddedness

and argumentativity of politeness, they would have to derive from natural settings and
occur spontaneously, as elicited evaluations and/or an experimental setting introduce
particular social aspects and motivations that warrant their classification as separate
social practices. This points towards the need for real-life spontaneous conversational
data. (2001: 255)
Naturally occurring data is in fact a broad category, and it allows researchers

to focus on a wide variety of datasets, as well as to rely on different ways of
3.3 Methodology 53
recording. As Grainger’s (2011) study of politeness illustrates, however, a

naturally occurring conversation does not necessarily always need to be audio-
or video-recorded: the researcher can, for example, reconstruct a previous
interaction from memory. One advantage of this is that it can provide extra
insight into the thoughts and feelings of participants beyond what emerges in
the interaction itself given the researcher has access to at least his or her own
thoughts at the time. The disadvantage, of course, is that the interaction is not
as open to inspection by other researchers to the same extent as recordings,
and it may also be subject to inadvertent interpretation by the researcher in the
very recalling of it. For this reason, the overwhelming tendency is for naturally
occurring interactions to be recorded and transcribed for analysis. The main
difference, then, is in the level of detail found in those transcriptions.
Although discursive approaches focus more on the participants’ perspective,
it is sometimes complemented with observer coding (see Chapter 2). In fact,
post-2000 researchers are not at all unanimous in the way they conceptualise
politeness or in their mode of analysis. Certain theories such as Marina Terk-
ourafi’s (2001, 2005) frame-based approach continue to emphasise the role
of theory in interpreting manifestations of linguistic politeness. Nevertheless,
almost every approach is united in its commitment to analysing politeness in
naturally occurring data.
Data types
In discursive approaches to politeness certain data types have gained particular
attention alongside naturally occurring face-to-face interactions, either because
they reveal information about the hearer’s evaluation, or because they shed light
on certain aspects of politeness in interaction, which has been largely ignored
in first-wave approaches.
CMC is one of the most noteworthy and most popular data sources in dis-
cursive research. According to Locher (2010: 3–4), this is due to three reasons.
First, online language usage tends to develop its own set of norms given the
diversity in text type, genre and communities of practice involved (see also
example (5) above). Thus, online etiquette, or so-called netiquette, affords
a significant amount of data for studying variability in norms of politeness.
Second, politeness can arise in different ways in online interactions given the
various possibilities for public and ostensibly private interactions to merge
online, and the potential for much larger audiences than generally found for
private face-to-face interactions (even multiparty ones). Third, online interac-
tions provide a unique channel for interaction, due to their multimodal nature
(see more on multimodality in Chapters 6 and 8). That is, in CMC a given mes-
sage is conveyed through different channels, which results in specific, online
designs of polite messages (e.g. the use of emoticons in emails).
Another important data source in discursive research has been provided by

historical texts. Although historical politeness will be studied in detail in
Chapter 8, it is pertinent to note here that historical interaction has stirred
interest in post-2000 politeness research due to its explanatory power. As
historical experts Kádár and Culpeper argue,
studying historical (im)politeness is of bi-directional importance: by examining the
past, the usage of politeness language today can be placed in context; by examining the
present, politeness language usage of the past can be placed in context. (2010: 13)
In other words, the examination of diachronically situated politeness can

explain certain peculiarities of contemporary politeness usage, and as such
it aids researchers to critically revisit certain prescriptive assumptions, which
are based on contemporary understandings of linguistic politeness.
The prosodic and paralinguistic features of politeness and impoliteness
were often mentioned in pre-2000 research, but it is only in recent years that
in-depth research on this topic has actually been undertaken. Arguably the most
representative study on this theme was conducted by Culpeper (2005, 2011c)
who examined the prosody of impoliteness rather than politeness, although
these findings are relevant to politeness research as well. As Culpeper argues,
prosody is an important way of giving rise to (im)politeness, and so it is
essential to examine the prosodic features of interactions. Although Culpeper
utilises instrumental approaches to examine prosody, it is important to note
that prosody is a communicative channel which can be studied in other ways as
well; for example, simply by denoting or describing relevant parts in transcribed
interactions. Indeed, in the field of conversation analysis (see Schegloff 2007a
for an overview), transcripts generally include details of hearable prosodic and
paralinguistic features of talk.
Institutional discourse is another important data type, as it provides infor-
mation on the relationship between power and politeness, as well as the usage
of politeness as a tool to enforce or redistribute power. For example, court-
room interactions, which have been analysed in depth by Sandra Harris (2011),
provide a noteworthy case of the usage of (im)politeness in power-dominated
settings. Courtroom interactions are highly regulated, which means that the
powerless (e.g. the witnesses) cannot directly oppose the powerful (e.g. by
keeping silent). It is for exactly this reason that skilful usage of politeness, as
well as covert impoliteness, can become a key means to challenge the powerful
and redistribute power.
The above-discussed data types are all naturally occurring, in the sense that
‘they are simply there for the researcher’ to record and analyse them. There
is, however, another type of data in discursive research, which is elicited,
namely, post-recording interviews. Certain researchers, most representatively
Spencer-Oatey (2008 [2000]), conduct interviews with the participants of an
interaction after the occurrence of the given interaction, in order to reconstruct

their states of mind during the interactions. Post-recording interviews are in
some sense naturalistic because, unlike in DCTs, the participants of the inter-
view can freely talk about the way in which they experienced an interaction.
3.4 A sample analysis

Let us now look at example (7): a brief sample from a popular work written by
British journalist Lynne Truss (2005), which was analysed in detail by Mills
and Kádár (2011). The point we want to make is that the journalist’s claims are
quite problematic from the perspective of post-2000 politeness research.
(7) Good morning madam.
Good morning sir.
How may we help you?
I would like some tomatoes/eggs/postage stamps please.
Of course. How many tomatoes/eggs/postage stamps would you
like?
Seven/five/twelve, thank you.
That will be six/four/two Euros. Do you have the exact money?
I do.
Thank you madam.
Thank you sir. Good day!
Good day!
Now the amazing thing is, this formal and civil exchange actually
represents what happens in French shops. French shopkeepers
really say good morning and goodbye; they answer questions;
they wrap things ever so nicely; and when it’s all over, they wave
you off like a near relation.
This example represents the French as polite people through the example
of an imagined conversation in a shop. Truss compares the French with the
British who – in Truss’ view – are becoming a ‘rude nation’. Such a description
is problematic from the perspective of discursive theorisation of politeness
for several reasons. First, it is constructed (textbook-like) and not naturally
occurring data, and so we lack evidence as to whether such an interaction would
occur in real-life in this way. Second, as this chapter has argued, politeness
by its nature is subject to contestation due to its inherent variability, and so
it can be argued that whilst certain French employees may communicate in
such a deferential way, this is definitely not a register that characterises the
speech style of every French employee. Third, this description represents a case
where politeness is represented according to the researcher’s normative view,
and it lacks acknowledgement of the first-order and second-order distinction
between participants’ and researchers’ understandings of politeness, which

gained prominence in post-2000 politeness research.
3.5 Summary
Although this chapter is dedicated to examining discursive theorisations
of politeness, it is important to emphasise that there are other competing
approaches in the field. And while we aimed to show the most important
features of discursive research, it should be emphasised again that discursive
research is not at all homogeneous.
There are various challenges in applying post-2000 theories, particularly
in the case of the discursive approach. Overall, there are various theoretical
claims and methodologies, which have been discussed here, but no clear over-
arching theory that has reached the level of influence of Brown and Levinson’s
(1987) theory has yet emerged. The most intriguing question for contempo-
rary politeness research, then, is how we can integrate these theoretical con-
cepts and methodological approaches into a coherent and integrated theoretical
framework.
3.6 Key readings

The short introduction by Kádár and Mills (2011) provides an overview of the
main concepts and objectives of discursive politeness research.
A more elaborate description can be found in Mills (2011a), which goes
into a more detailed discussion of terminological and other theoretical and
methodological issues in discursive politeness research. This work is a key
reading for those who intend to work using the discursive approach.
The paper by Locher and Watts (2005) offers another useful summary of some
of the main tenets of the discursive approach to politeness. This is another key
reading for those who intend to work using the discursive approach.
Haugh (2007c) offers an early self-reflexive critique of discursive
approaches, focusing in particular on the difficulties inherent in reconciling
the theoretical claims of discursive approaches with their reliance on assump-
tions inherited from first-wave approaches to politeness. It is proposed that a
truly discursive approach to politeness must inevitably be informed by research
and methods in conversation analysis and ethnomethodology.
Finally, a paper by Pilar Blitvich (2010) offers a useful reflection on issues
facing researchers more generally in the post-Brown and Levinson era of polite-
ness. Alongside outlining a genre-based approach to impoliteness that arguably
complements other discursive approaches, Blitvich considers various outstand-
ing issues, including the place of speaker intentions, norms, face, identity,
emotions, and terminological debates that continue to dog the field.
4 Politeness as social practice
4.1 Introduction
One of the most important findings in politeness research to date is that polite-
ness does not reside in particular behaviours or linguistic forms, but rather in
evaluations of behaviours and linguistic forms. This means that politeness is
always situated: in particular institutional, interpersonal or public contexts, in
certain interaction types or genres, as well as in particular relational networks.
It also means that politeness is crucially dependent on the understanding of
the participants themselves. Another key finding has been that evaluations of
politeness can vary across individuals, even when they are – at least nominally –
from the same social group. This variability, and the moral implications of such
evaluations, means that politeness is inherently argumentative. In other words,
people don’t always agree about what is polite, impolite and so on.1 And not
only that, these evaluations can have significant consequences for the parties
involved.
Consider example (1), which is from the movie The Social Network. Mark
and Erica have been talking about Mark’s ‘obsession’ with getting into a ‘final
club’ (i.e. an undergraduate social club) at Harvard University.
(1) Mark: I want to try to be straight forward with you and tell you that
I think you might want to be a little more supportive. If I get
in I’ll be taking you to the events, and the gatherings and
you’ll be meeting a lot of people you wouldn’t normally
get to meet.
Erica: You would do that for me?
Mark: We’re dating.
Erica: Okay, well I want to try and be straightforward with you
and let you know that we’re not any more.
Mark: What do you mean?
Erica: We’re not dating any more, I’m sorry.
Mark: Is this a joke?
Erica: No, it’s not.
Mark: You’re breaking up with me?
57
Erica: You’re going to introduce me to people I wouldn’t nor-

mally have the chance to meet? What the fff – What is that
supposed to mean?
Mark: Wait, settle down.
Erica: What is it supposed to mean?
[omitted section]
Mark: All I meant is that you’re not likely to, currently, I wasn’t
making a comment on your parents – I was just saying you
go to B.U., I was stating a fact, that’s all, and if it seemed
rude then of course I apologise.
Erica: I have to go study.
Mark: You don’t have to study.
Erica: Why do you keep saying I don’t have to study?!
Mark: Because you go to B.U.! ((pause))
Do you want to get some food?
Erica: I’m sorry you’re not sufficiently impressed with my edu-
cation.
Mark: And I’m sorry I don’t have a rowboat so we’re even.
Erica: I think we should just be friends.
Mark: I don’t want friends.
Erica: I was being polite, I have no intention of being friends with
you.
(The Social Network, 2005)
It is quite apparent here that Erica has been offended by Mark’s remarks at
the beginning of this excerpt. This offence arises from what he has implied
by saying that she’ll get to meet a lot of people she wouldn’t normally get
to meet if he gets into a final club, namely, that she is not as good as those
people. Erica initially responds sarcastically before going on to say she does
not want to continue dating him. She then explicitly holds him accountable
for what he has implied by asking him ‘what is that supposed to mean?’,
displaying her apparent anger at his remarks through the prosodic contour of
her responses, as well as through an incompletely uttered ‘what the fuck?’ It is
obvious that Mark has implied something about Erica, casting her as someone
of a lower social level (than him). What is most interesting is that Mark initially
seems oblivious to the potentially offensive implications of his remarks. As it
becomes obvious to him that Erica is indeed offended, he moves to clarify what
he meant and to apologise. However, his apology is qualified in that he only
recognises that she might have thought he was being ‘rude’, but he maintains his
‘intended’ meaning: that she will get to meet better people than those at Boston
University (B.U.) is simply a ‘fact’, and thus presumably not offensive. Erica,
however, does not accept his apology, and says she wants to leave and that they
4.1 Introduction 59
should just be ‘friends’. When Mark responds that he is not interested in being
friends with her, Erica claims that what she really meant was that she no longer
wants to date him, and that talk of being friends was just for the sake of being
‘polite’.
In this brief excerpt, then, Mark and Erica have not evaluated his initial
remarks in the same way. On the one hand, Erica is upset and offended and
moves to break up with Mark. On the other hand, Mark is initially oblivious
to the offensive implications of his remarks, and then maintains they are only
potentially offensive because Erica ‘misunderstood’ him. They also do not have
the same understanding of what Erica means by saying that they should just be
‘friends’. For Erica, this is a ‘polite’ way of breaking up with someone because
it draws from a recurrent practice or convention for doing just that, a point
which Mark appears to miss. Even between two people from the same culture
(mainstream white Americans), with a similar background as college students
in the north east of the US, engaging in a joint activity (dating), then, there is
no apparent agreement about what is polite or rude. The perceived rudeness or
offensiveness of Mark’s remarks from Erica’s perspective has very real-world
consequences in that it leads to the end of their relationship, although Mark is
apparently left somewhat bewildered as to why she is so offended. Of course,
we, the audience, are positioned to judge Mark as the ‘strange’ one who does
not know how to interact appropriately with girls. But there’s no guarantee, even
though it is likely, that everyone watching this scene would evaluate Mark’s
behaviour in the same way. We as the audience know what we are supposed to
think of Mark, but that does not mean that is what everyone really does think.
After all, what we think of the fictional character Mark may be influenced by
what we think of the real living person he is supposed to be based on (Mark
Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook).
There are at least two points that follow from examining example (1). First,
we can see evidence of variability and argumentativity in evaluations of polite-
ness on two levels here: on one level, between Mark and Erica; on a second
level, between the audience and the writers or creators of this film. This is
important to note, because when we are studying politeness we are in many
cases like an audience. We’re not in the same position as the participants them-
selves in evaluating particular situated behaviour as polite, impolite and so
on. We as analysts thus need to distinguish our own evaluations of politeness
(which follow from forming our own understandings of an interaction), and
those of the participants themselves, a point which has been emphasised in the
distinction between first-order and second-order understandings of politeness
(see Chapter 3). Second, it is obvious not only from what Erica says and implies
here, but also from Erica’s facial expressions and tone of voice (if you watch
the actual clip from the movie), that she has been offended by Mark’s remarks.
In other words, evaluations of politeness do not reside only in what people say.
They are more often than not embodied in prosody, facial expressions, gestures
and the like. Any examination of politeness must therefore at least recognise
that it is very often multimodal in nature, even if analysts choose to restrict
their analysis to primarily linguistic aspects of discourse and interaction.
These two key points have led to calls to explore the understandings of differ-
ent participants on politeness from various disciplinary perspectives. Yet while
various influential concepts and approaches have been proposed, as we dis-
cussed in Chapter 3, there is as yet no clear overarching theoretical framework
in which to situate these different understandings or perspectives. In this chap-
ter and the next, we move to offer just such a framework. We begin by outlining
an approach, building on the idea that politeness is an evaluation of (verbal
and non-verbal) behaviour, which conceptualises politeness as a form of social
practice. We suggest that any examination of politeness must begin by appreci-
ating that such evaluations are necessarily tied to social actions and meanings
that are recognisable to participants in situated contexts, not ‘behaviours’ or
‘linguistic forms’ per se.2 In Section 4.2, we begin by exploring the nature of
interpersonal evaluation, and how it lies at the core of our understanding(s)
of politeness. We then explain what we mean by social actions and meanings,
and why we think politeness is ultimately tied to these as recognisable forms
of social practice. In Section 4.3, we discuss how politeness as social practice
needs to be situated relative to different understandings of time, and the dif-
ferent understandings of social space that underpin these evaluative moments
of politeness. In Chapter 5, we will then outline a framework for situating
these various perspectives on evaluative moments of politeness, suggesting
that we need to appreciate there are inevitably multiple ways of understanding
politeness.
4.2 Politeness and interpersonal evaluation

While it is widely accepted that politeness involves some kind of evaluation
or attitude, as we discussed in Chapter 3, the notion of evaluation itself has
not been carefully theorised in politeness research. Apart from a few important
exceptions, such as in the work of Mills (2003) on gender and politeness (see
Chapter 11), interpersonal evaluations have been remarkably understudied.
While Eelen (2001), for instance, was emphatic in arguing that (im)politeness
always involves evaluative moments, he did not offer any clear theorisation of
interpersonal evaluations as such. To a large extent it has been simply taken
for granted that evaluations by speakers and hearers – however they might be
understood – are what give rise to politeness, impoliteness and the like.
Any attempt to understand interpersonal evaluations in relation to politeness
must, however, start by considering a number of complex issues. These include
questions relating to:
r the scope of interpersonal evaluations (i.e. what constitutes an interpersonal
evaluation?)
r the source of interpersonal evaluations (i.e. who does the evaluating?)
r the temporal locus of interpersonal evaluations (i.e. how and when do inter-
personal evaluations arise?)
r the normative basis of interpersonal evaluations (i.e. on what moral grounds
do interpersonal evaluations arise)
r the sociocognitive locus of interpersonal evaluations (i.e. how do social and
cognitive processes intersect in giving rise to interpersonal evaluations?)
In this section, we will start by focusing on just the first question. The other
issues will be addressed in subsequent sections of this chapter, and the chapters
that follow.
We can start to tease out what we mean by interpersonal evaluations by first
considering how evaluation and attitude are ordinarily defined. According to
the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary (www.merriam-webster.com, 2012),
an evaluation is broadly defined as the action of ‘judg[ing] the value or condition
of (someone or something) in a careful and thoughtful way’, while an attitude
is defined as ‘the way you think and feel about someone or something’ or ‘a
feeling or way of thinking that affects a person’s behaviour’. Evaluations and
attitudes are thus closely related in that ‘the act of judging or assessing a person
or situation or event’ (an evaluation) is thought to generate ways of thinking and
feeling about those people, situations and events (an attitude). An interpersonal
evaluation or attitude is restricted to appraisals or assessment of 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.
From a lay or folk understanding of evaluation and attitude, then, we can
draw out four key dimensions of interpersonal evaluations:
(i) persons and relationships
(ii) categorisation
(iii) valency
(iv) normative frame of reference
In other words, interpersonal evaluations involve casting persons and relation-
ships into certain valenced categories according to some kind of perceived
normative scale or frame of reference.
What makes interpersonal evaluations interpersonal in the first instance is
that they are directed at persons and relationships. A person can be concep-
tualised as an individual in a social environment, and is thus a socially defined
concept. This allows for the fact that while biologically we are all cognitively
autonomous individuals, persons in an interpersonal sense are conceptualised
differently across different social groups. For example, in some societies a per-
son is conceptualised as an independent monad (an independent social unit). In
other societies, a person is conceptualised as a node located in a web of interper-

sonal connections. In other words, one cannot talk about one individual without
considering those close to him or her. These two understandings of ‘person’
reflect different ways of conceptualising persons amongst mainstream Anglo-
North Americans and Chinese respectively. But there are many variations on
this theme across different kinds of social groups. In other words, there is an
important link between the conceptualisations of persons and the relational net-
works through which they are constituted (see also Chapter 11). A relationship,
following Arundale, can be conceptualised as ‘establishing and maintaining of
connection between two otherwise separate individuals’ (2010a): 138). Once
again, this allows for the different ways in which connection and separation
themselves can be understood across various social groups. Most importantly,
these different conceptualisations of persons and relationships are highly con-
sequential for understanding interpersonal evaluations. For example, in some
cases, how one person is evaluated does not impact on those with whom he or
she is closely connected. In other cases, evaluating one person can also entail
evaluations of other persons with whom he or she is closely connected. At the
core of interpersonal evaluations, then, lie our conceptualisations of persons
and relationships.
Categorisation naturally involves categories. But what do we mean by cat-
egories in an interpersonal sense? In summarising work by the ethnomethod-
ologist Harvey Sacks (1992) on membership categorisation analysis, Emanuel
Schegloff defines categories as
the store house and the filing system for the common-sense knowledge that ordinary
people – that means all people in their capacity as ordinary people – have about what
people are like, how they behave, etc. This knowledge is stored and accessed by reference
to categories of member/person. (2007b: 469)
To this, we would add categories of relationship. Categorisation thus involves

commonsense or ordinary knowledge we have about persons, and how we
expect them to behave in the context of those relationships. This goes beyond
prototypical persons (such as babies and mothers) to include specific persons
(such as ‘my son’ or ‘my wife’). For example, in some societies persons are
expected to apologise for transgressions on the part of other persons with whom
they share a close familial relationship (not only children, but also partners and
the like), while in others they are not obligated to apologise (although they may
of course do so).
Interpersonal evaluations involve not just any kind of categorisation, but
rather categorisations that are valenced. Valency is generally thought to be
positive when it involves attraction and negative when it involves aversion. In
some cases it may be neutral when it involves neither attraction nor aversion.
Valency thus refers to various scales ranging from good to bad, appropriate to
overpolite
mock impolite
not impolite
polite neither polite nor impolite impolite
not polite
mock polite
under-polite
Figure 4.1 Politeness-related evaluators in English.
inappropriate, like to dislike and so on. This means that valency is inevitably
emotively charged. Some person or relationship categories, such as babies or
mothers, can be positively valenced (although a particular mother might be
valenced negatively for some individuals), while others are generally nega-
tively valenced, such as criminals or arseholes (although once again particular
categorisations of individuals might be valenced positively). In relation to
politeness, there is also a range of valenced categorisations, some of which are
represented in Figure 4.1. Here we have summarised just some of the possible
politeness-related evaluators (at least in English in the first instance).3 The
point we are trying to make here is that there are a lot of ways of evaluating that
do not fall straightforwardly into being labelled either ‘polite’ and ‘impolite’.
These include being ‘overpolite’ or ‘under-polite’, ‘mock impolite’ or ‘mock
polite’, ‘not impolite’, ‘not polite’ or ‘neither polite nor impolite’ and many
other gradations between. When we talk about politeness in this book, then,
we are referring to this whole range of possible politeness-related evaluators.
What is important to note, however, is that these evaluators are not consistently
valenced as either positive, negative or neutral. While ‘polite’ is often thought
to be positively valenced, and ‘overpolite’ to be negatively valenced, these
valencies can be reversed in specific, situated interactions.
Consider the following experience of a politeness scholar visiting Britain
who was having trouble getting a drink at a local pub. After failing to get
the barman’s attention through various attempted ‘sorries’, ‘excuse-mes’ and
‘pardon-mes’, a local told him that he needed ‘cut the crap’ and simply ‘state
loudly and clearly what [he] wanted’. At that point he was immediately served.
(2) As the evening progressed I got to talk to my saviour, whose name

was Andy.
I explained what I did for a living, and that I was on my way
to Lancaster to begin my study on politeness in the BNC. He
proceeded to give me his own theory on politeness: to him it was
just another form of dishonesty, either used by ‘wankers’ who did
not dare deliver a straight and honest message (he was probably
indirectly referring to me and my rather pathetic attempts to order
a drink), or by ‘slimy bastards’ whose mild manners concealed
some devious ulterior motive.
He was, on the whole, rather suspicious of polite people.
(Deutschmann 2003: 23–4)
While example (2) is just an anecdote, it does illustrate that being evaluated
as polite is not necessarily always a good thing. In particular, it illustrates how
evaluations of what counts as polite can relate to (perceived) membership in
different social classes (see Chapter 11). Thus, while it might be tempting
to intuitively position some of these other evaluators as lying closer to either
the ‘polite’ or ‘impolite’ evaluators, or as inherently positively or negatively
valenced, we have not done so here simply because the valence of all of these
evaluators is very often determined through the locally situated evaluative
moments in which they arise. It also allows for the inevitable differences in
the content of analogous ‘politeness’ evaluators across languages and social
groups (see Chapter 9).
The final key dimension of interpersonal evaluations is that they involve
some kind of normative frame of reference: the perception that others from
the same social group would evaluate a person or relationship in the same way.
While politeness research has traditionally located normative understandings
at the level of society or culture, there has, more recently, been a move to
locate them relative to more tightly focused social groups. Here we take
this a step further. We suggest that normative understandings can be situated
relative to any social unit, ranging from dyads and relatively closed relational
networks (such as families or groups of close friends), through to a localised
grouping such as a workplace or community group, through to larger and thus
inevitably more diffuse societal or cultural groups. We are not claiming that
all these different social units are equally influential in evaluative moments of
politeness. Rather, we are pointing out that evaluations of politeness involve
not only a high level or abstract societal or cultural frame of reference (see
Chapter 11), but can also involve the relational histories of those persons
(or groups of persons) involved. We will explore these issues further in
Chapter 5.
Figure 4.2 Politeness and evaluation. (Peanuts

C 1965 Peanuts Worldwide LLC. Dis-
tributed by UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.)
4.3 Politeness and social practice

In this section, we extend the idea that politeness arises through evaluations
of behaviours and linguistic forms by proposing that politeness is itself a kind
of social practice. Let us begin by considering the interaction from the comic
Peanuts in Figure 4.2. Obviously Charlie Brown is offended by Lucy’s questions
here, as he explicitly labels her remarks as ‘rude’; more specifically, he implies
that Lucy herself is ‘rude’ in making these remarks. But what gives rise to this
evaluation? Why does Charlie Brown think her questions are ‘rude’?
The answer lies, in part, in the last frame of Figure 4.2. Lucy ponders on the
fact that in her experience criticising others inevitably leads to being criticised
by those others. In doing so, she attributes Charlie Brown’s evaluation of her
questions as ‘rude’ to his perception that she was criticising him. In asking ‘Why
do you suppose you do this?’, Lucy is not only casting Charlie Brown as some-
one who ‘talks loudly’ but also implying that this is not a good thing. In other
words, she implies that he sometimes talks too loudly when he gets excited,
and criticises him for it. This criticism is a form of social action. It is an under-
standing of what Lucy is doing through this talk that is jointly formed by her
and Charlie Brown through the course of this interaction. The criticism, in turn,
is necessarily directed at something, some kind of information or object, and
arises through particular types of meaning representation, here involving both
what is said (‘You have a tendency to talk loudly when you get excited, don’t you
Charlie Brown?) and what is implied (something like ‘you talk too loudly’ or
‘it’s annoying’) (see Chapter 2). The latter is a form of pragmatic meaning, that
is, where Lucy is held to be committed to or accountable for meaning something
by what she has said (see Haugh 2013b). In other words, we can see that Charlie
Brown is offended by Lucy’s criticism and that Lucy is aware of this offence
as arising due to this perceived criticism. It is thus the social action of criticism
and the content of that criticism (i.e. the associated pragmatic meaning), that
here occasions an evaluation of ‘rudeness’ on Lucy’s part in Charlie Brown’s
view.
However, not only do social actions and meanings lead to, or occasion,
evaluations of politeness, impoliteness and so on, but such evaluations may
themselves occasion evaluative social actions and meanings. Lucy herself points
this out when she bemoans that ‘we critical people are always being criticized!’
In other words, Charlie Brown’s interpretation of her remarks as criticism, and
his evaluation of this criticism as ‘rude’, occasions, in turn, an evaluative social
action on his part: namely, an implied criticism of Lucy as someone who
asks ‘rude’ questions. There’s no evidence here as to whether Lucy evaluates
Charlie Brown’s criticism of her as ‘rude’ or at least ‘not polite’, but she may
well do so.
Politeness is a social practice in one sense, then, because it involves evalua-
tions occasioned by social actions and meanings that are recognisable to par-
ticipants. In some cases, these evaluations may also be reflexively occasioned.
In saying these social actions and meanings are ‘recognisable to participants’
we are alluding to the fact that social actions and meanings necessarily draw on
normative practices, ways of formulating talk and conduct that are understood
by participants as doing and meaning certain things. In other words, we know –
not only Charlie Brown and Lucy but also we the readers – that Lucy is criticis-
ing Charlie Brown here because asking someone for an account of a habitual
behaviour on their part is a recognisable practice for criticising others (at least
in English, although not necessarily in other languages). What is meant here by
‘reflexively occasioned’ is that not only can evaluations of politeness and the
like be occasioned by social actions and meanings, but also that evaluations of
politeness and so on may in themselves occasion evaluative social actions and
meanings.
However, an analysis of politeness as social practice does not end there. The
answer as to why Charlie Brown thinks her questions are ‘rude’ also lies, in
part, in the way in which Charlie formulates his response to her question. He
first responds that he does not know, and then offers an account for this lack of a
specific answer; namely, that he has never been asked such a question, thereby
indicating he has never thought about it before. The specific formulation of
this account is important in two ways. First, he uses the account to categorise
the prior criticism as ‘rude’. Second, he formulates it at a more generalised
level in saying that no one has ever criticised him like that before because they
are not ‘rude enough’. In generalising this categorisation of the criticism as
‘rude’ in this way, Charlie Brown is implicitly appealing to broader norms,
namely, what everyone knows: criticising people in this way is ‘rude’. This
generalised level of the formulation of his account contrasts with the specific,
locally situated context of Lucy’s question. There is thus an implied contrast
between Lucy and ‘everyone else’. If others are not ‘rude enough’ to say
such things, then this implies Lucy herself is rude. Importantly though, in
formulating this categorisation at a more generalised level, Charlie Brown is

implicitly claiming this is common, everyday knowledge (in the sense that
everyone knows that). In other words, Charlie Brown’s evaluation of Lucy’s
criticism of him as ‘rude’ is not just his own idiosyncratic evaluation, but rather
is one rooted in a broader moral order. We know this because we, the readers,
can also readily understand how Charlie Brown is evaluating Lucy’s initial
remarks here.
The moral order refers to what members of a sociocultural group or relational
network ‘take for granted’, or what the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel
(1964, 1967) referred to as the ‘“seen but unnoticed”, expected, background
features of everyday scenes’ (1967: 35–6). This background to interpretation
and evaluation is not just a matter of common knowledge, but lies at the core of
what social actions and meanings members think are appropriate/inappropriate,
good/bad, polite/impolite and so on. It is not simply that we tend to expect
certain things in the talk and conduct of others and ourselves in interaction, but
that members regard such ‘familiar scenes of everyday affairs’ to be familiar
scenes ‘because it is morally right or wrong that they are so’ (Garfinkel 1967:
35). An evaluation of politeness or impoliteness thus always involves an implicit
appeal to the moral order, or to be more accurate, an appeal to a moral order
perceived to be in common amongst two or more participants by at least one
of those participants.
Another crucial point that Garfinkel made is that the ‘seen but unnoticed’
expectations that constitute that moral order are both ‘socially standardised
and standardising’ (1967: 36). This means they are not simply norms that
somehow afford or constrain the behaviour of members, but rather are the
means by which one makes a claim to be a member of society in the first
place. In other words, not only do practices depend on these expectations
in order to be recognisable to members and thus accessible as interpretative
resources, but also that as members continually engage in such practices in
their everyday interactions they both sustain the moral order, and over time
act to change it. Most importantly, Garfinkel did not regard these ‘seen but
unnoticed’ expectations as something to be simply assumed by the analyst,
but rather something that constitutes an important object of study in its own
right. This is because, while members are demonstrably ‘responsive to this
background’, since they are generally taken for granted, such expectations are
very often difficult for members to explicitly articulate.
Garfinkel started work on exploring this underlying moral order through
his now infamous ‘breaching experiments’, a method whereby one starts with
familiar scenes and asks ‘what can be done to make trouble’ (p. 37) in order to
tap into the ‘seen but unnoticed’ expectations of the moral order. For instance,
example (3) was reported by one of his students, who was asked to observe
and note down responses when they pressed others for further clarification of
standard, commonsense remarks or questions.
(3) S: How are you?
E: How am I in regard to what? My health, my finances, my
school work, my peace of mind, my . . . ?
S: ((red in the face and out of control)) Look! I was just trying to
be polite. Frankly, I don’t give a damn how you are.
(Garfinkel 1967: 44)
Responses to someone questioning these commonsense activities were often
remarkably extreme, as seen in example (3). To question the ‘commonsense-
ness’ of such remarks or questions was regarded by the unwitting participants
in the experiments as questioning the very basis of their social reality, and was
thus treated as a moral transgression. It is interesting to note that the ‘how are
you?’ routine is treated here as a matter of ‘just trying to be polite’, thereby also
alluding to a certain lack of sincerity in asking the question but not seeking a
full and extended response from the addressee, although notably not a lack of
sincerity in regard to the relational implications of the routine. In other words,
what example (3) indicates is that commonsense expectations in relation to the
‘how are you?’ routine are that it is not necessarily intended to elicit extended
or detailed responses, but rather that it meets expectations of what counts as
polite within the context of this particular moral order.
Other useful insights into the moral order – at least in mainstream white
American society at that time – were found from breaching experiments where
students were asked to act out the assumption they were boarders in their own
homes. Once again, in breaching expected, background features of everyday
scenes, the students quite often occasioned rather vitriolic responses. Garfinkel
reported that:
family members were stupefied. They vigorously sought to make the strange actions
intelligible and to restore the situation to normal appearances. Reports were filled with
accounts of astonishment, bewilderment, shock, anxiety, embarrassment, and anger and
with charges by various family members that the student was mean, inconsiderate,
selfish, nasty, or impolite. Family members demanded explanations. (1967: 47)
In example (4), an exchange reported by a student, his father attempted to

normalise his son’s previous actions by offering a plausible account for it.
(4) Father: Your mother is right. You don’t look well and you’re not
talking sense. You had better get another job that doesn’t
require such late hours.
Son: I appreciate the consideration but I feel fine and just want
a bit of privacy.
Father: I don’t want any more of that out of you and if you can’t
treat your mother decently you’d better move out!
(Garfinkel 1967: 48)
The son’s rejection of his father’s attempt to normalise their relationship through
continuing to respond to his father as if he were the landlord is treated as a
serious moral transgression by his father. What is notable here is that ostensibly
polite behaviour, at least what would be regarded as polite if one were a boarder
at that time, is treated as highly offensive by his parents (although, of course,
not every family responded in exactly the same way).
Politeness thus does not involve just any kind of (idiosyncratic) interpersonal
evaluation, but one that is rooted in the practices that constitute the moral
order of those members. It is in this second sense that politeness can also be
conceptualised as a social practice. In other words, politeness can be captured as
social practice because (1) evaluations of politeness are (reflexively) occasioned
by social actions and meanings that are recognisable through the fact they are
practices in themselves, and (2) evaluations of politeness involve appeals to a
moral order, not idiosyncratic standards. Yet in implicitly involving an appeal to
the moral order, and the practices that give rise to it, evaluations of politeness
are thereby open to dispute, because members of different groups, or even
members of the same group, do not necessarily always perceive the moral
order in the same way.
Take the case of moral basis of ‘complaining’, for instance. Complaining
about third parties (in English at least) is prototypically associated with eval-
uations of impoliteness in that it orients to some kind of ‘impropriety’ on the
part of the target of the complaint. As the conversation analyst Paul Drew
points out, ‘an instance of conduct is not self-evidently, intrinsically, or inher-
ently morally reprehensible as being a transgression, impropriety, offense, fault,
insult, unjustified accusation’ (1998): 322). A complaint about others thus gen-
erally involves talk where the moral character of the conduct (whether it be
verbal or non-verbal) is constituted through that talk itself. Therefore, in order
to find fault in others – and so build grounds for making a complaint – the
speaker needs to invoke some kind of ‘normative standard(s) that the other’s
behaviour has transgressed’ (p. 303). This means that complaints about others
involve implicit appeals to the moral order. It is this appeal to the moral order
that underlies the prototypical assumption in the case of complaints about
the conduct of others that the ‘complainable impropriety involves a kind of
rudeness or offensiveness’ (p. 303).
Consider the interaction in example (5), where Lisa is offering an account
for why she does not want to pick up Edna to take her to church this week. The
example begins with the formulation of a complainable, that is, a matter about
which a complaint can be made, namely, that Edna asked Lisa to take her home
straightaway thereby forcing Lisa to make an extra trip.4
(5) (Three friends, Bob, Lisa and Tom are talking while playing com-
puter games and studying)
24 Lisa: like last week she made me take her home straightaway
after the service. So I had to leave and then c[ome back.]
25 Bob: [Come back.]
26 (brief pause)
27 Tom: Oh
28 Lisa: And just- she’s just really doesn’t think of anyone but
herself.
...
37 Lisa: She’s just really oblivious to social etiquette.
38 Tom: Oh yeah.
Having formulated the complainable, Lisa then makes a recognisable com-

plaint (that she ‘doesn’t think of anyone but herself’) by implying that Edna
does not think of others, or, in other words, does not show consideration for
others. What is notable about this complaint is that it is formulated, just like
Charlie Brown in Figure 4.2, at a more generalised level than the locally situ-
ated context of the complainable. In being formulated in this way, Lisa invokes
an aspect of the moral order, namely the understanding of members that ‘not
thinking of anyone but oneself’ is a bad thing, and members should know this.
Lisa subsequently categorises this impropriety as a breach of ‘social etiquette’
in casting Edna as someone who is ‘really oblivious to social etiquette’, and
thus ‘not polite’ or even ‘impolite’. Notably, while the other participants do not
strongly align with Lisa’s complaint here by making some kind of assessment,
and nor do they express strong agreement (i.e. affiliate) with her stance that
Edna’s behaviour constitutes an impropriety that reflects her lack of under-
standing of ‘social etiquette’, they do not challenge it either. In other words,
it is tacitly accepted by Tom and Bob as consistent with their understandings
of the underlying moral order to which Lisa’s complaint appeals. Here we can
observe an instance of a social action (a complaint) and meaning (the object
of that complaint) being occasioned by a prior evaluation of someone else’s
conduct, namely, a breach of social etiquette. In other words, the complaint is
occasioned by a prior evaluation of someone’s behaviour as ‘not polite’ or even
‘impolite’.
Of course, no social action or meaning occasions evaluations of politeness,
impoliteness and so on as a matter of course. Complaining is not always
about improprieties or breaches of etiquette. In some cases, complaining about
things (whether about events, situations or even other people) can even play
a part in establishing a sense of relational connection between participants.

In example (6), in which two female neighbours are engaging in a form of
‘mutual complaining’, the complaints actually offer the other person a chance
to affiliate with the complaint by expressing their concern or empathy for the
person doing the complaining.
(6) June: Hi, how are you doing?

Mary: Boy, can you believe how hot it’s been?
June: Amazing, isn’t it? And I’m just returning from a four-mile
walk. Look at me. ((pointing to perspiration on shirt))
Mary: I’ve had such a bad headache since the beginning of this
heat wave, and my allergies don’t help things much.
June: Yeah, I can imagine how that feels.
(Boxer 1993: 106)
In engaging in a sequence of complaining followed by affiliating with the com-

plaint where they swap the roles of the one complaining and the one aligning
with the complaint, June and Mary are implicitly invoking the moral order.
This time, however, the expectation that the other person will affiliate with
the complaint involves a specific practice, namely, expressing empathy or con-
cern. Since not responding with such an expression of empathy or concern is
a morally accountable matter – that is, it would presumably be ‘not polite’
to withhold a display of empathy or concern – it is evident that these mutu-
ally complaining sequences can occasion evaluations of politeness, although
the participants do not explicitly comment as such. Thus, as Haugh (2007c)
argues, evaluations of politeness can arise through the adjacent placement of
expressions that display reciprocation of concern. The mutual complaining
in example (6) thus arguably occasions ‘seen but unnoticed’ evaluations of
politeness (see also Chapter 9).
Our conceptualisation of politeness as social practice – as an evaluation
that is (reflexively) occasioned by social actions and meanings – does not pre-
clude a focus on the various forms that have remained an important area of
concern in politeness research (see Chapters 2 and 3). Consider the case of
requests prefaced with ‘I wonder’-derived expressions (e.g. ‘I was wondering
if’, ‘I wonder if’). In a careful study of requests in telephone calls, the con-
versation analysts Traci Curl and Drew (2008) show that requests formulated
using modal verbs (e.g. could you, would you) treat the speaker’s request as
non-contingent, meaning the necessary conditions for granting the request are
already met so the request is unproblematic. I-wonder-prefaced request formu-
lations, on the other hand, are understood as orienting to specific contingencies
that might be associated with granting the request. If we compare examples (7)
and (8) below, we can see that while the modal verb could, which is typical of
requests in English, appears in both, in the case of example (8), the I-wonder-
prefaced request involves a clear orientation to the contingencies of granting that
request.
(7) Field SO88:2:8:1

1 Lesley: Hello?
2 (0.3)
3 Gordon: It’s Gordon.
4 Lesley: oh Gordon. Shall I ring you back darling,
5 Gordon: Uh no y- I don’t think you can,
6 (0.3)
7 Gordon: But uh just to (0.3) say, could you bring up a
8 letter. When you come up
(adapted from Curl and Drew 2008: 137)
(8) Field:2:2:1
1 Lesley: and ordered a book [and you said you’d hold
2 Jon: [yeah
3 Lesley: it for me
4 And I was supposed to be coming in around Easter
5 well I haven’t managed to get in and I wonder if you
6 could send it to me if you’ve still got it
In example (7), Gordon’s request is non-contingent in that he does not orient
to any particular pre-conditions – or what are termed ‘felicity conditions’ in
speech act theory (Chapter 2) – for making a request that is not yet fulfilled.
In other words, there is nothing in the formulation of Gordon’s request to
indicate that he thinks there is any reason why Lesley cannot grant it (albeit not
immediately). However, in example (8), where Lesley is calling up a bookshop
to request they send a book out to her that she previously ordered, the I-wonder
prefacing constitutes a kind of discursive resource (Thornborrow 2002) for
making requests. That is, a pre-existing pattern used in recurrent ways that
are recognisable to members (see more on these patterns in Chapter 7), by
which she indicates an orientation to contingencies that may make granting the
request difficult or even impossible, including the book no longer being there.
In doing so, she avoids making an implicit claim to having an entitlement to
have this request fulfilled in contrast to Gordon’s request in example (7). In
other words, Lesley displays her lack of entitlement to have this request granted
by orienting to the contingencies of granting through I-wonder-prefacing her
request. In this sense, she is invoking the moral order in that entitlements are
associated with interpretations of the social relationship that holds between
persons – in this case, between herself and the person working in the bookshop,
evaluative moment
social actions moral evaluations of

and meanings order politeness
Figure 4.3 Politeness as social practice.
Jon. In other words, by formulating her request in this way using this particular
discursive resource, Lesley is implicitly evaluating her relationship with Jon as
requiring caution in displaying entitlements. In displaying a lack of entitlement
in this case of requesting she is thus occasioning an interpersonal evaluation of
politeness vis-à-vis their ongoing relationship.5
We have thus far claimed that politeness constitutes a social practice in
two key ways. On the one hand, politeness involves evaluations which are
occasioned by social actions and meanings that are recognisable through the
fact they are practices in themselves. These evaluations also have the potential
to reflexively occasion evaluative social actions and meanings. In other words,
social actions and meanings may themselves be occasioned by such evaluations.
On the other hand, politeness involves implicit appeals to the moral order,
which is constituted through practices by which social actions and meanings
are made recognisable as ‘familiar scenes of everyday affairs’ and thus open to
moral evaluation (e.g. as good/bad, appropriate/inappropriate, polite/not polite,
impolite/not impolite and so on). This view of politeness as social practice that
arises through evaluative moments is summarised in Figure 4.3.
In treating politeness as a social practice, then, we have made the point that
we do not think something or someone is polite, impolite and so on because
of a particular behaviour on their part, or because they have used a particular
linguistic form per se. Instead, it is because we evaluate the social action or
meaning we interpret as arising through this (embodied) talk and conduct as
polite, impolite and so on. The content of these evaluations, and the social
actions and meanings through which they arise (and they themselves give rise
to), should thus be the starting point for empirical studies of politeness.
4.4 Politeness and time

In characterising politeness as a social practice it is clear that it needs to be
situated, first of all, relative to time, a concept that we treat in the present
volume as critical for situating understandings of politeness. It is important to

understand that in doing so, however, there are different ways of understanding
time. In this section, we introduce different perspectives on conceptualising
time that are particularly salient to understanding politeness as social practice.
The first understanding of time relates to the here-and-now of an evaluative
moment of politeness, as captured in Figure 4.3: how particular social actions
and meanings are evaluated vis-à-vis politeness in the very moment in which
those social actions and meanings arise through interaction. This will be sub-
sequently contrasted with time in the sense of the there-and-then.
It is important to appreciate, however, that even a basic conceptualisation of
time in the here-and-now necessarily involves more than one way of perceiving
time. In politeness research to date, time in the here-and-now has generally
involved an understanding of time as punctuated. In other words, politeness
has been treated as a discrete, independent evaluative moment on the part
of either the speaker or the hearer. In practice, this involves evaluating each
utterance or turn at talk vis-à-vis politeness.
However, time in the here-and-now can also be understood in the sense of a
current moment of talk being constrained and afforded by prior and subsequent
talk, or what Garfinkel calls the ‘retrospective–prospective sense of a present
occurrence’ (1967): 41). On this view of time, evaluations of a particular
utterance of turn at talk vis-à-vis politeness are invariably situated relative to
prior evaluations and those evaluations that follow. Inevitably those evaluations
that arise contiguously – that is, adjacently – tend to be most tightly interlinked,
but the retrospective–prospective sense of a present occurrence can, of course,
go beyond adjacent turns at talk. This is an understanding of time in the here-
and-now as emergent.
To better understand what we mean by these two senses of time in the
here-and-now – namely, time as punctuated and time as emergent – consider
example (9). Michael (one of the authors of this book) is staying at Sirl’s house
on holiday in London and Michael is going out sightseeing that day. Sirl and
Michael have just met outside the bathroom in the morning.
(9) 1 S: What time are you leaving this morning?
2 M:Oh, in about an hour I suppose. Are you in a hurry to leave?
3 S: No, no. Just asking.
4 (2 second pause)
5 M:Would you like to use the bathroom first?
6 S: Yeah, sure, if you don’t mind.
(adapted from Haugh 2007a: 94)
Sirl’s initial inquiry in turn 1 might be interpreted as a pre-request in that it
constitutes a preparatory condition for making a request to use the bathroom
first, and Michael subsequently leaves open the possibility that Sirl may wish
to make such a request in turn 2 in his response. Sirl’s utterance in turn 1 is

therefore open to evaluation as ‘polite’, since he is orienting to high contingency
and relatively low entitlement in making a request: recognising it is a matter
of delicacy for Sirl to request outright to use the bathroom first given he is
the host. Michael’s response is also open to evaluation as ‘polite’, through an
adjacent display of an orientation to the currently invoked contingencies of
making that request. However, Sirl does not go on to make the request to use
the bathroom in turn 3. Instead, he treats his first utterance as simply a request
for information. Sirl’s second utterance (in turn 3) is also open to evaluation
as ‘polite’ given he appears to abandon the request to use the bathroom first,
apparently in a display of deference to Michael (who implied he might be in
a hurry to leave given he has raised this as a specific contingency). However,
the marked pause after Sirl’s counter-response indicates that something has
been left unsaid. In turn 5, Michael thus makes an offer to Sirl that he use
the bathroom first, thereby treating Sirl’s utterance in turn 1 as being ‘pre’
to soliciting an offer from Michael to use the bathroom first. In other words,
Michael reinterprets Sirl’s first utterance as attempting to get Michael to offer
that Sirl use the bathroom first, and so this plausibly counts as an instance
of soliciting an offer rather than requesting. In making a pre-emptive offer,
albeit a couple of turns late, this utterance is open to evaluation as ‘polite’,
given it reciprocates concern for Sirl’s position as a host unwilling to ask a
guest to wait for the bathroom. The subsequent acceptance of this offer by
Sirl in turn 6 ratifies Michael’s retrospective interpreting of this prior turn.
Since soliciting an offer orients to a lower degree of entitlement, this turn
is also open to evaluation as ‘polite’. From the perspective of a punctuated
view of time, then, each turn at talk here is plausibly open to evaluation as
‘polite’.
However, when considered from the perspective of time as emergent, a
somewhat different analysis of evaluations of politeness arises. The critical
moment here is when Sirl pauses in turn 4. Through this interactionally marked
pause Sirl indicates his possible dissatisfaction with Michael’s response in
turn 2. In other words, while Sirl says he does not want to use the bathroom
first, he implies (through pausing) that in fact he may indeed want to use the
bathroom first. By not saying he wants to use the bathroom, he avoids being
held accountable for requesting to use the bathroom. This leaves Michael with
the option of either pretending to not notice this implication (which could
be evaluated as ‘impolite’ or at least ‘inattentive’ to the needs of Sirl), or
responding to it by pre-emptively offering that Sirl use the bathroom first. In
other words, Michael is left with the choice of looking potentially impolite,
or having to let Sirl use the bathroom first without Sirl needing to be held
accountable for making such a request. The question, then, is whether soliciting
an offer in this way is ‘polite’. From Michael’s perspective, at least, it was
‘not polite’, largely because acknowledgement of the high contingency/low

entitlement of a request to use the bathroom first was ultimately by-passed
through the course of this sequence by securing a pre-offer from Michael.
The emergent evaluation of the social actions and meanings that ultimately
arose here as ‘not polite’, at least on Michael’s part, is not consistent with
the punctuated evaluations of each social action and meaning as ‘polite’ in
the above analysis. This contradiction, however, is part and parcel of this
particular interaction, because it was this inconsistency that generated the sense
of interactional ‘jarring’ or ‘dissonance’ (even possibly prototypical ‘passive
aggressive’ behaviour) at play here. We can thus view time in the here-and-now
in both ways: either as punctuated points on a continuum or as interleaving spans
across a continuum. We will discuss this point in further detail in Chapter 6 when
we examine politeness in interaction more closely.
Of course a particular evaluative moment of politeness – or interlinked set
of moments – does not arise in a vacuum. It is invariably located vis-à-vis
other evaluative moments over time. In other words, we can understand time as
historicity: the ongoing linking of the here-and-now with the there-and-then
(i.e. over time), as well as the there-and-then in its own right (i.e. back in time).
There are two main ways in which evaluative moments in the here-and-
now are connected with evaluative moments in the there-and-then. First, an
evaluative moment of politeness in the here-and-now draws from recurrent
evaluative moments of politeness vis-à-vis the moral order. This means that
the border between here-and-now and there-and-then is porous because an
understanding in the here-and-now is dependent on understandings established
through the there-and-then. Many social actions and meanings that are under-
stood in locally situated contexts in fact follow pre-existing patterns. Recall,
for instance, Erica’s ‘I think we should just be friends’ in example (1) above,
which draws from a recurrent practice people use when breaking up an inti-
mate relationship. It is exactly due to the conventional nature of this utterance
that many of us find Mark’s reaction to it to be humorous (it seems that Mark
belongs to a small minority for whom Erica’s utterance does not politely imply
that she is breaking up with him). When such utterances are deployed in the
here-and-now, the interactants invoke understandings that they have created
in the past and so are in some sense ‘continuously there’. In other words, we
need to see time as also involving a recurrent here-and-now: practices by which
social actions and meanings arose in the past there-and-then can be invoked in
the here-and-now. Erica’s social action of breaking up in example (1) is clearly
conventional, and so it represents a situation where an understanding from the
there-and-then is embedded in the understanding in the here-and-now of an
interaction.
It is important to note, however, that not every utterance is recurrent to the
same degree. In other words, the degree of conventionality of an utterance
lies on a scalar continuum. Whenever we act according to the moral order

we appeal to pre-existing understandings; the main difference between emer-
gent and recurrent understandings is that the latter arise through invoking the
there-and-then. Understandings in the here-and-now are thus always potentially
subject to influence from understandings in the there-and-then. Certain usages
of politeness can become preferred by a society or a relational network within a
society, and through recurrence they can become formalised, a process defined
as, and extended to ritualisation by Kádár (2013). We will discuss these points
in further detail in Chapter 7 when we examine politeness and its relationship
with convention and ritual.
Second, an evaluative moment of politeness in the here-and-now can interlink
with other evaluative moments of politeness vis-à-vis the relational history of
those participants. After all, an interaction can be conceptualised not only as
sequential, adjacently placed turns of talk (the prototypical sense of interaction
in the here-and-now), but also as ‘turns in an ongoing exchange interspersed
with “pauses” of minutes, hours or days’ (Sifianou 2012: 1561). We often
evaluate (and expect others to evaluate) social actions and meanings in the
light of happenings that took place in the past. Indeed, there is a distinct form
of politeness which comes into operation through this sense of historicity: its
operation presupposes relational history (see Chapter 7).
Relational history forms an important link between the past and the present,
as historicity influences evaluations in the here-and-now. It is important to note,
however, that historicity has yet another interpretation: there are interactions
that are reported to have taken place in the past. Past has a relative value here
in the sense that for interactions that are reported, as opposed to those that
take place in front of our eyes, it is simply a matter of relativity whether they
took place just a few days earlier or centuries ago. We can thus also talk of
evaluative moments existing in the there-and-then in their own right, as, for
example, in talk about the relational history of people who interacted some
time ago in the past. This has its own analytical challenges, which are further
discussed in Chapter 8. It is also worth pointing out that relational histories
can also play out across relational networks, a perspective we explore further
in Chapter 9. However, at this point we only need to note that not only are
evaluative moments in the here-and-now connected with evaluative moments
in the there-and-then in these two main ways, but also that evaluative moments
arise in the there-and-then in their own right.
4.5 Politeness and social space

In characterising politeness as a social practice it is clear that it also needs to
be situated relative to space; or, to be more precise, social space. The notion
of field (ba in Japanese; chang d in Mandarin Chinese) is rather useful in
representing what we mean by the social space in which politeness is neces-

sarily always situated. It was first introduced into academic theorisation by the
Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida (1949), and has since found resonance
with the study of complex systems in biology, quantum physics and cogni-
tive science (Ohtsuka 2011; Shimizu 1995). A field in Eastern philosophical
thought is essentially a dynamic relational network, which is not only imbued
with its own historicity, given that there is no space without time, but is also
imbued with ongoing interaction and emerging relationships. These relational
networks vary from ongoing relational networks imbued with considerable rela-
tional history such as intimate dyadic relationships, families, neighbourhoods,
schools and communities, to groups or teams in institutional or organisational
environments where relational histories and historicity intersect, through to
larger, more diffuse relational networks labelled variously as nations, societies
and cultures which are inevitably imbued with historicity. Critically, while
these relational networks, and the social practices that constitute them, exist
through the ongoing, networked interactions of individuals, they constitute at
the same time the discursive means by which individuals define and understand
evaluative moments of politeness in the first place.
There are two key important aspects of ‘field’ as social space that distinguish
it from classic accounts of society or norms in politeness research. First, there
is the claim that ‘the properties of the individual entity cannot be definitely
established except in the ba [‘field’] within which it is situated’ (Ohtsuka 2011:
4). What this means for us is that what is experienced as ‘individual’ and what
is experienced as ‘social’ in the human experience cannot be separated. In other
words,
In the human experience, then, not only are individuals qua individuals dependent upon
the nexus that is the social, but also the social qua social is dependent on individuals in
nexus. What is individual in nature and what is social in nature are fully interdependent,
while at the same time, individual phenomena and social phenomena are distinct and
functionally contradictory poles of human experience. (Arundale 2009: 40–1)
This is important to note, because it means that we cannot fully understand

politeness from the perspective of individual persons who are contributing to
ongoing evaluative moments of politeness. We must also, at the same time,
examine the ‘field’ or social space in which these evaluative moments arise. A
practical consequence of this is that it is not sufficient to simply ask individuals
whether they think something was polite, impolite and so on. Such evaluations
must be situated relative to the social space or ‘field’ in which they arose.
Rather than seeing this ‘field’ as static and fixed, however, what we find is
that it involves multiple interpenetrating relational networks that vary in their
degree of salience within particular, situated, evaluative moments of politeness.
Second, the field in which politeness as social practice arises is a complex

system, which means it has both self-organising and emergent properties
that go beyond the characteristics of the individual nodes which constitute
that relational network. A language is an example par excellence of a social
phenomenon that emerges through the interactions of individuals. We cannot
trace a language to one single person, but rather to the self-organising
properties of a complex system that form through ongoing interactions
between persons over time and social space. In the same way, we cannot
trace politeness as social practice to any single person, but rather to the
self-organising emergent properties of a particular relational network over
time. This means politeness as social practice is ultimately a characteristic
of the complex system as a whole (relational networks), not of its parts
(individuals). Yet this complex system cannot arise in the first place without
ongoing interactions (whether direct or mediated) between those individuals.
Moreover, no individual is fully subordinated to a relational network, as
individuals have the opportunity to initiate changes in social practices, albeit
depending in part on their place within the relational network. The study of
politeness, then, involves understanding how evaluative moments of politeness
are situated relative to both persons and relationships/relational networks. We
address the way in which understandings of politeness are situated vis-à-vis
persons and relational networks in Chapters 9–11.
It is essential, therefore, to acknowledge the relativity of individualism when
it comes to evaluations of politeness. As sociological research, such as that
of the renowned philosopher Michael Foucault (1973) illustrates, individual-
ism is itself an ideology that we inherit in many societies, with this ideology
being spread in various (sometimes aggressive) ways. His point is that social
organisations are a natural constraint on individualism in itself, and people in
societies or certain networks of societies always act in relation with others,
no matter what their claims to being individualistic might be. In an important
sense, then, even a seemingly antisocial act presupposes the acknowledgment
of social standards, and it is in this sense that politeness is ultimately a socially
constructive act.
A further reason why individualism is relative is that it is a dominant ide-
ology in only some societies and networks. It is necessary to acknowledge
that in other societies and networks hierarchy and interdependence, not indi-
vidualism, underpin perceptions of norms of appropriate behaviour, and these
understandings of persons thus influence practices and evaluations of polite-
ness. Moreover, even in seemingly egalitarian societies there are inevitably
groups that prefer hierarchical orders, a preference which manifests itself in
their social practices. And there are also societies which not only refute the
ideology of individualism, but in fact regard individualism itself as a recent
‘invention’, a point which becomes clear when we consider historical societies

that valued power and communality.
Notions such as individualism must therefore be regarded critically and self-
reflexively, otherwise researchers are likely to project their own understandings
on understandings of politeness that differ culturally or diachronically. For
example, let us imagine a medieval nobleman cursing a commoner who
crossed the street in front of his horse. Although our immediate reaction might
be that the given person is being ‘rude’, if we take into account the medieval
belief that the nobleman is simply more valuable than the commoner, then
we can see that his cursing is afforded by his social position, and thus it is
unlikely that either the nobleman or the commoner regarded the cursing as
rude by default. The relativity of individualism thus necessitates examining
every particular evaluation of politeness in a situated way: by examining the
field or social space in which it takes place.
As we shall discuss further in Chapter 10, understandings of politeness
ultimately draw from conceptualisations of persons-in-relationships, which, in
turn, draw from socially constituted understandings of cognition and emotion.
And, as we shall see in Chapter 11, understandings of politeness can lie at the
heart of the social constitution of both identities and cultures, and thus persons
and relational networks are intimately interlinked.
4.6 Summary
In this chapter we have outlined an understanding of politeness as a form of
social practice. We have suggested that politeness is thus ultimately located in
evaluations of social actions and meanings by persons that are situated relative
to both time and social space. However, given we include, but also go beyond, a
traditional focus on linguistic politeness in conceptualising politeness as social
practice, this approach necessarily calls for multidisciplinary perspectives on
politeness. In other words, conceptualising politeness as social practice requires
an appreciation that there are multiple ways of understanding politeness. It is
to this problem of the multiple understandings of politeness, and how to situate
them relative to each other, that we now turn in Chapter 5.
5 Understandings of politeness
5.1 Introduction
In Chapter 3 we introduced the distinction between first-order politeness and
second-order politeness. A first-order perspective on politeness is generally
thought to encompass the understandings of participants or lay users of lan-
guage. A second-order perspective, in contrast, is thought to encompass a
theoretical approach to politeness. However, while the first-order/second-order
distinction has been useful in politeness research in stimulating a move to
greater diversity in the ways in which we study politeness, this two-way dis-
tinction nevertheless masks a number of very different kinds of understandings.
It has also been claimed that there are ‘first-order’ as opposed to ‘second-order’
approaches to politeness. We reject this kind of simplistic opposition. We sug-
gest that not only does this set up an unproductive tension in the field, it is also
a view that neglects the fact that any approach to politeness necessarily draws
from multiple loci of understanding.
Let us consider for a moment the following interaction from the comedy
Seinfeld. In example (1) Jerry has just noticed an unusual pen belonging to
Jack, who is one of the neighbours in the retirement village where Jerry’s
parents live.
(1) Jerry: What kind of pen is that?

Jack: This pen?
Jerry: Yeah.
Jack: This is an astronaut pen. It writes upside down. They use
this in space.
Jerry: Wow! That’s the astronaut pen. I heard about that. Where
did you get it?
Jack: Oh it was a gift.
Jerry: Cause sometimes I write in bed and I have to turn and lean
on my elbow to make the pen work.
Jack: Take the pen.
Jerry: Oh no.
81
Jack: Go ahead.
Jerry: I couldn’t
Jack: Come on, take the pen!
Jerry: I can’t take it.
Jack: Do me a personal favour!
Jerry: No, I’m not . . .
Jack: Take the pen!
Jerry: I cannot take it!
Jack: Take the pen!
Jerry: Are you sure?
Jack: Positive! Take the pen!
Jerry: Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Gee, boy!
(‘The pen’, Seinfeld, Season 3, Episode 3, 1991)
In this example, we see an instance of offering occasioned by Jerry showing

an interest in Jack’s pen. But this is no ordinary offering, but rather one that is
repeated a number of times using direct imperatives, and which Jerry repeatedly
refuses before finally relenting and accepting Jack’s offer. From the perspective
of the stereotyped version of Jewish American culture (see Chapter 11) in which
this scene plays out, these repeated, directly formulated offers are a way for
Jack to show his offer is sincere, while Jerry’s repeated refusal is a way to show
his reluctance to accept Jack’s offer unless it is truly sincere. It thus constitutes
a kind of recognisable social practice through which evaluations of politeness
are evidently occasioned. However, Jerry’s acceptance of Jack’s offer of the pen
results in a dispute between Jerry and his father Morty, on the one hand, and
Helen, his mother on the other, as we can see in example (2) which continues
on from example (1).
(2) Helen: (as soon as the door is closed) What did you take his pen
for?
Jerry: What he gave it to me.
Helen: You didn’t have to take it.
Morty: Oh my God! She’s gotta make a big deal out of everything.
Jerry: He offered it to me.
Helen: Because you made such a big fuss about it.
Jerry: I liked it. Should I have said I didn’t like it?
Helen: You shouldn’t have said anything. What did you expect
him to do?
Jerry: He could have said: ‘Thank you, I like it too’ and put it
back in his pocket.
Helen: He loves that pen.
Morty: Oh come on!
5.1 Introduction 83
Helen: He talks about it all the time. Every time he takes it out
he goes on and on about how it writes upside down, how
the astronauts use it.
Jerry: If he likes it so much, he never should have offered it.
Helen: He didn’t think you’d accept.
Jerry: Well, he was wrong.
Helen: I know his wife. She has some mouth on her. She’ll tell
everyone in the condo now that you made him give you
the pen. They’re talking about it right now.
What is disputed here is whether Jerry should have accepted Jack’s offer to
give Jerry his pen. Helen criticises Jerry for taking the pen, arguing he should
have never accepted it in the first place. She attributes the offer made by Jack as
being a result of Jerry making a ‘big fuss’ about the pen, and so characterises
Jerry as soliciting an offer from Jack. Underlying this characterisation there is
a cultural assumption at play here, namely, that it is good to share things with
others when they indicate they like it. Jerry and Morty, however, reject this
interpretation, arguing that Jerry was simply complimenting Jack on his pen,
and that if Jack was not truly sincere in making the offer he should not have
made it in the first place. At the end of this example Helen worries about what
Jack’s wife will say to others in the retirement village; particularly that she will
tell others that Jerry solicited an offer from Jack, putting Jack in the potentially
embarrassing situation of not offering it when it seemed Jerry wanted it. It
appears, then, that Jerry and Morty have evaluated Jerry’s acceptance of the
pen as quite acceptable (i.e. ‘polite’ or at least ‘not impolite’), while Helen
has evaluated it as impolite, at least in the eyes of Jack and his wife. Helen is
also clearly concerned about the possible repercussions of this evaluation of
impoliteness for their relationship with others in the community. What this kind
of example shows us is that different understandings of politeness, impoliteness
and the like can arise amongst participants.
Because there are multiple ways of understanding politeness we need to
start talking of understandings of politeness rather than of any single under-
standing. In this chapter, we thus revisit the first-order/second-order distinction,
which we discussed in Chapter 3, and introduce a framework which situates
understandings of politeness relative to four key loci of analysis, not just two.
Our point is that in order to effectively study politeness we must first begin to
appreciate that there are different ways of looking at the same phenomena, and
we need to be aware of how these different understandings are situated relative
to each other.
One way of understanding the world is from the study of the nature of being,
existence or reality, or what is called ontology. The word ontology comes
from the Greek words ὄντος (óntos) and λόγος (logos) and literally means ‘the
study of that which is’. The ontological perspective we take here, namely, a
social realist ontological position, necessarily assumes there is such a thing as
politeness in the first place, and that it forms part of our social reality.
Understanding the world also involves the study of the nature and scope of
knowledge, or what is called epistemology. The word epistemology comes
from the Greek words ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē) and λόγος (logos), and literally
means ‘the study of knowing’. An epistemological perspective on politeness
is somewhat different in that it involves the question of how we look at the
world and make sense of it. Since the notion of politeness is itself a way of
making sense of our social world, then an epistemological perspective involves
the questions of how we come to such understandings in the first place, and
importantly whose understandings are involved. Our basic position is that such
understandings arise in the interface of those perceiving the world and the
perceived social reality.
What the first-order/second-order distinction points to is that there are two
quite different epistemological perspectives we can take in perceiving polite-
ness as part of our presumed social reality: that of the user (first-order) and
that of the observer (second-order). However, given any understanding is nec-
essarily situated within a ‘field’ (ba) – a dynamic relational network which is
imbued with its own historicity as well as ongoing interaction and emerging
relationships, as we discussed in Chapter 4 – we propose that understandings
of politeness are necessarily embedded in the ‘field’ of that user or observer. In
other words, we adopt a social constructivist epistemology here, where under-
standings of politeness are situated relative to the ‘field’ in which they are
perceived.
On the one hand, there is the view of the participants themselves: the peo-
ple who are themselves involved in the evaluative moments through which
politeness arises. Of course, human communication has for a long time been
supported by various technologies, and we are not restricted to direct, face-
to-face communication. Even in historical times there were various mediated
forms of communication, as we argue in Chapter 8, although with the rise of
more recent technologies, mediated communication has become increasingly
widespread and influential. In relation to politeness, then, we must also con-
sider the understandings of metaparticipants: people whose evaluations of
politeness arise through vicariously taking part in the interaction by viewing it
on television or on the internet, for instance. Both participant and metapartici-
pant understandings are first-order in the sense that they involve some kind of
participation in the evaluative moment.
On the other hand, there is the view of those who observe evaluative
moments through which politeness arises. The lay observer can observe such
moments spontaneously in an ad hoc manner. We are all lay observers when it
comes to politeness, because we all engage in social interactions with others,
5.1 Introduction 85
both as participants and as metaparticipants. However, there is another, more

formalised way of observing that involves more systematic and evidenced
interpretations of evaluative moments. An understanding that arises through
systematic and evidenced observation is that of an analyst. Both lay observer
and analyst understandings are second-order in that they involve observation
rather than participation in the social world.
While the first-order/second-order distinction has generally been held to be
between participant and analyst understandings of politeness, we suggest that
this neglects a further two loci of understanding. Given evaluations of politeness
are inevitably constituted within a ‘field’, we propose here that an additional
first-order loci for understanding politeness that we need to consider is one
rooted in the distinction between insiders and outsiders, while an additional
second-order loci for understanding politeness that we must take into account
is one rooted in the distinction between ‘lay explanation’ and ‘theory’.
In Chapter 4, where we introduced an approach to politeness as social prac-
tice, we pointed out that politeness involves implicit appeals by members of a
relational network to a moral order in the very evaluative moments in which
politeness arises. But what do we mean by the term member? A member is
an individual (or group of individuals) who assumes, or claims, an insider
perspective on the backgrounded, and generally unnoticed, expectations that
constitute a certain moral order. In particular, a member is a person who holds
both themselves and others accountable to this moral order. Following the lin-
guistic anthropologist Kenneth Pike (1967), the understandings of insiders are
generally termed an emic perspective, and contrasted with the understandings
of outsiders to a moral order, or what is termed an etic perspective. Emic under-
standings are not always made explicit, however, and indeed may remain tacit
and understood amongst members to the extent they inform social practice.
These are both first-order understandings because they each constitute a set of
expectancies that practically inform the very evaluative moments that give rise
to politeness.
It is worth noting that in making a distinction between two kinds of first-
order perspectives, that between participants and members, we are deliberately
opening up a way for analysts to account for the fact that not everyone from the
same society necessarily agrees about what counts as polite, impolite and so on
in particular, situated interactions. Of course, in many instances the perspectives
of a participant and member are co-present in one and the same person. But as
we shall see in this chapter, this is not always the case.
Second-order epistemological understandings of politeness also involve
explicit accounts or attempts at rationalising the ways in which people are
polite, impolite and so on, and how something counts as polite, impolite and
so on in the first place. On the one hand, sociocultural accounts of interper-
sonal phenomena, such as politeness, can be developed and shared amongst
ordinary users of a language. These constitute folk-theoretic understandings

of politeness. Emic (or etic) accounts of politeness that are made explicit
amongst members (and sometimes shared with non-members) thus constitute
folk-theoretic understandings. On the other hand, explicitly defined and for-
malised accounts of politeness can be shared amongst scientific observers.
Theoretical understandings of politeness (or what might be termed scientific-
theoretic understandings) are thus restricted to a particular group: a community
of practice of scientific observers or academics. Theoretical understandings are
required – at least ideally – to be constructed in such a way that they can be
consistently applied by different scientific observers. Both folk-theoretic and
(scientific-) theoretical understandings are second-order in that they involve
conceptualisation rather than actual participation in the social world.
To summarise, then, from a user perspective, there are four inter-related
perspectives from which the nature of politeness, as an assumed part of our
social reality, can be understood:
(i) First-order participant: Participant understandings
Metaparticipant understandings
(ii) First-order expectancies: Emic understandings
Etic understandings
From an observer perspective, there are four inter-related ways in which we
can account for how we evaluate something to be polite, not polite, impolite
and so on in the first place.
(iii) Second-order observer: Lay observer understandings
Analyst understandings
(iv) Second-order conceptualisation: Folk-theoretic understandings
Theoretical understandings
There are thus four, not just two as commonly thought, important loci
that constitute the first-order/second-order distinction: participation (partici-
pant/metaparticipant) and expectancies (emic/etic), (the first-order loci of
understanding), and observation (analyst/lay observer) and conceptualisation
(theoretical/folk-theoretic) (the second-order loci of understanding). We thus
propose a framework that situates understandings of politeness relative to these
four key loci of the first-order/second-order distinction.1 This framework is
summarised in Figure 5.1.
We are not suggesting that all of these different loci of understanding are
important all of the time. In some cases just a few loci of understanding may
be salient. It depends on the nature of the questions being asked, and the
nature of the interaction or discourse being observed. But it is also important
to realise that one person can have multiple understandings of politeness at
the same time. Indeed, if our aim is to grasp the nature of politeness then it is
necessary to embrace the idea that we need to be talking more about multiple
understandings of politeness.
participant/ analyst/
metaparticipant lay-observer
first- evaluative second-

order moment(s) order
emic/ theoretical/
etic folk-theoretic
Figure 5.1 Loci of understandings of politeness.
We will now discuss, in turn, each of these four different loci of understand-
ings of politeness in more detail. In particular, we will explain how each of
these four different loci in fact encompasses a number of different ways of
understanding in and of themselves.
5.2 Participant/metaparticipant understandings

A participant is an individual in interaction who takes up a particular position
or perspective in relation to that talk or conduct. We generally first think of
speakers and hearers when the question of who participates in interaction arises.
However, we use the terms producer and recipient here, instead of speaker and
hearer, to avoid confusion with these commonly used folk terms, as well as to
allow that interaction can occur over multiple modes (not just through speech).
It is now well known that there are various ways in which individuals – or
indeed groups of individuals – can position themselves in relation to producing,
interpreting and evaluating talk or conduct. These different positionings or
alignments are what Goffman (1979, 1981) called participation status.
One key distinction that can be made in relation to participation status is
between ratified and unratified participants (see Chapter 11 for further discus-
sion of ratification in relation to identities and cultures). This is based on the
intuitive distinction between listening to and hearing talk. When we listen to
talk we are assumed to have some degree of responsibility, or in some cases
even an institutionalised obligation, to attend to or participate in that talk. That
responsibility makes us ratified participants. As ratified participants we are
entitled to hold other participants (as well as ourselves) morally accountable
for the social actions and meanings that arise through that talk. When we hear
talk, however, while it is audible to us and we may (or may not) understand
it, we are not expected to attend to or directly participate in that talk. If we
are not expected to participate, then, we are unratified participants. As unrat-
ified participants, then, we do not have an entitlement to hold the producer
morally accountable for the social actions and meanings that arise through that
talk, although individuals may attempt, of course, to upgrade their participation

status from unratified to ratified (and vice-versa) in the course of interaction.
What we find, then, is that interactions can involve, on the one hand, more
‘focused encounters’ where all the individuals are ratified participants who are
expected to jointly sustain and attend to the talk and conduct at hand (Goff-
man 1964). A conversation between two or three friends in a private setting
is more often than not a good example of a focused encounter. On the other
hand, interactions may involve larger gatherings where there are both ratified
and unratified participants. A conversation between two or three friends in a
public setting like a café or restaurant is often a good example of a broader
social situation. In the latter situation others present, such as waiters or people
at adjacent tables, may be able to hear what the friends are talking about, at
least at times, but they are not generally considered ratified participants in that
interaction.
Ratified and unratified participants can be further subdivided into different
types. There are a number of different models for doing this, but we will start
here by outlining the basic model proposed by Goffman (1979, 1981). A rat-
ified recipient may either be an addressee or an unaddressed side participant.
An addressee is a person (or persons) to whom the talk or conduct is (osten-
sibly) directed, while a side participant is not directly addressed as such. Both
addressees and side participants have recognised entitlements to respond to the
talk, although their degree of responsibility to do so varies (at least ostensibly).
Unratified recipients, on the other hand, can be divided into bystanders and
overhearers. The former is an individual (or group of individuals) that can be
expected to be able to hear at least some parts of the talk, but are not ratified as
a participant. An overhearer, on the other hand, refers to an individual (or group
of individuals) that might be able to hear some parts of the talk. Overhearers
include listener-ins (persons whom speakers and other ratified participants are
aware can hear the talk) and eavesdroppers (persons who are secretly following
the talk). The notion of participant is thus a complex one despite being repre-
sented as one locus for understanding politeness in Figure 5.1. These different
types of participation status are summarised in Figure 5.2.
To appreciate the various different kinds of participation status, let us con-
sider example (3), which happened, or perhaps was imagined to happen, at a
U2 concert, when Bono, the lead singer, had taken the microphone to address
the audience between songs.
(3) At a recent U2 concert in Glasgow, Scotland, he asked the audience

for total quiet. Then, in the silence, he started to slowly clap his
hands, once every few seconds. Holding the audience in total
silence, he said into the microphone,
‘Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies.’
speaker hearer
producer recipient
ratified unratified
addressee side bystander overhearer

participant
listener-in eavesdropper
Figure 5.2 Types of participation status.
From the front of the crowd a voice with a broad Scottish accent
pierced the quiet . . .
‘Well, f – ckin stop doin it then, ya evil bastard!’
(http://phocks.org/stumble/bono/)
The response from the member of the audience here is an instance of delib-
erate misinterpretation of Bono’s earlier claim being one of causation (i.e. his
clapping is leading children in Africa to die) rather than what was evidently
meant (the clapping is a chilling way of representing an estimate of a horrific
number of deaths). However, deliberately misinterpreting Bono’s point in this
way projects an ironic evaluation of Bono. In other words, while the explicit
denunciation of Bono is itself only mock censure, there is nevertheless implied
censure of Bono for being self-righteous here, and a mocking attitude towards
that sense of self-righteousness he is presupposed to have. We might ask the
question as to whether this ironic evaluation from the audience is offensive
or simply mock impolite. Or to phrase the question more carefully, for whom
might this be considered offensive or simply considered mock impolite?
The producer here is the member of the audience that shouted out the remark,
while the addressee is, of course, Bono himself. Whether he found (or would
find) such a response offensive is open to question, but it’s not entirely out of
the question to think that he might. However, Bono is not the only party present.
There are a large number of side participants here for whom the remark was
most likely meant to entertain, namely, the audience at the concert, at least those
ones who could hear the comment. For them it is clearly open to evaluation
as mock impolite, that is, an evaluation of a potentially impolite social action
(here, ironic censure) as non-impolite, although some in the audience could
also be offended if they thought the remark made light of a very serious matter.
There are also, arguably, a number of unratified participants here, including the
other members of U2 who are positioned here as bystanders, and other members
of the technical crew backstage who are essentially listener-ins in this situation.
They are perhaps less likely to evaluate the remark as simply mock impolite
than the side participants here, in part, because they are associated (to varying
degrees) with the target of the ironic censure. The point being made here is
that how this ironic censure is evaluated critically depends, in part, on the
participation status of the person(s) concerned.
Example (3) is in fact an anecdote that went ‘viral’ on the internet, which is,
of course, how it ended up in our email inboxes in the first place. As we briefly
noted previously, the development of various technologies has meant there are
increasing numbers of different kinds of mediated forms of communication
where participation is vicarious, including more ‘traditional’ forms such as
television, film and radio through to relatively newer ‘digital’ forms, such
as social media, discussion boards and the like. The line between the two is
increasingly becoming blurred though, as mediated forms of communication,
such as messenger, Skype, SMS, social media and the like can involve direct
participation, of course, and increasingly so. However, it is nevertheless clear
that evaluations of politeness can arise through metaparticipants vicariously
taking part in the interaction by viewing it on television or on the internet.
Consider the following two responses to the posting of the above anecdote on
a blogger’s website.
(4) Barbara_jozsef
It is still funny, too funny XD
(5) Pamsplace7
your so cruel!! Cant believe this person come to see U2. EVIL
man, pure evil.
We are talking about children! Dying!2
In example (4) the first commenter evaluates the remark as mock impolite given
she treats it as humorous. In example (5), however, the second respondent
evaluates both the remark itself and its producer, and the first commenter’s
response to it as offensive. At this stage, whether or not the incident really
happened starts to become immaterial, as metaparticipants start to evaluate the
responses of others to the anecdote, as well as the original remarks themselves.
The main point to take note of here is that we need to extend the model
of different types of participation status to include not only evaluations that
arise through co-present or mediated participation (i.e. by participants), but
also evaluations of politeness that arise through vicarious participation (i.e. by
metaparticipants). In relation to politeness, this is important, because often the
understandings of metaparticipants can be just as important, and sometimes
even more important, than those of the participants themselves.3
producer recipient meta-recipient
(un)ratified (un)ratified
addressee side bystander overhearer

participant
Figure 5.3 Types of recipient and meta-recipient participation status.
The extension of participation status to encompass the understandings of

metaparticipants is summarised in Figure 5.3. Once again we can see that the
loci of participation for understanding politeness are indeed complex when
one considers things more carefully. One important difference to note between
participants and metaparticipants is that in the case of the latter, the distinc-
tion between ratified and unratified recipients becomes less clear-cut. Meta-
addressees and metaside-participants can be treated as unratified recipients,
while metabystanders and meta-overhearers can be treated as ratified recipi-
ents. Viewers of film and television, for instance, are often treated as ratified
overhearers (Dynel 2011).
Take example (6), which is from the American comedy Seinfeld. Jerry,
Elaine, Kramer, George and George’s new girlfriend Audrey are sharing a
pizza at Jerry’s apartment. At the point this excerpt begins, Kramer has just
been talking about a reggae lounge he went to the previous night.
(6) Kramer: You wouldn’t believe the women at this club. Ohh, man.
Audrey: It’s amazing how many beautiful women live in New
York. I actually find it kind of intimidating.
Kramer: Well you’re as pretty as any of them. You just need a
nose job.
((Audrey stops eating, Elaine looks up with a shocked
look on her face, Jerry lifts his hand to his forehead in a
sign of exasperation, and George chokes on his food))
Elaine: Kramer!
Kramer: What? What?
Elaine: How could you say something like that?
Kramer: What do you mean? What, I just said she needs a nose
job. So what?
Elaine: No no, there’s nothing wrong with her nose! I’m so sorry,
Audrey.
Audrey: No, it’s ok.

Elaine: What did you have to say that for?
Kramer: Well, I was just trying to help out.
(‘The nose job’, Seinfeld, Season 3, Episode 9, 1991)
Audrey’s self-deprecatory comment about her looks occasions a compliment

(‘you’re as pretty as any of them’), here a positive assessment, followed by
some advice (‘you just need a nose job’) from Kramer. Embedded within this
advice, however, is a negative assessment of her nose: namely, it is too big
(a point about her looks, incidentally, about which George himself has been
obsessing but has not been able to bring himself to say anything to her). This
negative assessment, albeit presupposed in the context of friendly advice, is
clearly evaluated as impolite by the others present. This is evident both through
their non-verbal responses, and from the way in which Elaine holds Kramer
to account for giving this advice, implying that it is very inappropriate (‘How
could you say something like that?’; ‘What did you have to say that for?’),
claims his negative assessment is improper (‘there’s nothing wrong with her
nose’), and apologises to Audrey for Kramer’s remark (‘I’m so sorry, Audrey’).
In other words, Kramer’s advice, which is addressed to Audrey, is treated by
the other side participants as an impropriety that demands a display of censure
of both the comment and of Kramer for making it. Notably, Audrey who is
the target and addressee of the advice, downplays the improper nature of it in
responding to Elaine’s apology (‘no, it’s okay’). Thus, it is the side participants
who display evaluations of Kramer’s advice as impolite or offensive here, rather
than the addressee. Kramer, on the other hand, remains seemingly oblivious to
the negative import of his advice, as he does not acknowledge that there was
even an impropriety on his part (‘What, I just said she needs a nose job. So
what?’), and indeed seems to perceive it as simply friendly advice (‘Well, I
was just trying to help out’), and consequently is visibly frustrated by Elaine’s
negative response to it.
In terms of participant understandings, then, it appears we have at least
three perspectives: the advice is evaluated as clearly impolite/offensive by
the side participants (Elaine, George and Jerry); the advice is evaluated by
the addressee (Audrey) as not being as offensive as Elaine claims; and the
advice is evaluated by the producer (Kramer) as not at all impolite (and pos-
sibly even polite). There is, however, yet another understanding of polite-
ness at play here, namely, the perspective of the viewers of this episode.
We, the viewers, are ratified overhearers as the interaction here is clearly
recipient designed for our entertainment. We vicariously experience inter-
actions between characters, one of whom at least is seemingly oblivious to
widespread societal disapproval – at least in mainstream Anglo-Englishes – of
making negative comments about the appearance of others. Impoliteness thus
becomes here a form of entertainment for metaparticipants (see also Culpeper

2005).
To understand politeness, then, we must first consider the different perspec-
tives from which participants themselves may be evaluating social actions and
meanings. It is not sufficient to talk only of speakers and hearers. There are
multiple types of participation status, and although we have only just given a
few limited examples of this here, it is important to bear in mind these mul-
tiple different types of participant understandings when analysing politeness.
We will revisit and expand upon such issues in subsequent chapters (see
Chapter 6). However, before doing so, we need to first consider more carefully
on what grounds participants (and metaparticipants) evaluate social actions and
meanings as polite, impolite, mock impolite and so on. In other words, how is
it that people know (or think they know) something is polite, impolite, mock
impolite and so on. It is to the second loci of understanding politeness, namely,
the set of moral expectancies that inform such evaluative moments, to which
we now turn.
5.3 Emic/etic understandings

As we discussed in Chapter 4, our view of politeness as social practice grounds
evaluations of social actions and meanings, and by extension evaluations of
those people held accountable for them, in the moral order. Evaluations are
based on a set of backgrounded, and generally unnoticed, expectancies through
which members know (or think they know) what social actions and meanings
can count as polite or impolite in particular situated contexts. In attempting
to better understand what we mean by this moral order, let us first consider a
broad working definition of politeness developed by Culpeper:
Politeness involves (a) an attitude compromised of particular positive evaluative beliefs
about particular behaviours in particular social contexts, (b) the activation of that attitude
by those particular-in-context-behaviours, and (c) the actual or potential description of
those in-context-behaviours and/or persons who produced as polite, courteous, consid-
erate, etc. . . . Impoliteness, although its performance involves significant differences,
can be defined along similar but contrary lines: it involves negative attitudes activated
by in-context-behaviours which are associated, along with the person who gave rise to
them, with impoliteness metalanguage (e.g. impolite, rude, discourteous, etc.). (2011b:
428, underscore added)
We have underlined three key words in this definition that point to the critical
role of the moral order in how it is that people know (or at least think they know)
something is polite, impolite and so on. The first is the claim that (im)politeness
involves evaluative beliefs, specifically beliefs about what behaviour is expected
in particular contexts. In characterising this set of expectations as constituting
the moral order, what we mean is that these expectancies are themselves realised
through interaction, and deviations from them thus result in social actions or
meanings for which persons are held accountable in interaction.
The second important claim is that these beliefs are socially grounded: they
are dispersed to varying degrees across various kinds of relational networks,
ranging from a group of families and friends, to a localised community of
practice, through to a larger, much more diffuse societal or cultural group
(see also Chapters 7, 9 and 11). What is critical to note is that members
can hold both themselves and others accountable to the moral order of this
particular relational network. To be held accountable involves various real-
world consequences, ranging from approval and social inclusion through to
censure and social exclusion. The notion of member, in turn, presupposes two
fundamentally different perspectives on the moral order, namely that of the
insider (an emic perspective) and that of an outsider (an etic perspective).
The third important claim is that these beliefs have recourse to a set of
(im)politeness evaluators: descriptors or metalanguage used by members to
conceptualise their social world. What is interesting about politeness and impo-
liteness in English, and indeed many other languages, is that these evaluative
beliefs have become institutionalised in the language itself. This is not to say
that everyone who speaks a particular language will have the same set of
beliefs about politeness, but rather that they can draw from a common set of
(im)politeness evaluators in the evaluative moment. We thus suggest it is impor-
tant to investigate what these (im)politeness evaluators mean to the members
who use them, as well as the underlying set of moral expectancies that ground
evaluative moments of politeness from the perspective of members; in other
words, from an emic perspective. However, we briefly point out at the end of
this section that we are inevitably required to examine politeness from both
emic and etic perspectives if we are to understand the full range of contexts in
which it arises given we are living in an increasingly globalised world.
The moral order is constituted, as we discussed in Chapter 4, through
practices by which social actions and meanings are recognisable to members.
These practices are inevitably open to moral evaluation – they can be assessed
as good/bad, appropriate/inappropriate, polite/not polite, impolite/not impolite
and so on by members. Evaluations of politeness are thus rooted in the expecta-
tions that constitute the moral order. Here, we expand on this point by suggesting
that it is useful to think of the moral order as multilayered and dispersed
in various ways and to varying degrees across relational networks. Michael
Silverstein (2003), a linguistic anthropologist, suggests that expectancies (or
what he terms norms) form orders of indexicality. This refers to the idea that
sets of expectancies are reflexively layered. At the first layer (or first-order)
of expectancies we find probabilistic conventions for evaluating social actions
and meanings. These are formed for individuals through their own history of
interactions with others, and so while they may be similar they are never exactly
societal/cultural norms
third-order
community of practice/
organisational or other second-order
group-based norms
localised norms first-order
Figure 5.4 Reflexive layers of the moral order (cf. Holmes, Marra and Vine
2012: 1065).
the same across individuals (cf. ‘habitus’, Watts 2003); although they are
likely to bear greater similarity in localised relational networks within which
there are ongoing interactions between members over long periods of time
(such as within families or between groups of friends). At the second layer (or
second-order) we find semi-institutionalised conventions for evaluating social
actions and meanings. In other words, sets of expectancies that are shared
across identifiable communities of practice, organisational cultures or indeed
any social group recognised as such by members. Finally, at the third layer (or
third-order) we find sets of expectancies as they are represented in supra-local
(i.e. societal) conventions for evaluating social actions and meanings. In being
reflexively ordered, it should not be assumed that third-order expectancies
will necessarily always take precedence over second-order ones and so on
(although they often do), but rather that in invoking first-order expectancies
we inevitably invoke second- and third-order ones as well.
The three reflexive layers of the moral order underpinning evaluative
moments of politeness are represented in Figure 5.4. In this figure, it is sug-
gested that localised sets of expectancies that develop for individuals in situated
relationships are necessarily embedded (and thus interpreted) relative to com-
munities of practice, organisational or other group-based sets of expectancies,
which are themselves necessarily embedded relative to broader societal or ‘cul-
tural’ sets of expectancies (see also Chapter 11). All three layers of the moral
order are potentially relevant to understanding politeness.
These various layers of the moral order implicitly assume an insider’s, or emic
perspective. An emic perspective is often related to the study of ‘cultures’, but
here we return to Pike’s (1967) original treatment of emic as an understanding
formulated in terms of conceptual schemes and categories regarded as mean-

ingful and appropriate to ‘insiders’, i.e. ‘members’ of relational networks.4
It is through members holding both themselves and other (perceived) mem-
bers accountable to these sets of expectancies that they can claim an insider’s
understanding. An etic perspective, on the other hand, is an understanding for-
mulated in terms of conceptual schemes and categories regarded as meaningful
and appropriate to ‘outsiders’, that is, those who are treated as lying outside the
relational network in question. It is important to note that an etic perspective
is not synonymous with a theoretical one. An etic perspective is simply ‘an
approach by an outsider to an inside system, in which the outsider brings his
own structure – his own emics – and partly superimposes his observations on
the inside view, interpreting the inside in reference to the outside starting point’
(Pike 1990, emphasis added). The system in question here is, of course, the
moral order that grounds evaluative moments of politeness. In other words,
we propose, consistent with Pike (1967), that the etic not be confused with
issues of theory, and that the emic/etic distinction be used simply to refer to the
distinction between insiders and outsiders relative to relational networks.
The sets of expectancies that constitute the moral order draw in important
ways from sets of (im)politeness evaluators (descriptors or metalanguage used
by members to conceptualise their social world). What an etic perspective offers
is a way of systematically investigating the different ways in which the social
world is conceptualised across different relational networks. In this way, we
can appreciate differences, and of course similarities where they exist, across
different emic perspectives on (im)politeness evaluators.
We therefore argue that it is important to tease out the emic worldviews that
underpin (im)politeness evaluators. Otherwise we may fall into one of two traps:
first, thinking we are talking about the same phenomena across languages and
cultures when in fact we are not; second, generating analytical artifacts that are
of no consequence for those people concerned through the imposition of tacit
etic understandings that underlie (im)politeness evaluators in English when
applied to the analysis of politeness phenomena in other languages (Haugh
2012a). In other words, to talk about ‘politeness’ in various languages without
a consideration of emic or insider perspectives on the phenomena in question
is akin to essentially bleaching out these important conceptual differences. We
will revisit such issues again in subsequent chapters (see Chapter 9).
It is important to note, however, that we are not suggesting here that an
emic understanding necessarily be privileged over an etic one. Indeed, in some
instances, an interplay between emic and etic understandings lies at the very
core of the evaluative moment of politeness itself. This becomes most obvious
when one considers the issue of how to analyse evaluations of politeness
in intercultural interactions where participants do not share similar insider
perspectives on the moral order.
Consider example (7), an intercultural apology that arose subsequent to an

Australian man (Wayne) and his wife not turning up to dinner to which he had
been invited by a Taiwanese woman (Joyce) and her family. While Joyce tried
to contact Wayne that night he did not answer his phone, and only later, the
next day, sent a short SMS text to Joyce, saying ‘Sorry I forgot I was busy
with something.’ The following evening, two days after the event, Joyce called
Wayne having not received a follow-up call from him. The point at which
example (7) begins is when Wayne offers an apology to Joyce (and her family).
(7) W: It’s just, ah, I really apologise for not to you getting back the
other day but we couldn’t make it?
J: oh, that’s okay. yeah, yeah, yeah. I- I just thought oh probably
you are busy with something so you ah probably were easy
to- to for(hhh)get it.
W: yeah we were pretty busy actually
J: oh, okay, yeah, yeah that’s fine. I just want to call you, that-
that- that’s okay.
(Chang and Haugh 2011a: 420)
Wayne made no further apology in the remainder of the call, but rather
repeatedly asked after Joyce and her family. The question, then, is how was
this apology evaluated by Wayne and Joyce? From an emic perspective, Wayne
appears to evaluate his own apology as sufficiently polite, an analysis that is
evidenced by the fact that Wayne did not attempt to make any further apologies,
but rather attempted to show friendliness towards Joyce and her family by
asking questions about them (see the complete transcript in Chang and Haugh
2011a). Joyce, on the other hand, appears to evaluate his apology as ‘impolite’
(mei-limao), a finding that is indicated through Joyce repeating absolution
of Wayne’s offence at a number of different points in the conversation despite
Wayne only ever offering an apology once in the interaction. What repeating an
absolution (i.e. ‘that’s okay’) should occasion, from Joyce’s emic perspective,
is an attempt to show sincerity (chengyi) through repetition of the apology or
by giving a more detailed account or explanation.
Of course, what we need to bear in mind in this analysis is that from Wayne’s
point of view, Joyce’s evaluation of his apology is one based on an outsider or
etic perspective, while from Joyce’s point of view, Wayne’s evaluation of his
apology is one based on an outsider or etic perspective. In other words, both
Wayne and Joyce can be regarded as taking either an emic or etic perspective
in their evaluations of the relative (im)politeness of the apology depending on
whose understanding we are talking about in the first place (i.e. either Wayne’s
or Joyce’s). We will revisit the particular challenges posed for understanding
politeness in intercultural settings in Chapter 11.
5.4 Analyst/lay-observer understandings

Understandings of politeness can arise not only through participation but also
through observation of evaluative moments. Whether we are lay persons or
analysts, we all begin from the same point, making observations. The difference
between understandings of lay observers and analysts lies in what is done with
those observations of evaluative moments of politeness.
Lay observers are persons who do not have specialised knowledge of a
particular field, in this case, the field of politeness research. What is done in lay
observation, then, is to move straight from observation to interpretation. In other
words, observations about a particular evaluative moment result in spontaneous
accounts of it. These accounts seek to generalise and attribute motivations and
the like, but are not based on any attempt to systematically build up evidence for
those accounts. For example, if a friend, in an outburst quite out of character,
yells at me in anger, I might attribute this potential impoliteness to him ‘not
feeling well’ or being ‘upset about something else’. I might then generalise
from this incident to conclude that my friend is the kind of person who does
or says impolite things when he is sick or upset. Lay observers thus generate
spontaneous and less stringently evidenced understandings of politeness.
In the case of analysts, however, these observations are subject to two fur-
ther processes before generating interpretations of those evaluative moments,
according to the communication scholar Klaus Krippendorff (1970; see also
Arundale 2013). The first is that these observations are formalised in some way.
This involves systematic labelling, classifying or categorising these observa-
tions using technical terms or concepts. These processes result in ‘formalised
observations’, or what is generally termed ‘data’ in the social sciences. The
second set of processes involves inferential work where one detects possible
relationships, order and structure in the data, thereby generating evidence for
one’s subsequent interpretations. Many of the studies of politeness we dis-
cussed in the previous two chapters involve exactly these kinds of processes.
An analyst thus generates interpretations of evaluative moments of politeness
through systematic and evidenced observation. What counts as ‘systematic’
and ‘evidenced’ observation varies, of course, according to the nature of the
initial observations of evaluative moments and the means by which they are
formalised into data.
The different pathways by which lay observers and analysts generate inter-
pretations of their observations of evaluative moments of politeness are sum-
marised in Figure 5.5. Lay observers move directly from making observations
to interpreting those observations. Analysts, on the other hand, offer (or at
least attempt to offer) systematic evidence for those interpretations through
formalising those observations by generating data, and teasing out possible
relationships, order and structure in that data.
Universe of Making Generating Producing Interpreting

perceivable observations data by evidence results
events formalizing via
observations analysis
Figure 5.5 Procedures in interpreting observations of evaluative moments of politeness

(Arundale 2013, after Krippendorff 1970: 242).
However, while the perspective of lay observers is considered marginal at best

in the physical sciences, in the social sciences the situation is quite different. In
studying politeness, we are in fact very interested in the understandings of lay
observers. This is because the understandings of lay observers can constitute
an important influence on what it is we are studying, the understandings of
participants and metaparticipants. In other words, how people talk and think
about politeness can influence the ways in which evaluations of politeness arise
in and across moments of time in the first place, as we noted in Chapter 4. It
is also important to remember that everyone, including the analyst, generates
understandings of politeness from the perspective of a lay observer. There is
thus the ever-present danger that lay observation masquerades as analysis in
the interpretation of evaluative moments of politeness.
Thus, while we maintain that the understandings of politeness which arise
through lay observation and analysis should be carefully distinguished, we are
not arguing that one should be privileged over the other. Indeed, the under-
standings of lay observers can offer useful insights into evaluative moments
of politeness if they are examined in systematic and evidenced ways by ana-
lysts. Let us return to the ‘intercultural apology’ we introduced in example
(7). We noted that there was evidence from the interaction itself that while
Wayne evaluated the apology as sufficiently polite, Joyce evaluated the apol-
ogy as impolite (mei-limao, bu-limao). The question this analysis raises is
whether these are idiosyncratic evaluations or they are legitimately invoking
their respective moral orders. In other words, are we actually dealing with an
intercultural difference here or is it simply that Wayne and/or Joyce understand
this incident in ways peculiar to them? Chang and Haugh (2011a) thus sys-
tematically examined responses of lay observers, a group of twenty-five Aus-
tralians and a group of twenty-five Taiwanese, in order to explore this question.
The lay informants were first asked to report their evaluations of the apology
after listening to the whole conversation, rating it on a five-point Likert-type
scale, ranging from ‘very impolite’, ‘impolite’, ‘neither polite nor impolite’,
‘polite’ through to ‘very polite’.5 The results of this survey are summarised in
Figure 5.6.
16
14
very impolite
12
10 impolite
8
6 neither polite nor
4 impolite
2 polite
0
Australian Taiwanese
Figure 5.6 Overall ratings of the degree of (im)politeness by lay observers.
There are two points we can note from the responses of Australian and
Taiwanese lay observers. First, overall the Australians tended to evaluate the
apology as ‘not impolite’ (i.e. either ‘polite’ or ‘neither polite nor impolite’),
while the Taiwanese tended to evaluate the apology as ‘impolite’, a difference
that was found to be statistically significant. Second, despite this overall trend
there was some degree of intracultural variation, especially amongst the Aus-
tralian lay observers. In other words, there was both intercultural and to a lesser
extent intracultural variability in their evaluations of (im)politeness.
A subset of twenty-eight respondents were then asked in interviews to explain
why they evaluated the apology in the way they did. Australian lay observers
who evaluated the apology as ‘polite’ or at least ‘not impolite’ most often
made reference to Wayne being ‘friendly’ towards Joyce in the course of their
conversation.6 In example (8), one Australian informant suggests the apology
would have been much less polite if Wayne had not been friendly.
(8) AM6: And um that when she suggested that they make another
time he was keen for that, and he seemed concerned with
her mother’s issue and also with her and how she were, so
I think if he didn’t really want to speak to her, then he- he
could have been a lot less polite.
I: Okay.
(Chang and Haugh 2011a: 427)
In other words, showing interest in Joyce and her family contributed to the
overall evaluation of the apology as ‘not impolite’. This indicates that evalua-
tions of (im)politeness are holistically grounded, often being discourse-based
impressions rather than utterance-based, a point we will revisit in Chapter 6.
Taiwanese lay observers who evaluated the apology as ‘(very) impolite’, on
the other hand, most often made reference to the notion chengyi (‘sincerity’).
Evaluations of an apology as ‘sincere’ (chengyi-de) and thus ‘polite’ (limao)

are often occasioned through repetition of the speech act, by means of which
one can also secure uptake of an offer of redress (i.e. another meeting at another
time), another important means of displaying ‘sincerity’ (chengyi), as we can
see in example (9) below from a Taiwanese informant.
(9) 8 TM3: dddddddddddd,
‘I feel he wanted to hang up the phone quickly,’
ddddddddd
‘so I think he was not polite [bu-limao].’
((section omitted))
11 TM3: dddddd, dddddddddddd,
‘his apology was short, I think he was hurry to hang up
the phone’
dddddddddd, ddJoycedddd,dd
dd
‘Because he said he would like to make it next time.
But he continued talking about something else before
Joyce said anything.’
(Chang and Haugh 2011a: 429–30)
The lay observer accounts for why he evaluated the apology as ‘impolite’ (bu-
limao) by making reference to the perceived lack of ‘sincerity’ (chengyi) on
Wayne’s part in making the apology. First, the Taiwanese informant implies
that the apology should have been repeated in suggesting that Wayne wanted to
get the conversation, and thus his apology, over and done with quickly (turn 8).
Second, he suggests that while Wayne made an offer of redress, namely, meet-
ing at another time with Joyce and her family, the invitation lacked sincerity
(chengyi) because he did not arrange a specific date for another meeting. What
becomes apparent here, then, is that not only did the Australian and Taiwanese
lay observers evaluate the apology differently, they offered different accounts
for why they evaluated the apology in that way. In other words, they appealed
to emic understandings of their own respective moral orders, one where friend-
liness was invoked, and another where chengyi (‘sincerity’) was emphasised.
It can be inferred, therefore, that the respective evaluations of Wayne, who
evaluated the apology as ‘polite’ or at least ‘not impolite’, and Joyce, who
evaluated it as ‘impolite’ were grounded in the third-order cultural or societal
expectancies that constitute their respective perceptions of the moral order.
Our point here, then, is that not only do we need to be careful to distinguish
between the understandings of lay observers and analysts, but also that the
understandings of lay observers can offer a useful resource for analysts in
interpreting evaluative moments of politeness (see also Chapter 9).
5.5 Theoretical/folk-theoretic understandings

The final locus for understanding politeness involves the ways in which it
is conceptualised. This can be either from a scientific-theoretic perspective or
from a folk-theoretic perspective. A scientific-theoretic perspective involves the
conceptualisation of politeness as an object of study. Some of the key charac-
teristics of a scientific conceptualisation are that it is precise and accurate (e.g.
there is no ambiguity in categorisation of phenomena), internally coherent (e.g.
the same underlying epistemological and ontological foundations underpin all
parts of the theory, or the absence of internally contradictory propositions),
replicable (e.g. other analysts could generate similar interpretations with the
same or similar data), and it has some degree of explanatory or predictive
power. Most importantly, the conceptual schema/categories used to analyse
and describe politeness must be regarded, according to the ethnographer James
Lett, as ‘meaningful and appropriate by the community of scientific observers’
(1990: 131). In other words, scientific-theoretic accounts involve explicitly
defined and formalised understandings of interpersonal phenomena that are
shared amongst scientific observers. Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness
theory (see overview in Chapter 2), for instance, represents a conceptualisation
that was previously regarded as ‘meaningful and appropriate’ by most polite-
ness researchers, but nowadays is regarded in that way by only some. It is
worth noting that not only do our views of scientific knowledge change, the
key source of scientific theorising (at least in social sciences) is in fact emic
and folk-theoretic perspectives on interpersonal phenomena.
A folk-theoretic perspective aligns to a large extent with the emic under-
standings of members, but refers specifically to the emic knowledge repre-
sented in conceptualisations of persons, relationships, social structures and the
like, which tacitly underpin the moral order in question. For example, in folk-
theoretic accounts of politeness shared amongst some English speakers, polite-
ness is assumed to arise because we need to show consideration and respect
to others. Other English speakers assume, however, that politeness arises as a
way of showing one is of a higher social class than others. These both con-
stitute folk-theoretic understandings of politeness. However, while different in
scope, if we look a little deeper we find that in both cases a conceptualisation
of persons as independent and autonomous individuals is presumed in such
accounts.
Lying somewhere between scientific and folk-theoretic understandings of
politeness are what Kádár (2007) terms ‘proto-scientific’ understandings.
These arose in the work of scholars in the past where politeness was studied,
not systematically in its own right, but rather as just one part of a more holistic
record of customs and philosophical beliefs. In certain historical cultures such
as the Chinese there is a long proto-scientific history of studying politeness
5.6 Summary 103
and impoliteness for educational or moral purposes. Although such theories

inevitably lack the methodological and terminological systematicity of their
modern counterparts, they are invaluable as sources of understandings of
politeness that go beyond folk theorising.
Once again, it is important to note that while folk or proto-scientific-theoretic
understandings are considered marginal at best in many areas of research, since
we are interested in the case of politeness in what is an inherently social phe-
nomena, such understandings can potentially play a very important role in scien-
tific theorising. However, we would emphasise here that a scientific theorisation
should only ever be informed and never unduly constrained by folk-theoretic
understandings of politeness. This does not amount to a claim that a scientific-
theoretic understanding should be ‘independent of the observer’s culture’ (Lett
1990: 131). We, like Pike, are doubtful that such observer-independent under-
standings are even possible. As he argues,
there are no observer-independent bits of knowledge of any kind – scientific or
other . . . there is no observer-independent world view; there is no set of observer-
independent data accessible to us; the scientific method does not eliminate that
dependency’. (1990: 187)7
It is thus even more critical in our view that we carefully identify the loci of
the understandings of politeness in question.
One very important consequence of the way in which we theorise politeness,
whether one draws from a scientific-theoretic or folk-theoretic understand-
ing of politeness, is that this conceptualisation both affords and constrains
what count as observations, data, evidence and interpretations for the analyst.
Arundale (2013) argues, for instance, that a conceptualisation of politeness as
rooted in a view of persons as independent and autonomous individuals affords
interpretations of politeness as a kind of strategic choice on the part of the
speaker, as described in Brown and Levinson (1987). However, it constrains,
at the same time, understandings of politeness as normative practice. Given
that different theoretical conceptualisations not only afford but also constrain
our understandings of politeness, in the remainder of this book we will make
reference to a range of different scientific-theoretic and folk-theoretic concep-
tualisations of politeness. Our basic position is that due consideration should
be given to emerging, alternative theoretical paradigms that afford new under-
standings of politeness alongside those that are more well established in the
field.
5.6 Summary
In this chapter we’ve suggested that there are four key loci in which under-
standings of politeness can be grounded:
(i) Participant/metaparticipant understandings: user interpretations

(ii) Emic/etic understandings: user conceptualisations
(iii) Analyst/lay observer understandings: observer interpretations
(iv) Theoretical/folk-theoretic understandings: observer conceptualisations.
In other words, we have proposed that first-order understandings of politeness
encompass the interpretations (participant versus metaparticipant) and concep-
tualisations (emic versus etic) of users, while second-order understandings of
politeness encompass the interpretations (lay versus analyst) and conceptual-
isations (folk-theoretic versus theoretical) of observers. We’ve suggested that
collectively these four key loci offer a more nuanced framework for under-
standing politeness than a simple distinction between the understandings of
‘participants’ and ‘analysts’ or ‘non-scientific’ and ‘scientific’ understandings.
What the framework also suggests is that there are no purely ‘first-order’ or
‘second-order’ approaches to politeness. Instead, any examination of politeness
can be grounded in a number of different loci of understanding. Indeed, it is
important to understand that any one person can have multiple perspectives on
politeness. While analysts are very often metaparticipants, they are at times
also participants themselves in evaluative moments of politeness. An analyst
is also able to make observations grounded in a lay observer’s perspective on
those evaluative moments, and may draw from either folk-theoretic or theo-
retical conceptualisations of politeness. It follows, then, that it is important
to carefully distinguish between what counts as an analyst’s, as opposed to a
lay observer’s, understanding of politeness. It is also important to distinguish
between the different kinds of participation status relative to which understand-
ings of politeness are situated, and the emic/etic understandings that different
persons may invoke in the course of the evaluative moment(s) of politeness.
There are a number of advantages in acknowledging that ultimately we
should be talking about understandings of politeness rather than any one par-
ticular understanding. On the one hand, it affords a more nuanced range of
approaches and methodologies to be drawn upon in furthering our understand-
ing of politeness. This allows us to break free from the ‘linguistic’ constraint on
studying politeness – the traditional focus on linguistic manifestations of polite
behaviour such as politeness strategies and linguistic forms. In this way, we can
further explore the inherent multimodality of politeness as a social practice, and
also explore the various modalities in which such social practices are situated.
On the other hand, it helps to integrate different perspectives into holistic – but
nevertheless internally coherent – approaches to the study of politeness. When
politeness is understood in this way, it can be approached from the perspective
of various different disciplines, employing a wide range of approaches and
methodologies. In other words, when we talk of understandings of politeness
we mean both different epistemological bases (e.g. user versus observer) and
5.6 Summary 105
different disciplinary bases (e.g. linguistic pragmatics versus corpus linguis-

tics) for grounding the study of politeness. However, rather than surrendering
completely to theoretical eclecticism, what this framework offers is a way of
situating understandings of politeness in such a way that more meaningful com-
parisons can be made. In the remaining chapters in this book, we explore more
fully the implications of conceptualising politeness as a social practice and
appreciating the multiple loci in which understandings of it can be situated.
Part II
Politeness and time

6 Politeness in interaction
6.1 Introduction
It has long been recognised that time is fundamentally constitutive of social
action in interaction. In the course of reconceptualising politeness as social
practice in Chapters 4 and 5, we have argued that time both constrains and
affords understandings of politeness in various ways. For this reason, it is
important to analyse understandings of politeness as they arise in situated
interactions. However, to situate politeness in interaction need not necessitate
a narrow focus on micro-analyses of individual encounters. We have suggested
that particular understandings of politeness in the here-and-now are inevitably
interlinked with understandings of politeness in the there-and-then, both over
the course of the relational histories of those participants, and across the mul-
titude of interactions through which the relational network(s) and attendant
moral order(s) that are involved are constituted. In other words, we assume
here a view of interaction as a meeting point between time in the sense of
the locally situated here-and-now, and time in the sense of the historically and
socially relative there-and-then.
To illustrate what we mean by this, consider example (1), from the American
film Trains, Planes and Automobiles. The interaction begins after Neal has been
forced to walk a considerably long way back from the carpark having found
his rental car was not there, adding to his numerous trials in trying to get back
home for Thanksgiving after his flight was cancelled.
(1) 1 Agent: (smiling with a cheerful voice) Welcome to Marathon,
may I help you?
2 Neal: Yes.
3 Agent: How may I help you?
4 Neal: You can start by wiping that fucking dumb-ass smile
off your rosey, fucking, cheeks! And you can give
me a fucking automobile: a fucking Datsun, a fucking
Toyota, a fucking Mustang, a fucking Buick! Four
fucking wheels and a seat!
5 Agent: I really don’t care for the way you’re speaking to me.
109
6 Neal: And I really don’t care for the way your company left
me in the middle of fucking nowhere with fucking
keys to a fucking car that isn’t fucking there. And
I really didn’t care to fucking walk, down a fucking
highway, and across a fucking runway to get back here
to have you smile in my fucking face. I want a fucking
car RIGHT FUCKING NOW!
7 Agent: May I see your rental agreement?
8 Neal: I threw it away.
9 Agent: Oh boy.
10 Neal: Oh boy, what?
11 Agent: You’re fucked!
(Trains, Planes and Automobiles, 1987)
This excerpt begins with an ostensibly polite greeting and a standard pre-offer
of assistance used in service settings, ‘May I help you?’ (turn 1). While her offer
literally seeks a yes/no response, it is normally expected that the customer will
launch immediately into his or her request given the presumed service encounter
interpretative frame at play here. Neal’s literal response in turn 2 is thus the
first indication that something is amiss. The agent nevertheless retains her
(stereotypical) ‘Pan-Am smile’ and cheery tone of voice in formulating the offer
of assistance itself in turn 3 subsequent to Neal’s gratuitous go-ahead response.
Neal responds by launching a long tirade where he repeatedly swears as he
demands the agent stop smiling and that he be given a car (turn 4). The agent
remains composed subsequent to this in indirectly requesting that Neal refrain
from using such language through a mild complaint (turn 5). However, this
occasions yet another long tirade of complaints from Neal where he once again
repeatedly uses the word ‘fuck’ (turn 6). The litany of complaints is concluded
with a forcefully worded demand that he be given a car immediately. Once
again, despite the clear impolite attitude on the part of Neal, the agent retains
a polite demeanour, as she continues using a ‘cheerful’ intonation and once
again uses a formulation which is conventional for a polite service encounter
frame (i.e. ‘may I . . . ’) in requesting further information from Neal (turn 7). It
is at this point that the tenor of the interaction begins to alter. Upon learning
that Neal does not have a copy of his rental agreement, the agent concludes,
employing a ‘non-cheerful’ intonation for the first time and without a smile,
that Neal is ‘fucked’ (turn 11). The contrast between the polite demeanour of
the car rental agent in continuing to adhere to the script for a polite service
encounter and the overtly impolite responses of Neal thus becomes even more
salient at this point in the interaction, when the agent switches into formulating
her utterance with an overtly impolite attitude (albeit not quite as vehement as
Neal).
What we can see from example (1) is that the polite attitude on the part of the
agent and the consistently impolite attitude on the part of Neal, in the here-and-
now of this particular interaction, are readily recognisable to the participants
(and to us, the viewers) through their interdependence with understandings of
politeness in the there-and-then in two key ways. First, in order to appreciate
that the agent’s attitude can be characterised as ‘polite’, while Neal’s attitude can
be characterised as ‘impolite’, it is necessary to invoke a particular interpretative
frame, a set of expectancies in relation to mainstream North American service
encounters, which constitutes the moral order at play here. This ‘polite service
encounter’ frame is invoked by the agent through her classic ‘Pan-Am smile’,
her ‘cheery’ intonation, and the use of various formulations conventionally
associated with such a frame (e.g. ‘may I . . . ’, ‘I don’t really care for . . . ’). It
is contested, on the other hand, by Neal through repeated use of an expression
(i.e. ‘fuck’) that is considered taboo relative to this frame; although as we
pointed out in Chapter 4, even this seemingly antisocial act presupposes the
acknowledgment of social standards through which it is constituted as taboo in
the first place.
Second, the impact of the agent’s use of language that contests the ‘polite
service encounter’ frame is increased because it stands in marked contrast to
her prior polite attitude. In other words, our evaluation of her assertion that
Neal is ‘fucked’ is made relative to evaluations of her prior demeanour. The
pragmaticians Arin Bayraktaroğlu and Maria Sifianou (2012) describe this as
an instance of ‘the iron fist in a velvet glove’, where an ostensibly polite attitude
is progressively built up in an interaction to the point where an impolite attitude
becomes even more devastating for the target than it otherwise would have been
(and thus amusing for the viewers in this case).1 The way in which Neal, and,
perhaps more importantly, we the viewers, evaluate the agent’s last assertion that
Neal is ‘fucked’ thus draws from the relational history of these two characters
that has been established in the course of this particular interaction, as well
as from understandings of the ‘polite service encounter’ frame involved. In
other words, we have a brief relational history at play here, which affords an
evaluation of ‘you’re fucked’ that is more marked than it might otherwise have
been relative to this frame. It also illustrates how the analysis of politeness can
go hand-in-hand with analyses of impoliteness, and thus ultimately we should
be theorising them both within one overarching framework.
What becomes apparent here, then, is that understandings of politeness,
impoliteness and so on are co-constructed by two or more participants over
the course of an interaction. To be co-constructed means that not only the
speaker but also other participants can influence the trajectory of social
actions/meanings and the evaluations of politeness they reflexively occasion
as they develop in interaction. The upshot of this is that politeness must be
analysed as situated in interaction, although it is important to note here that
we conceptualise interaction not as isolated moments of the here-and-now

but rather as inextricably linked to understandings of politeness in the there-
and-then. In this chapter we thus consider more deeply the various ways in
which interaction in this broader sense, whether it be direct or mediated, both
constrains and affords understandings of politeness.
6.2 Key concepts
Incrementality and sequentiality

Politeness has traditionally been analysed as a discrete, independent evaluative
moment on the part of either the speaker or the hearer at the utterance level
(see Chapter 2), which assumes, in turn, a punctuated view of time. However,
as we discussed in Chapter 4, a key finding from more recent research is that
understandings of politeness are cumulative: they build on one another, both
within and across interactions. In other words, evaluations of a particular utter-
ance of turn at talk vis-à-vis politeness are invariably understood relative to
both prior and forthcoming evaluations, rather than simply retrospectively (see
Eelen 2001). While those evaluations that arise adjacently to each other, or
what is sometimes termed contiguously, tend to be most tightly interlinked,
the retrospective/prospective sense of a present occurrence can, of course, go
beyond adjacent turns at talk, and indeed may go beyond a single interaction
located at a particular point in time and space. This latter perspective on polite-
ness as cumulative assumes, in turn, a perspective on time in the here-and-now
as emergent.
In order to analyse emergent understandings of politeness in interaction
alongside punctuated understandings, there are two key inter-related analytical
notions that we need to consider: incrementality and sequentiality. Incremen-
tality refers to the way in which speakers adjust or modify their talk in the light
of how the progressive uttering of units of talk is received by other participants.
In other words, the fact that social actions and meanings are produced incre-
mentally in interaction means they are inevitably subject to ongoing evaluation
as they are produced, and so can be adjusted accordingly in real time. Sequen-
tiality, on the other hand, refers to the way in which current turns or utterances
are always understood relative to prior and subsequent talk, particularly talk that
is contiguous (i.e. immediately prior to or subsequent to the current utterance).
This means that next turns are a critical resource for participants in reaching
understandings of the evaluations of others, including understandings of other’s
understandings of one’s own evaluations. It also means that not only partici-
pants, but we analysts as well, have access to a record of what John Heritage
characterises as ‘publicly displayed and continuously up-dated intersubjective
understandings’ (1984: 259) when examining understandings of politeness in
interaction. It is very important to remember, however, that next turns con-

stitute an indirect record from which both participants and analysts can only
make inferences. A response in next or subsequent turns rarely provides proof
of how a prior turn has been understood except in those relatively few cases
where participants utter explicit metacomments about that turn (a point which
we will discuss further in Chapter 9). Instead, responses in next turn provide
some evidence for participants, and thus for analysts, to make inferences about
the current speaker’s understanding of the prior turn.
To illustrate the ways in which incrementality both constrains and affords
understandings of social actions and meanings, and thus (im)politeness, con-
sider for a moment example (2), from the film There’s Something About Mary.
Here, Ted (a ‘nerd’) is inviting (or attempting to invite) one of the ‘cool’ girls
at school (Renise) to go to the senior prom.
(2) 1 Ted: ((taps Renise on the shoulder as she is smoking)) Hey,
Renise.
2 Renise: ((as she slowly turns around to face Ted)) Hey.
3 Ted: So what’s up?
4 Renise: ((looks away)) Er, I dunno.
5 Ted: Cool. (looks away)
6 Ted: ((long pause: Ted nods twice with body oriented
towards Renise but not gazing directly at her; Renise
orients her body at right angles to Ted and does not
return his gaze at any point))
So I was wondering, I don’t, I don’t know uh, if may-
maybe you wanted to,
((Renise turns her gaze further away from Ted looking
at something in distance))
or not, if you don’t want to you don’t have to, I mean,
I don’t, I, I was just wondering if maybe you’d go to
the prom and, or uh, if you felt like that maybe you
wanted to go, with me, or I mean whatever, if, if you
didn’t.
7 ((pause))
8 Ted: Did you take that bio test? Cos that was like-
(There’s Something About Mary, 1998)
What is notable here, of course, is the way in which Renise deploys gaze
and the orientation of her body to signal disengagement with Ted’s talk. This
evident disengagement, in turn, occasions the incremental development of an
invitation where the structurally preferred response to the invitation is initially
acceptance, but which is subsequently transformed into one where rejection is
projected. Preference is a technical term from the field of conversation analysis,
which refers to the non-equivalent ordering of actions. A preferred action,

according to Anita Pomerantz (1984), is one that is performed with a minimum
of delay early in the turn, or with some kind of upgrade, while a dispreferred
action is one that is performed after some delay later in the turn and may be
qualified or hedged. Acceptance of the invitation (as well as the invitation itself)
is initially structured as a preferred action by Ted in turn 6 as it is launched with
the conventional form for making tentative invitations (‘I was wondering if’)
early in the turn. However, this trajectory is subsequently abandoned as both the
invitation (and acceptance of it) is progressively transformed into a dispreferred
action through hesitations, hedges (‘I don’t’, ‘I mean’), qualifications (‘I if may-
maybe you wanted to’), to the point that a refusal is evidently the structurally
preferred response (‘or not, if you don’t want to you don’t have to’, ‘or I
mean whatever, if, if you didn’t’). Indeed, at the conclusion of his long-winded
invitation, Ted attempts a topic shift in turn 8 before Renise has even responded
(at least verbally), perhaps because he is anticipating a refusal from her.
Whether or not Renise’s evident disengagement in this interaction would
be evaluated as impolite is an open question, especially given this is meant to
be an interaction between high school students. However, Renise is arguably
indexing at least a non-polite attitude here because she does not display any
visible sign of interest in either Ted or his invitation. That Ted picks up on this
non-polite attitude is evident from the way in which he progressively adjusts the
preference structure of the invitation in the course of his talk. In other words,
we can find evidence of a particular understanding of politeness (i.e. a non-polite
attitude on the part of one of the participants) through close examination of the
incremental development of a social action, in particular, the transformation
of the preference structure of Ted’s invitation from a preferred to a dispreferred
action.
Renise’s subsequent response is not, however, the structurally preferred rejec-
tion, as we can see in the continuation of the dialogue in example (3). This, in
turn, muddies the waters somewhat in relation to how her attitude towards Ted
might be evaluated.
(3) 8 Ted: Did you take that bio test? Cos that was like-
9 Renise: ((moves her head to gaze at Ted)) Look, I heard this
rumour that this guy, like, was gonna ask me.
((moves her gaze away)) So I’m gonna wait and see
what happens there.
((pause)) But that sounds great ((torques her body to
face Ted)), yeah.
10 Ted: Okay.
11 Ted: ((turns away to leave, and then turns back))
So, is that like-, is that like a yes or a no or?
12 Renise: ((turns to face Ted)) I thought I made it perfectly

clear, ((starts moving away)) if everything else falls
apart, ((torques body to face Ted as she is leaving))
maybe.
13 ((Renise walks off))
14 Ted: (towards Renise’s back as she walks away)
I’m gonna hold you to that.
(There’s Something About Mary, 1998)
Instead of flatly refusing, Renise follows her implied refusal (in indicating there
is someone else she is hoping will ask her) with an upgraded appreciation (‘but
that sounds great’). On the one hand, this affords an evaluation of her response
as at least not impolite, if not polite. On the other hand, it creates ambiguity
in interpreting pragmatic meaning. That is, in relation to the content of her
response, is she refusing Ted’s invitation or conditionally accepting it? This
ambiguity is oriented to by Ted who pursues a less equivocal response from
Renise, albeit with a tentatively formulated question. At this point, however, not
only does Renise’s meaning here become clear (accepting Ted’s invitation is a
last resort that she might consider if no other invitations were forthcoming), but
it becomes clear that Renise is once again indexing a non-polite, if not outright
impolite, attitude here. The humorous intent of this interaction becomes clear
for the viewer, of course, when Ted indicates that he is taking her highly
conditional ‘acceptance’ of his invitation seriously. But what is important to
note here is that Ted’s understanding of Renise’s immediately prior talk (i.e. turn
9), as well as her evaluative attitude towards him and his invitation, is dependent
on her current turn (i.e. turn 12). This illustrates the critical importance of taking
into account the sequentially situated nature of understandings of politeness.
In this way, we can see how the inherent sequentiality of dialogic interaction
can also both afford and constrain understandings of politeness. It is also
in this sense that we can talk about the ‘retrospective/prospective’ nature of
understandings of politeness.
What is meant by the ‘retrospective/prospective sense of a present occur-
rence’, according to Schegloff, is that retrospectively, current turns offer
indications of the current speaker’s understanding of a just prior turn, while
prospectively, current turns set ‘some of the terms by which a next turn will be
understood’ (2007: 16). The way in which current turns are inevitably under-
stood relative to both prior and forthcoming talk is thus a critical normative
force that both affords and constrains understandings of politeness. It is also the
simultaneously retrospective and prospective operation of current turns of talk
that can ultimately confer emergent properties on understandings of politeness.
We briefly introduced the notion of emergence in relation to perspectives on
time in Chapter 4. Here, we will define the notion of emergence more formally.
In order to do so, let us consider the way in which the following request sequence
develops in an episode of the television series, Desperate Housewives. Example
(4) begins when one of the characters, Susan, goes across to see her neighbour,
Mrs Greenberg.
(4) 1 Greenberg: Susan. Long time no see.
2 Susan: Mrs. Greenberg. Do you remember those two
eggs I let you borrow last Christmas?
((She opens up her carton of eggs and motions
to two empty spaces in the container which is
otherwise full of eggs))
3 Susan: I need those back.
4 Greenberg: Well gosh, honey, I’m fresh out, but if you want,
I could run to the store.
5 Susan: Oh, forget about it, it’s not that important.
6 But since I’m here, do you still have that old
hatchback sitting in your garage? Can I borrow it
tomorrow?
7 Greenberg: You wanna borrow my car?
8 Susan: Just for a couple of hours.
9 Greenberg: Well, I’m not sure. Do you know how to drive a
stick?
10 Susan: Yes, I think so. I learned in college. It’s like riding
a bike, right?
11 Greenberg: I’m not sure, dear. ((moves to shut the door))
12 Susan: It’s no big deal. It’s just for a couple of hours.
13 I let you borrow my eggs for a whole year.
(‘Running to standstill’, Desperate Housewives,
Season 1, Episode 6, 2004)
Susan launches straight into a pre-request in turn 2, after a perfunctory greet-
ing, through a recognition check that orients Mrs Greenberg to the possibility of
a forthcoming request. However, rather than waiting for a go-ahead response,
Susan moves immediately into the request itself in turn 3, which is formulated
here as a directive, thereby displaying high entitlement to have her request
to borrow eggs granted. While Mrs Greenberg offers to purchase more eggs,
after indicating she does not have any eggs at present (turn 4), Susan dismisses
the offer (turn 5), and instead moves immediately into a check of availability
of Mrs Greenberg’s car (turn 6). This check of availability is interpretable as
a pre-request, an understanding which is subsequently confirmed when, once
again without waiting for a go-ahead response, Susan issues a second request:
this time to borrow Mrs Greenberg’s car. When Mrs Greenberg responds with
an expression of surprise, and thus equivocally to the request (turn 7), Susan
attempts to downgrade the imposition (‘just for a couple of hours’) over the
course of the next few turns – or what Brown and Levinson (1987) have termed
the degree of negative face threat (see Chapter 2) – before offering a justifica-
tion for this request in turn 13, namely, that she lent eggs to Mrs Greenberg
for a whole year. While this is somewhat ridiculous from the perspective of
the viewer, and it is this that lends humour to the sequence, it also becomes
apparent why Susan drew attention to the borrowed eggs in the first place,
namely, she equates her lending two eggs to Mrs Greenberg with borrowing the
latter’s car. In other words, a possible understanding emerges here that Susan
was asking to borrow eggs from Mrs Greenberg in order to justify asking to
borrow the latter’s car. Whether or not Susan’s reasoning or assumption here is
accepted by Mrs Greenberg (and by we viewers) is consequential, in turn, for
the understandings of politeness at play in this interaction.
One question we can consider, for instance, is how Susan’s declination of
Mrs Greenburg’s offer in turn 5 might be evaluated vis-à-vis politeness. As we
noted, in formulating the request with a directive (‘I need those back’), and
in not waiting for a go-ahead response from Mrs Greenberg subsequent to the
recognition check pre-request, Susan displayed a high entitlement to having
the request granted. In other words, Mrs Greenburg was being put on the spot,
as it were, in that no contingencies in granting the request were oriented to
by Susan in the formulation of her request, and thus a refusal to grant the
request was projected as the dispreferred response here. Yet in spite of this,
there was no indication in Mrs Greenburg’s response that she evaluated Susan’s
request or the formulation of it as impolite, or at least she did not display an
evaluation of it as impolite. And indeed she offers to go to buy some eggs in
turn 4, a display of concern that is interpretable here as polite given this goes
beyond what might be normally expected from one’s neighbours. This display
of concern is reciprocated when Susan refuses Mrs Greenberg’s offer in turn
5. Since Susan treats the granting of her request that Mrs Greenberg return the
two eggs as no longer ‘important’ in her declination of Mrs Greenberg’s offer
to buy some eggs, the declination is itself interpretable as polite, since she has
ostensibly relinquished a high entitlement to have her request granted.
However, Susan’s declination of Mrs Greenberg’s offer is cast in a somewhat
different light as the interaction progresses. In particular, it is shifted in part
through Susan’s subsequent request in turn 6 to borrow Mrs Greenberg’s car,
and Mrs Greenberg’s initial equivocal response in turn 7. It shifts even further
when Susan responds to Mrs Greenberg’s subsequent implied refusal in turn 11
by downgrading the request in turn 12, and justifies her request to borrow Mrs
Greenberg’s car by reminding Mrs Greenberg in turn 13 that Susan previously
lent her two eggs. In the light of this, then, Susan’s declination of Mrs Green-
berg’s offer is evidently less polite than it first appeared, given this is being
used as a means to persuade Mrs Greenberg to lend her car to Susan. We can
punctuated evaluations
turn 5 turn 6 turn 7 turn 11 turn 12 turn 13
interleaving
speaker/recipient
evaluations
emergent evaluations
Figure 6.1 Punctuated versus emergent understandings of politeness.
see from this that the way in which Susan’s declination in turn 5 is evaluated
vis-à-vis politeness can be revised in the light of the social actions/meanings
that arise through subsequent turns, in particular turns 6–7 and 11–13. Ulti-
mately, then, the evaluation of turn 5 vis-à-vis politeness is formally dependent
on what subsequently occurs in the interaction (as well as what precedes it).
This is displayed schematically as illustrated in Figure 6.1. The arrow point-
ing from the left to the right side of the page in Figure 6.1 represents the
ongoing movement of time in the here-and-now. The individuated boxes above
the main time arrow represent punctuated evaluations of politeness at each
turn. The interleaving boxes under the main time arrow represent the interleav-
ing of speaker and recipient evaluations of politeness across contiguous turns.
The dotted box underneath the interleaving boxes represents an instance of an
emergent evaluation of politeness. The difference between understandings of
politeness represented above the time arrow (representing those derived via
punctuated evaluations) and those representations below the time arrow (rep-
resenting those derived emergent evaluations) is that the former are formally
independent of each other while the latter are formally interdependent. The
most important thing to note here, then, is that understandings of politeness
cannot always be tied to single utterances or turns at talk. In cases where they
are cumulative across an interaction, this means evaluations of politeness are
interdependent or intertwined with prior and forthcoming evaluations of polite-
ness, and thus an evaluation of current utterances or turns cannot be formally
examined without considering prior and forthcoming utterances or turns. In
other words, politeness must be analysed as incrementally and sequentially
situated in the here-and-now of dialogic interaction, or what is termed ‘talk-in-
interaction’ in conversation analysis.
One final point to note is that since incrementality and sequentiality both
afford and constrain understandings of the social actions and meanings that
occasion evaluations of politeness in the here-and-now, we must inevitably

allow for what Schegloff terms possible understandings. It is evident that in
many cases participants pursue possible understandings of actions along mul-
tiple lines, and thus, ‘they are therefore prepared to recognise even ones arrived
at by others that might have been thought elusive’ (2006: 147). The multiple
lines along which participants pursue understandings of social actions and
meanings, and thus evaluations of politeness which are reflexively occasioned
by these understandings, is an important characteristic of politeness in interac-
tion. One key upshot of this is that understandings of politeness are inevitably
tinged with some degree of contingency. In other words, participants, and thus
analysts, can only be as sure in our understandings of politeness as the prior
and subsequent turns allow.
Accountability
In Chapter 4 we briefly noted that evaluations of politeness, impoliteness and
the like can have significant consequences for those parties involved. The
real-world consequentiality of understandings of politeness is a function of
the way in which participants can be held accountable for social actions and
meanings, and thus the evaluations that are reflexively occasioned by them, in
interaction. Accountability is a notion that was first introduced in the work
of the ethnomethodologists Sacks (1992 [1964–72]) and Garfinkel (1967). It
refers to the degree to which a person (or group of persons) is taken to be
committed to or responsible for the real-world consequences of their social
actions and meanings. Accountability arises in two key ways in interaction.
On the one hand, participants are normatively accountable for their evaluations
of themselves and others. This is accountability in the sense of what Heritage
refers to as ‘the taken-for-granted level of reasoning through which a running
index of action and interaction is created and sustained’ (1988: 128). On the
other hand, participants can be held or hold themselves morally accountable
for how they are taken to be evaluating something or someone, in the sense of
‘overt explanation in which social actors give accounts of what they are doing
in terms of reasons, motives or causes’ (Heritage 1988: 128). In both cases
however, participants are drawing from a perceived moral order in attributing
or claiming accountability for particular understandings of politeness.
Let us consider example (5), an interaction from a documentary investigating
race relations in Australia, where four Indians are being taken around various
communities in Australia. In the example, two of them are talking with an
Aboriginal elder about the experiences of indigenous Australians. It begins
here with Radhika asking the elder why indigenous Australians have struggled
to improve their lives. Here we use a slightly more complex set of transcription
conventions so that we can examine paralinguistic and prosodic aspects of the

interaction alongside what is said.2
(5) 1 Radhika: So do they lack motivation? Why do they lack

[motivation?]
2 Elder: [some do ] because of, uh, the sss- so I think
because they’ve been so suppressed, you know if
you kick a dog so much and call ‘em a dog he’ll
stay there [so that-
3 Gurmeet: [so >there
there there< should be uhm, educational institu-
tions, uh specific educational institutions for Abo-
rigines [then, ] after that there [will be no ( ) ]
4 Elder: [there is] [there is a lot of that]
here there is a lot of that here.
5 Gurmeet: then what are the complaints.
6 Elder: ((cocks her head)) uh uh, beg your pardon?
7 Gurmeet: why are you complaining then.
8 Elder: ((steps back)) ↑am I complaining?=
9 Radhika: =n::o.
10 Gurmeet: ((smiles)) heh [heh]
11 Elder: [I’m] answering questions that they
asked. I’m not complain-
12 Gurmeet: but but [you are] saying
13 Elder: [you don’t] you don’t live in my country,
you don’t- this is my country, ((points her finger
at Gurmeet)) Kamilorau is my country. I see what
happens here, whatever happens in your country.
14 We complain about some of our governments=
15 Gurmeet: =yeah=
16 Elder: cos are they making right decisions for us? You
know this is what we’ve gotta ask questions about.
And why can’t we complain.
(Dumb, Drunk and Racist, Episode 4, 2012)
The issue of accountability starts to come to the fore at turn 5, when Gurmeet
asks what the elder’s complaints are about, having been told that there are spe-
cific educational institutions to support Aborigines. This is evidently taken to be
more than simply an information-seeking question by the elder, as we can see
from her response in turn 6, where she asks that Gurmeet reformulate his ques-
tion, thereby implying dissatisfaction with the formulation of his current talk,
as well as displaying puzzlement at the terms of the question through cocking

her head. However, despite the indications that something is amiss, Gurmeet
nevertheless pursues a response from the elder in turn 7, once again asking her
to justify her complaints. In doing so, Gurmeet is implicitly challenging the
elder’s right to complain, invoking the moral claim that if one does not have
grounds for complaining, one should not complain. It then becomes evident
from the elder’s response in turn 8 that the way in which Gurmeet has cast the
elder’s prior responses as complaining is potentially causing offence. In other
words, the elder evaluates Gurmeet’s casting of her responses as complaining
as ‘not polite’ or even ‘impolite’. The elder steps back, thereby metaphorically
indicating relational separation from Gurmeet, while the prosodic contour of
talk also indicates astonishment or surprise at this pursuit of a response, both
through the raised pitch and the emphatic stress on ‘complaining’. While the
question is ostensibly addressed to Gurmeet, it is Radhika who offers the pre-
ferred response here, namely, that she is not complaining, in the subsequent
turn. Gurmeet then displays recognition of the possible offence by displaying
embarrassment through smiling and two laughter particles (turn 10), and this
offence is confirmed through the elder’s subsequent response in turn 11, where
she challenges the casting of her prior talk as complaining by Gurmeet, and
recasts it as simply ‘answering questions’. Yet despite his recognition of the
possible offence, Gurmeet nevertheless pursues his line that the elder is com-
plaining in turn 12, although he abandons his turn when the elder moves to
cast Gurmeet as an outsider, and herself as an insider. In doing so the elder
invokes her right to judge the situation of indigenous Australians in turn 13.
Ultimately the elder concedes in turns 14–16 that she does complain about the
government, but ends by claiming the right not only to judge but also to com-
plain. What appears to have caused offence here, then, on the part of the elder
is that Gurmeet as an outsider has challenged her (insider’s) right to complain,
and this breaches her expectations vis-à-vis what is considered an allowable
and would thus count as a polite assessment.
A complaint, as we discussed in Chapter 4, involves constituting the moral
character of the conduct (whether it be verbal or nonverbal) through that talk
itself, since particular talk or conduct is never inherently a transgression, impro-
priety, offence, fault and so on. In challenging the elder’s grounds for complain-
ing, Gurmeet is implicitly positioning himself as having the right to evaluate
the moral character of her conduct vis-à-vis discussions of problems facing
indigenous Australians. In essence, he is appealing to a perceived moral order
and positioning himself as an insider alongside the elder in relation to this moral
order. It becomes evident by the end of this example that it is this positioning
that causes offence. From the elder’s emic perspective, Gurmeet does not have
the (moral) right to challenge her (moral) right to judge and complain, and thus
his line of questioning constitutes a transgression or impropriety that grounds

her offence. More specifically, she treats the evaluative character of Gurmeet’s
line of questioning as in breach of her understanding of what counts as polite by
positioning Gurmeet’s perspective as one that is etic, that is, an outsider’s per-
spective. In this way, we can see how understandings of politeness can intersect
with issues of culture and identity, a point we will discuss further in Chapter 11.
The point we are making here, however, is that this interaction clearly illustrates
the importance of accountability for understandings of politeness in interac-
tion. It is notable that such expectations become particularly salient when there
is perceived to have been a breach of the moral order, and thus expectations
vis-à-vis politeness. On the one hand, we can see that Gurmeet is holding the
elder morally accountable for complaining in that he seeks an overt explanation
or account for why she is complaining. On the other hand, we can also see that
not only is the elder holding Gurmeet morally accountable for how he is being
taken to be evaluating her, but that she also treats Gurmeet’s attempts to hold
her morally accountable as offensive. Thus, in order to examine the way in
which understandings of politeness and impoliteness arise through participants
holding others (and themselves) accountable to a perceived moral order, we
must carefully examine how participants orient to the moral order itself in
interaction.
The moral order, as we noted in Chapter 5, is multilayered. It consists of
localised sets of expectancies that develop for individuals in situated relation-
ships (first-order) which are embedded (and thus interpreted) relative to com-
munities of practice, organisational or other group-based sets of expectancies
(second-order), which are themselves embedded relative to broader societal sets
of expectancies (third-order). Participants can thus be held accountable to dif-
ferent layers of the multiple sets of expectancies that constitute the moral order.
Let us explain what we mean by this by first considering an interaction between
Chinese participants of an online discussion board focusing on animation,
which is taken from a study of ‘doing deference’ by Haugh, Chang and Kádár
(2013). The thread from which example (6) is taken was initiated by Angele,
who began by apologising to everyone in a group of net-friends for a trans-
gression; namely, reposting pictures that others had previously posted. This
apology thread is occasioned by Angele being held accountable by others to
the set of expectancies for posting in this particular relational network. Since
her transgression is of the expectations of a relational network that has formed
through ongoing contact around a common interest (namely, discussing anima-
tion) it constitutes a transgression of second-order moral expectancies. We pick
up this thread at the point Angele is apologising for the third time having had
her two previous apologies rejected by Alice. We provide here just a translation
of the original Mandarin Chinese (see Haugh, Chang and Kádár 2013 for the
original text).
(6) Post 8, 16:21 (Angele)

[I] apologise for this: I posted some pictures on ‘Mr A and Ms
A’s sweetheart little shop’ (newbie > <)’. I really don’t know
my behaviour [of posting pictures] makes me an idiot) [I]
here apologise to everyone. [I] hope you can forgive me . . . [I]
will never do this again . . . [I am] sorry everyone . . .
Angele structures her apology in a particular way, starting with an announce-

ment that explicitly indexes her current post as constituting an apology through
a performative verb (‘[I] apologise for this’). She then describes the offence,
namely, posting some pictures on an area belonging to Mr A and Ms A, as
well as casting herself as a newbie (xinshou), and displays her frustration with
this newbie status through an emoticon representing ‘closed eyes’ (> <). This
casting of herself as a newbie is offered as an account for this offence, as she
acknowledges that by infringing upon this norm she has made a fool of herself.
She then repeats her apology, asks for forgiveness, promises forbearance (i.e.
that it will not happen again), and then apologises yet again. In repeating her
apology in this way, Angele is orienting to a broader societal set of expectan-
cies in relation to apologies in Chinese, namely, that one indexes sincerity
(chengyi) through repetition of an apology expression (a point we noted in
Chapter 5). In doing so, Angele is also displaying a markedly deferential line,
thereby opening up her apology to evaluation as ‘polite’ (limao). However,
she is also orienting to the expectancies of this particular relational network,
or what can be termed a community of practice. In other words, Angele is
simultaneously orienting to both second-order (group-based) and third-order
(societal) norms that constitute the moral order being invoked by these
participants.
In the following three posts, however, we can observe how first-order norms
(localised sets of expectancies that develop for individuals in situated relation-
ships) can intersect with second-order and third-order sets of expectancies, and
thus also play a part in understandings of politeness that arise through interac-
tion. Example (7) begins when another participant (Juziheng) intervenes in the
thread.
(7) Post 9, 16:22 (Juziheng)
That . . . Miss A . . . your apology has no format >/////<. [I am]
afraid you have to apologise one more time >/////<
Post 11, 16:23 (Alice)
Sigh . . . Miss A is a newbie . . . Her membership was created by
me a few days ago. She is a little fart kid who doesn’t know
anything. Over!
Post 12, 16:25 (Juziheng)
Oh Miss A . . . we encourage each other to go through things. I’ve

been here for a long time . . . [I] also don’t understand anything
either >///////<
>/////< [blushing, embarrassed]
In post 9, Juziheng complains that Angele’s apology does not follow the correct
format expected by members of their group (thereby orienting to a second-
order norm), and demands yet another apology from Angele, although the
illocutionary force of this complaint and directive is softened somewhat by the
emotive stance of embarrassment that Juziheng displays through an emoticon
that represents blushing. This display of embarrassment about continuing to
hold Angele accountable for the formulation of her apology mitigates to some
degree a potential evaluation of her post as ‘impolite’ (mei-limao, bu-limao).
At this point, however, Alice intervenes to defend Angele as seen in post 11.
Specifically, she casts Angele as a ‘little fart kid’ (xiao-pihai) who does not
know anything (specifically about the rules on reposting prior posts and the
correct format for apologies), and thus implies that Angele cannot be expected
to know everything. She also identifies Angele as a newbie who has just joined
their group at Alice’s invitation. In being posted subsequent to Juziheng’s
attempt to hold Angele accountable, Alice holds Juziheng accountable for
a post that she considers inappropriate (i.e. too harsh), and thereby implies
Juziheng does not have moral rights to be making such an evaluation of Angele.
In other words, Alice asserts that while she can hold Angele accountable
for transgressions, Juziheng does not have such rights. Alice’s post thus
invokes a localised sets of expectancies vis-à-vis her own situated relationship
with Angele that contrast with the set of expectancies vis-à-vis the situated
relationship between Juziheng and Angele, and in this sense, we can see
how first-order sets of expectancies that develop for individuals in localised,
situated relationships can also play a part in understandings of politeness in
interaction.
The invoking of these first-order norms by Alice is subsequently ratified by
Juziheng in post 12, when the latter expresses empathy for Angele through
claiming to have had similar experiences or feelings, and displays embar-
rassment through a ‘blushing’ emoticon. In other words, Juziheng implicitly
acknowledges her transgression or impropriety in attempting to hold Angele
accountable for transgressions, thereby orienting to the sets of expectancies
that have developed for the localised relationships that have developed between
these various participants.
To analyse understandings of politeness in interaction, then, we must care-
fully examine the ways in which participants orient to or invoke (whether
implicitly or explicitly) the reflexively inter-related layers of the moral order.
Invoking the moral order can also involve, as we have seen, explicitly casting
participants as either members relative to this moral order, and thus insiders, or
as non-members who are inevitably seen as taking an outsider perspective on
it. Attributing or claiming an insider versus outsider perspective on the moral
order can be highly consequential for how understandings of politeness, impo-
liteness and so on develop in interaction, because what participants can be held
accountable for can be traced, in part, to perceptions of the moral order and the
(perceived) status of participants vis-à-vis that moral order.
Footing
In Chapter 5, we introduced the notion of participation status. We pointed out
that when examining politeness in interaction we consider the different per-
spectives from which participants themselves may be evaluating social actions
and meanings. In particular, we argued that understandings of politeness must
be situated in relation to various different possible types of participation status.
However, closer examination of the perspectives of participants in interaction
indicates that there is yet another phenomena we need to take into account –
what the sociologist Erving Goffman (1979, 1981) called footing. The notion
of footing refers to four distinct sets of roles and responsibilities that Goffman
suggested were conflated in the folk notion of speaker. According to Goffman
there are four different speaker footings: animator, author, principal and figure.
An animator (or utterer) is the one producing talk, an author is the entity that
creates or designs the talk, a principal is the party responsible for that talk, and
a figure is the character portrayed within the talk.
In example (8), taken from the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, we can
see how the person serving in the shop exploits these footings in making
suggestions that would be conventionally understood as polite, but given the
ironic framing here, are open to evaluation as not polite (and even perhaps as
impolite).
(8) (Charles is going to buy a gift for Carrie’s wedding to a rich

Scotsman)
1 Charles: Do you have the wedding list for Banks?
2 Server: Certainly, sir. Lots of beautiful things for around about
the £1,000 mark.
3 Charles: What about things around the sort of £50 mark? Is
there much?
4 Server: Well, you could get that Pygmy warrior over there.
5 Charles: This? Excellent!
6 Server: If you could find someone to chip in the other 950
pounds. Or our carrier bags are £1.50 each. Why don’t
you just get 33 of them?
7 Charles: Well, I think I’ll probably leave it. Thanks very much.
You’ve been very . . .
(Four Weddings and a Funeral, 1994)
What we can see here is that the server maintains the same seemingly ‘polite’
demeanour throughout the interaction consistent with expectations invoked by
the service encounter frame relative to which the two participants co-construct
the social actions, meanings and evaluations here (cf. example (1)). However, it
becomes apparent that this demeanour is only a polite veneer on the surface of
the interaction, in which Charles is ultimately left in no doubt as to the server’s
true attitude towards him. It thus constitutes a prototypical instance of what
Leech (1983) terms ‘mock politeness’. It can be characterised as ‘mock’ (as
opposed to ‘genuine’) because seemingly helpful suggestions (which are con-
sistent with a polite service encounter frame) actually mask a negative assess-
ment of Charles’ request that she suggest something much cheaper than she
initially canvassed. This negative assessment is masked because it is achieved
through ironic detachment, which is achieved, in turn, through the server invok-
ing a complex set of footings.
There are two suggestions made by the server in response to Charles’ request.
While the suggestion that he buy a ‘pygmy warrior’ in turn 4 appears at first to
be a genuine one, and towards which Charles expresses an appreciation (in turn
5), it becomes apparent in her subsequent turn that the suggestion is an entirely
unrealistic one given Charles’ budget. Another suggestion (to buy carrier bags)
is also made in the same turn, which although formulated in the conventional
manner of a polite suggestion in a service encounter, is nevertheless also clearly
unhelpful. Charles is left with no option but to leave the shop, leaving it unsaid
what he thinks of the service he has just received (in turn 7).
If we consider this interaction from the perspective of Goffman’s notion
of footing it becomes evident that while the server is the animator and is
seemingly committed as the principal of these suggestions, she is not the
author. Instead, the server is animating the kinds of things a helpful and polite
server might suggest. In this way, she detaches from being a ‘fully committed
participant’ to a ‘detached observer’, as argued by the conversation analyst
Rebecca Clift (1999). In the footing of a ‘detached observer’ she is able to
imply an evaluation of these suggestions, namely, that they are absurd, thereby
implying that Charles’ request that she suggest gifts that cost around £50 is
also an absurd one. In other words, she is implying a negative assessment of
Charles’ request, which in the context of a service encounter frame is clearly
not polite (and perhaps even interpretable as impolite). Moreover, through the
ironic frame invoked here, she takes a footing relative to the implied negative
assessments as a fully committed participant: she is the animator, author and
principal of these negative assessments, and thus her negative evaluations may
also be perceived as hostile towards Charles. In this respect, it is open to
evaluation as impolite. She also implicitly invites Charles to share in this ironic
frame, although this is obviously difficult given he is the target of the negative
assessments. However, we, the audience, as ratified overhearers, clearly can
share in the irony. Ultimately, then, it is this clash between the ostensibly polite
demeanour of the server, the implied negative assessments that are not polite
relative to a service encounter frame, and the hostile attitude towards Charles
that is potentially open to evaluation as impolite, which gives rise to what
can be termed ‘mock politeness’. Notably, these different understandings of
politeness arise simultaneously through the complex set of footings invoked by
the server.
In Goffman’s framework only the speaker has a complex range of footings
available to him or her. Yet clearly recipients can also take various footings.
It is thus proposed by Haugh (2013c) that in the notion of speaker – or what
we term here production – footing needs to be complemented by the notion of
recipient (or reception) footing. While the animator (or utterer) is completed
by the (meta)recipient, as we discussed in Chapter 5, it is further argued that
the role of the author who constructs the talk has a counterpart in the inter-
preter who perceives and evaluates the social actions and meanings that arise
through that talk. The role of the principal who is socially responsible for
those meanings or actions is necessarily complemented by the accounter who
(explicitly or tacitly) holds the principal responsible for those social actions
and meanings. And, finally, the production role of figure, namely, the character
depicted in the talk, is also a potential target when the character depicted is
co-present, or when an utterance is attributed to someone other than the speaker.
The complex array of participation footings proposed here are summarised in
Figure 6.2.
From Figure 6.2 it becomes apparent that understandings of politeness need
to be situated not only simply vis-à-vis speakers or hearers, but relative to
a complex array of production and reception footings. To examine how this
complex set of participation footings can underpin multiple understandings of
politeness in interaction, let us return to the example of the interaction between
two visiting Indians and an Aboriginal elder talking about the experiences of
indigenous Australians, which we discussed earlier. The relevant part of the
interaction is reproduced in example (9) below.
(9) 5 Gurmeet: then what are the complaints.

6 Elder: ((cocks her head)) uh uh, beg your pardon?
7 Gurmeet: why are you complaining then.
8 Elder: ((steps back)) ↑am I complaining?=
speaker hearer
figure target
production principal accounter reception

footing footing
author interpreter
utterer (meta)recipient
ratified (un)ratified
addressee side participant
bystander overhearer
Figure 6.2 Types of participation footings.
9 Radhika: =no::
10 Gurmeet: ((smiles)) heh [heh
11 Elder: [I’m answering questions that they
asked. I’m not complain-
12 Gurmeet: but but you are saying
(Dumb, Drunk and Racist, Episode 4, 2012)
As we previously discussed, the elder appeared to take offence at Gurmeet hold-

ing her morally accountable for ‘complaining’ about the situation of indigenous
Australians, as seen in turns 5, 7 and 12 in example (9). This was apparent from
the way in which the elder held Gurmeet morally accountable for how he was
being taken to be evaluating her in holding her morally accountable for com-
plaining, as seen in turns 6, 8 and 11. We would go further here though, and
argue that this interaction involves a complex array of participation footings
on the part of Gurmeet and the elder. In suggesting that the elder is unjus-
tified in complaining (in turns 5, 7 and 12), Gurmeet is clearly taking the
participation footing of animator, principal, author, with the elder as the fig-
ure. The reception footings that are invoked through Gurmeet’s talk, on the
other hand, involve the elder as the addressee and figure, as well as inter-
preter and accounter. This array of participation footings is largely mirrored in
the elder’s responses (in turns 6, 8 and 11), where she takes the participation
footing of utterer, principal and figure. However, the authorship of her utter-
ances is in fact attributable to Gurmeet (given he is the one who suggested
she is complaining). This interactional detachment from the author footing
is how, in part, the elder signals her potential offence at Gurmeet’s line of
questioning.
There are, moreover, more than two participant loci in relation to under-
standings of (im)politeness in this interaction. There is, for instance, the host
of the documentary as well as two other visiting Indians who do not directly
contribute to this particular interaction, but are nevertheless co-present, and so
are positioned in the reception footings of side participants and interpreters.
There is also yet another layer of participation footings; namely, we, the view-
ing audience, who are ratified overhearers to this interaction, and thus can also
form our own evaluations of politeness relative to this interaction. But most
importantly for the trajectory of this particular segment of their interaction
is the solitary contribution of Radhika. While the elder’s question in turn 8
is ostensibly directed at Gurmeet, the presence of side participants, including
Radhika, allows Radhika to step into the addressee footing in turn 9. In endors-
ing the elder’s implicit rejection of Gurmeet’s suggestion, or what the conver-
sation analyst Tanya Stivers (2008) terms an affiliative response, Radhika not
only takes up a reception footing as accounter and interpreter of the elder’s prior
turn, she also takes up a reception footing as accounter of Gurmeet’s prior talk.
In other words, she implicitly holds Gurmeet accountable for his potentially
offensive suggestion. The fact that Gurmeet moves to reiterate his stance once
again after this (in turn 12), however, suggests that he does not have the same
understanding vis-à-vis impoliteness as the elder and most likely Radhika. It
also remains an open question what understandings the host and the other two
Indians might have had. But this multiplicity of possible understandings is,
we would argue, the whole point. When examining politeness in interaction
the question should not be ‘is this talk or conduct polite or impolite?’ and
the like. Instead, the question should be ‘for whom is this (potentially) polite
or impolite for?’ There is no reason to think that there should be only one
answer to the question of how interactions are evaluated vis-à-vis politeness.
This is not to suggest that participants always have diverging understandings
of politeness, but rather to simply point out that we need to relinquish the oft
implicit assumption that everyone has the same understanding of politeness in
interaction.
Interactional multimodality
Throughout the analyses in this chapter we have been alluding to yet another
key feature of how understandings of politeness arise in interaction, namely,
multimodality. We will consider the issue of multimodality further in Chapters 7
am I complai-ning?
Figure 6.3 Instrumental analysis of ‘agitated’ pitch contour.
and 8. Here, we will thus only briefly consider what might be termed interac-
tional multimodality – the way in which multiple modes can be drawn upon
in forming understandings of politeness in interaction. In the case of direct
interaction, apart from talk (i.e. what is said), it is now well established that
prosody, essentially how something is said, can be enormously influential on
understandings of politeness, as pointed out in an instructive survey of prosodic
dimensions of impoliteness by Culpeper (2011a) (see Chapter 3). The prosody
of talk involves a complex interplay of factors such as timing, loudness, accent,
pitch and voice quality. While the more detailed transcription conventions of
conversation analysis pick up on many of these features, as we saw in our
analysis of example (5), an instrumental analysis of prosodic features can fur-
ther ground systematic analyses of the role of intonation in reaching particular
understandings of politeness. We suggested earlier, for instance, that the elder
displayed astonishment at Gurmeet’s repeated request that she provide a justi-
fication for complaining about the situation of Aboriginal Australians through
both a raised pitch and emphatic stress on ‘complaining’ when responding
‘↑am I complaining?’. The former markedly raised pitch is clearly visible in
an instrumental analysis of the pitch contour of this particular utterance, as
illustrated in Figure 6.3.
At the beginning of her utterance, the elder’s local pitch on ‘am’ is markedly
higher and rising relative to her global pitch register, as seen in the contour
labelled A in Figure 6.3. This was represented by an upward arrow (↑) in the
conversation analytic transcription. At the end of the ‘complaining’ her pitch
is also visibly rising, albeit at a lower pitch as seen in the contour labelled B in
Figure 6.3. This was represented by a question mark (?) at the end of the word in
the transcription. The conversation analyst Margaret Selting (1996) describes
this kind of intonation contour as displaying ‘astonishment’, through which the
elder signals that Gurmeet’s pursuit of a response is unexpected. In other words,
through this intonational contour the elder implies that Gurmeet’s question
is inapposite (i.e. inappropriate or unjustified) (Couper-Kuhlen 2012). The
‘astonished’ or ‘surprised’ intonational contour also signals that the preferred
response to her question is in fact denial of her question. As well as displaying
agreement with her astonishment, an affiliative response that is subsequently
provided by another participant, Radhika, is signalled through a fall-rise pitch
on an elongated ‘no’.
The advantages of this kind of instrumental prosodic analysis is that it is
relatively objective and accessible given it is a visual representation of pitch
movement rather than being based on various different kinds of transcription
systems, as well as being more finely nuanced. However, ultimately, the main
advantage of such an analysis is that it draws the attention of researchers to
examine the important role intonational patterns can play in the interactional
achievement of understandings of politeness, which might otherwise go unno-
ticed in our analyses of politeness.
It is also becoming increasingly apparent that non-verbal modes can also be
critical in constituting understandings of politeness in interaction, as we have
observed in a number of the examples in this chapter. These modes include
gesture (i.e. an expressive movement that has a clear boundary of onset but
does not result in any sustained change of position), facial expressions (i.e.
movements of parts of the face, such as the mouth, nose, eyebrows), gaze (i.e.
the organisation, direction and intensity of looking), proxemics (i.e. the distance
that individuals take up with respect to others and relevant objects) and posture
(i.e. the way participants position their bodies in a given interaction) (Norris
2004). In example (5), for instance, the elder steps back as she utters ‘↑am I
complaining?’.
In example (10), an insurance agent (Lan) in Taiwan has been asking about
whether a long-term customer (Chen) has renewed his car insurance with
them. At the point this excerpt begins, the insurance agent topicalises unmet
expectations, namely, that he had expected the case to go to them because the
customer’s mother had said it would (turn 3). This is followed by a denial of
knowing what his mother had promised by the customer, and admitting that the
case is being dealt with by someone else (turn 4). An interpretation of Chen’s
response as displaying embarrassment is evident from close examination of not
only his pausing and use of hesitation markers, but also from an analysis of his
gaze, as illustrated in the figure in example (10), which is adapted from Chang
and Haugh (2011b).
(10) IR-4
As Lan’s utterance in turn 3 (whereby he implies a complaint) progresses we

can observe how Chen’s line of gaze moves from being directed at Lan (frame
1) to being askew of Lan (frame 2) through to being directed at something else
in the distance (frame 3). In other words, Chen cuts his line of gaze towards Lan
as the implied complaint becomes apparent. In his subsequent verbal response
in turn 4, Chen frowns as he first claims a lack of knowledge about the details
of the case, thereby doing ‘recalling’ (frame 4), before returning his line of
gaze to Lan when he begins to offer an account for these unmet expectations
on the part of Lan (frame 5). Through cutting his line of gaze with Lan at this
particular point in the interaction, commitant with the hesitation markers and
6.3 Key studies 133
pausing, Chen thereby displays ‘embarrassment’ (buhao-yisi) in response to

Lan raising the issue of unmet expectations. This display of embarrassment is
important because through it Chen displays his evident discomfort and sense of
impropriety at not being able to met Lan’s expectations vis-à-vis the insurance
case. Thus, while Lan’s topicalising of these unmet expectations is open to
evaluation as ‘not polite’ (bukeqi, lit. not holding back), Chen does not display
offence, but rather displays embarrassment, thereby indicating an evaluation of
Lan’s stance here as ‘not impolite’ (bushi bu-limao).
Finally, it is worth noting that both prosody and non-verbal modes of inter-
action are not restricted to direct (i.e. face-to-face) interaction, as we also
observed the way in which emoticons, for instance, can influence understand-
ings of politeness in mediated interaction, such as in online discussion boards
or messenger services and the like in examples (6) and (7).
6.3 Key studies

In a series of articles on the so-called Conjoint Co-Constituting Model of Com-
munication, Arundale (1999, 2006, 2008, 2010b) offers a theoretical grounding
for much of what we have discussed in this chapter. In this theory, three key
principles are proposed, drawing from work in conversation analysis, namely,
the Sequential Interpreting Principle, the Recipient Design Principle and the
Adjacent Placement Principle. These are claimed to lie at the heart of all under-
standings of social action, meaning and evaluations in interaction, and so are
arguably critical to our understanding of politeness in interaction.
Along similar lines, Haugh (2007c, 2013d) develops an approach to situating
politeness in interaction, with a particular focus on how participants’ under-
standings of politeness can be situated vis-à-vis the analyst, on the one hand,
and how understandings of politeness are tightly interwoven with interpreta-
tions of social actions and meanings, on the other. Both these approaches fall
under the general purview of interactional pragmatics, an approach to prag-
matic phenomena that is informed by research and methods in conversation
analysis.
Readers who are interested in how conversation analysts themselves might
approach the analysis of politeness (although it has not been a core interest
in conversation analysis to date), would be well advised to consult an article
by Ian Hutchby (2008) where he outlines both the potential contribution that
conversation analysis can make to studies of politeness, as well as its natural
limitations.
A range of approaches to analysing politeness in interaction that are broadly
discursive can be found in a special issue on Politeness as a Discursive Phe-
nomenon edited by Kasper (2006a). It features papers by Locher (2006), Haruko
sequentiality incrementality
analysis of social action/meanings
analysis of evaluations of politeness reflexively

occasioned by those social actions/meanings
situate understandings of politeness

vis-à-vis participation footings
accountability multimodality
Figure 6.4 Key steps in analysing understandings of politeness in interaction.
Cook (2006) and Kasper (2006b) herself, which offer different ways in which
politeness can be analysed in interaction.
Finally, for an approach to analysing politeness in discourse that remains
more faithful to the Brown and Levinson (1987) original model of polite-
ness, see Usami’s (2006) introduction to Discourse Politeness Theory. In this
approach, Usami draws from corpus-informed approaches to analysing polite-
ness in discourse, arguing that politeness involves an holistic evaluation of
discourse rather than remaining at the level of individual utterances.
6.4 Summary
Ultimately, no matter whether we choose to focus exclusively on linguistic
dimensions of politeness, or aim to broaden our analytical scope to include
multimodal elements as well, the general approach that we have suggested here
remains the same. This general approach to analysing evaluative moments of
politeness in interaction is summarised in Figure 6.4.
In order to analyse understandings of politeness in interaction we must first
start with an analysis of the social actions and meanings that arise in this
interaction. From there we can start to build our analysis of the incremental and
sequential development of understandings of politeness, which are invariably
constituted through multiple modalities. In particular, we need to focus on how
participants can be held accountable for those social actions and meanings, and
the evaluations of politeness they reflexively occasion. In doing so, however,
it is critical to remain cognisant of the various possible participation footings
taken up by participants. In this way, we can go beyond the overly constraining
view that there is only ever one understanding of politeness in interaction.
6.5 Exercises 135
6.5 Exercises
I. Answer the following questions:
1. Can you think of instances where what appeared at first to be impolite
talk or conduct turned out to be not as impolite as you first imagined? If
so, why might that have been the case?
2. Have you ever experienced situations where different people in a group
had very different understandings about whether something was polite
or impolite? If so, why might that have been the case?
3. Do you feel differently when watching someone being teased in a joking
manner as opposed to being teased yourself? If so, why?
II. Consider the following questions and analyse the politeness phenomena
occurring in them. Compare your analysis with the brief annotations below:
(a) (Flora is sitting by herself in a local teahouse when Mr Mybug comes
and sits down)
Mybug: Do you know what D. H. Lawrence said?
Flora: I do actually, yes.
((pause))
Mybug: He said, ‘There must always be a dark, dumb, bitter belly
tension between the living man and the living woman.’
Flora: Mr Mybug, do tell me about the book you’re writing.
(Cold Comfort Farm, 1995)
(b) (Kat is talking with her mother Lesley. They are discussing Kat’s plans
for coming home from university)
1 Les: Anyway when d’you think you’d like to come home ↓love.
2 (.)
3 Kat: Uh:m (.) we:ll Brad’s goin’ down on Monday.
4 (0.7)
5 Les: Monday we:ll ah-:hh .hh w: ↑Monday we can’t manage
because (.) Granny’s ↓coming Monday?
6 (0.4)
7 Kat: Oh;,
8 (0.5)
9 Kat: Could- (0.3) Dad↑couldn’t pick me up from:: (.) ee-
even from Westbury could he
10 Les: .hh I ↑CAN’T HEAR you very well cz of this damn
machine that’s attached to this telephone ↑say it again,
11 Kat: Would it be possible: for Dad to pick me up from Westbury
on [Monday.
12 Les: [Ye:s yes ?THAT would be ↓alright
In example (a), we can see how what is normatively expected by the con-
versation opener ‘Do you know . . . ?’ is flouted by Flora in order to imply she
is not interested in the topic. While it is a recognisable pre-telling, in other
words, the preferred response here is ‘yes’, which therefore acts as ‘go-ahead’
for Mybug to launch his telling, Flora neglects this preference structure in issu-
ing a bald ‘no’ that blocks the progressivity of that telling. It is thus open to
evaluation as impolite. However, Mybug is not at all deterred and launches his
telling nevertheless, to which Flora responds by attempting a topic-shift. Thus,
while we the audience (who are ratified overhearers) can see Flora is being
potentially rude to Mybug, he seems blissfully unware.
In example (b), we can see how Kat changes the formulation of her request
from an ‘indirect proposal’ in line 3, whereby she nevertheless displays a
relatively high entitlement to be able to come home when she likes, to a
more tentative formulation (‘couldn’t . . . could he?’) in line 9, and finally to
a formulation (‘would it be possible . . . ’) in line 11 that displays a much
diminished estimation of entitlement to come home as and when she likes. This
reformulation of the request, and the degree to which it orients to her entitlement
to have that request granted thus develops incrementally over the course of this
interaction in response to her mother’s orientation to the problematicity of Kat’s
request.
7 Politeness, convention and rituality
7.1 Introduction
The present book has so far analysed politeness as it emerges and develops
in a given interaction. Indeed, in many cases understandings of politeness
come into existence ‘on the spot’, as the interactants draw from certain sets
of expectancies in co-constructing interaction in localised, situated contexts.
If we put politeness on a time scale, it can be argued that evaluative moments
of politeness in the here-and-now represent a cycle of participant actions and
reactions, which come into existence in either the punctuated or emergent sense
of the present moment. However, understandings of politeness are not always
completely localised in this way. A certain interaction is often the continu-
ation of a previous one, and so the interactants construct politeness in the
light of understandings formed in prior interactions. Even more importantly,
many contexts do not necessitate such localised understandings. In many set-
tings, perhaps most typically formal or institutionalised ones, understandings
of politeness are arguably less localised in the here-and-now given the inter-
actants are expected to follow certain ‘scripted’ expectations. In such contexts
politeness tends to follow certain underlying schemata: pre-existing patterns
of thought or behaviour used in recurrent ways that are readily recognisable to
members. These schemata reduce uncertainty in the formation and interpreta-
tion of linguistic politeness for the simple reason that by relying on them the
interactants can follow pre-existing ways of understanding politeness. It can
be argued that, if localised understandings of politeness arise in the here-and-
now of time, such schemata represent a pre-existing frame for understanding
politeness in the here-and-now.
Indeed, if we observe various interactional datasets it becomes evident that
we are often less original than we would normally think. There are certain
situations and acts, which seem to ‘speak for themselves’, in a sense that
they evoke relatively little ambiguity (see Chapter 5), due to the fact that the
interactants, unwittingly or not, utilise schematic forms or social practices. A
reliance on schemata should definitely not be imagined as a robotic process
of copying of models of politeness: pre-existing patterns of politeness can be
137
made use of by members as discursive resources, to use a term which is

widely used in discourse analysis (see e.g. Thornborrow’s (2002) study for a
detailed analysis, as well as Taylor (2007). To draw upon schemata in projecting
understandings of politeness is an inherently social practice, which can be
utilised to successfully cope with difficult situations, or even to politely gain
the upper hand in a conflict, as the interaction in example (1) below illustrates.
(1) Sheriff: ‘We are looking for a man who might be around
here.’
...
Colonel Ludlow: ‘What is he wanted for, sheriff?’
Sheriff: ‘That would be of a private nature.’
Colonel Ludlow: ‘A private nature? That’s a public office you
hold, isn’t it Sheriff?’,
((awkward silence))
Colonel Ludlow: ‘Gentlemen . . . ’
(Legends of the Fall, 1994)
Example (1) takes place between a retired colonel who works on his land and a
company led by a corrupt sheriff who is pursuing a fugitive, who is in fact hiding
at the colonel’s property. This interaction represents a case where a recurrent
social practice, namely, the use of the form of address ‘Gentlemen’ to address
others ‘politely’, is utilised to conceal aggression. In other words, a particular
interpretative schema is being drawn upon here as a discursive resource to
accomplish a particular end. The noteworthy element in this interaction is that
the colonel’s final utterance, which follows a long and awkward silence and is
made with a rising pitch, does not leave any doubt with regard to its meaning:
it politely but very determinedly signals the end of the interaction. That this
is understood is evident from the pursuers indignantly leaving at that point.
The form of address ‘gentlemen’ could have various readings in the present
context. For example, it could function as a polite imperative for the sheriff
to answer the colonel’s question. However, as ‘Gentlemen’ sets up schematic
interpretation of a marker of leave-taking in this particular social setting, the
sheriff and his companion can have little doubt with regard to the meaning of
the colonel’s utterance.
As a matter of course, the interaction in example (1) represents a prototyp-
ical situation where a schema is being deployed and understood according to
what appears to be the speaker’s plan. However, ambiguity is an inherent fea-
ture of understandings of politeness, and even those understandings that draw
from schemata are not completely exempt. This claim has been confirmed by
anthropological research (e.g. Rasmussen 1992), which claims that schematic
behaviour and ambiguity are not at all contradictory phenomena. One could
argue that a particular schema tends to generate a default understanding, but
then it depends on various factors whether this understanding actually arises

in a particular communicative interaction or not. There are cases, for instance,
when seemingly polite patterns just do not seem to function as such, as we can
see illustrated in example (2). This interaction takes place between Veek, an
alcoholic French vicomte (nobleman), and his friend ‘Packy’, an American mil-
lionaire, at a train station, while Packy’s high-class English fiancée, Beatrice,
who is known for being a prude, stands next to them.
(2) He chuckled amusedly and turned to Beatrice, all smiles, as one
imparting delightful news.
‘When last I see this old farceur it is in New York, and he is
jumping out of the window of a speakeasy with two policemen
after him. Great fun. Great good fun. Do you remember, my Packy,
that night when . . . ’
‘Are you off somewhere, Veek?’ asked Packy hastily.
‘Oh yes. But do you remember . . . ?’
‘Where?’
When Veek begins to retell stories from Packy’s stormy past the latter attempts
to silence him by changing topic and inquiring about the other’s plans, which is
often interpreted as a polite sign of discomfort. However, Veek does not seem
to get the hint, and after perfunctorily answering Packy’s question, restarts the
telling of the story, and so Packy needs to interrupt him yet again. While the
schema used by Packy here is not understood by the vicomte in the way it
would normally be, and it is this that creates the comical situation here, this
humour could not come into existence should the reader not perceive the failure
of this schema in the first place.
Examples (1) and (2) illustrate that there are certain pre-existing patterns
which are associated with politeness and which are understood by most peo-
ple. This would imply that these patterns operate according to rather simple
principles, that is, they are generally understood by all members of a society,
having been learnt by everyone through socialisation, and thus only socially
incompetent people like the vicomte in example (2) fail to understand them
properly. However, as this chapter will illustrate, the situation is considerably
more complex than this, because patterns of politeness are often not socially
but locally constituted, and so they can remain invisible, and thus are often a
source of ambiguity and confusion, for the external observer.
7.2 Key concepts

This section overviews the role of schemata in understandings of politeness by
looking into two major types, namely, conventions and rituals.
Conventions
Schemata come into operation due to their recurrent nature. A certain linguistic
form or behaviour becomes schematic for a group of people if it is used and
used again, and so in this sense it also becomes a social practice. Recurrence is
an important factor behind the way in which we structure both information and
pragmatic meaning. Although utterances come into existence in the course of
the discursive co-construction of interaction, they tend to be formed according
to certain recurrent forms and practices, for the aforementioned reason that it
is economic to rely on schemata. As Garfinkel (1967) notes, a large proportion
of our everyday speech activity is recurrent, or what he defined as routine
language usage. Routine language activities have the following representative
properties:
r They are often left unspoken.
r They involve continuous references to the biography and prospects of an
ongoing interaction.
r They are often hidden from the external observer.
Routine is a relatively broad category, as it covers the recurrent ways in
which information and actions are organised in discourse in general. To provide
a simple example, when a mother habitually asks her child ‘How was it today?’
after school, she can use the anaphoric ‘it’ because both she and the child know,
from the context created by a series of (often similar) previous interactions,
that the topic here is ‘school’.
Certain routines specifically regulate social interaction (i.e. the ways in peo-
ple negotiate, maintain and, in some cases, renegotiate their relationships).
Those forms of recurrent schematic behaviour which follow patterns associ-
ated with understandings of politeness, as well as humour, sarcasm and so on,
are defined as conventional.
Examples (1) and (2) are both cases of politeness arising through con-
ventions exactly because they represent language usage that is meant to be
understood by everyone. As Terkourafi (2001) explains, conventional polite-
ness is typically understood on the basis of not only what is actually said
but what is left unspoken, because conventions ‘encode particular illocution-
ary forces’ (Copestake and Terkourafi 2010). For instance, the indirect utter-
ance ‘I was wondering if you could open some windows?’ is a conventionally
encoded request to open the window, and this interpretation would be clear to
almost everyone, even if strictly speaking the request is not made in a direct
way.
The conventions that underpin politeness often involve certain forms, such
as honorifics, politeness formulae, nicknames, or any form which is standardly
regarded as polite (e.g. ‘please’, ‘thank you’). This relationship between con-
vention and form has been described by Searle:
Figure 7.1 A Taiwanese invitation letter written in Chinese.
I am suggesting that can you, could you, I want you to, and numerous other forms are
conventional requests . . . but at the same time they do not have an imperative meaning.
(1975: 76)
Importantly, ‘form’ in our understanding does not necessarily cover a simple

dictionary lexeme; in other words, it is not simply a word which is polite (in fact,
we would argue that no word is in itself polite or impolite). In order for a form
to become conventionally polite, it must involve social actions and pragmatic
meanings that are regularly associated with evaluations of politeness. That is,
once a certain form occurs and recurs together with a social action which
regularly occasions evaluations of politeness it becomes a ‘polite form’, but of
course only as long as the convention is recognised as such within a society or
smaller relational network.
The relationship between a certain form and the polite meaning associated
with it can be complex. As we could see in the case of ‘Gentlemen’ in example
(1), the interpretation of this schema as a polite convention for leave-taking not
only depends on lexical meaning but also, for example, on prosodic properties.
Some other, written, conventional forms associated with politeness are repre-
sented through elaborate graphic ways, as illustrated in Figure 7.1. This figure
is a schematic Chinese invitation card (for a detailed analysis of such cards see:
Kádár 2011). The translated text is given in example (3) below.
(3) Our first son Guo’en

and our third daughter Meiiling
will have their engagement ceremony on March 29th, the 69th year
of the Republic of China (i.e. 1980), in Taipei. We would like to
notify about this matter, with sincere respect all our relatives and
friends.
Chen Wen-kuo, Chen Mei-ling, Li Yang and Li Ao
respectfully report this.
According to the traditional Chinese conventions for ‘polite’ invitations,

one needs to denigrate oneself and elevate the other. Notably, this convention
is actually represented by the graphic characteristics of those Chinese texts.
That is, in Figure 7.1 the reference to others (ddd zhu-qinyou, i.e. ‘all
our relatives and friends’; circled at the top centre) and an honorific form
which elevates the recipients (dd qijing, ‘respectfully report this’; lower left
circle) are written with big characters, which thus expresses elevation, while
the senders’ names (upper left circle) are written with small characters, which
thus expresses self-denigration. Obviously, such graphic conventions, which
can become considerably more elaborate than we can observe in Figure 7.1,
have a default reading as polite because they are associated with a specific
action; that is, inviting. It is also necessary to note that conventional forms
are not limited to lexical items, and longer utterances, such as those used in
traditional courting etiquette, can also count as ‘conventionally polite’.
Conventions come into the existence through conventionalisation – the pro-
cess during which a form recurs until what it implies becomes accepted as a
default meaning. Conventionalisation can be captured perhaps most clearly in
historical contexts where its development process can be traced through the
years. As Culpeper and Demmen (2011) argue, certain stereotypical forms of
politeness, such as indirect requests in Anglo-Englishes, actually came into
existence through a long process of conventionalisation. Conventionalisation
is often not an arbitrary procedure because it tends to follows social needs,
as well as changes in social values. For example, it has been argued that the
rise of conventionally indirect requests reflects a strong emphasis on individ-
ualism, which grew in significance during Victorian times or even earlier (see
Wierzbicka 2006).
Conventions can be more societal or more ‘local’ in scope. Cultural norms
and changes in such norms, which give rise to new polite conventions, are
always constituted within a distinct group. Various groups within a society
orient to different cultural values, and so it can be argued that a given culture
is constituted by an aggregation of subcultures (see more on this question in

Chapter 11). Approaching this claim from a different perspective, a society is
constituted through multiple intersecting and overlapping relational networks
within which different values can develop. Although polite conventions often
reflect dominant social values, as in the case of conventional indirectness noted
in Figure 7.1 and example (3), they can reflect subcultural values as well.
To provide an example, recently many Hungarian teenagers have adopted a
conventional form of acknowledgement, köszike. This word counts as ‘cute’ to
many in Hungarian because it is doubly diminutive (in a rather ungrammatical
way): that is, the standard form köszönöm is modified with the diminutive suffix
-i (köszi), which is then modified with the diminutive suffix -ke. This form has
supposedly developed amongst female teenagers, and so it reflects a certain
subcultural convention: a convention of a relational network of a certain age
(i.e. teenagers) and gender (i.e. females).1 Such conventions, which can gain
popularity as happened also with köszike, often become the subject of social
debates and criticisms, as they do not fit into the normative interpretation of
‘appropriateness’. In other words, societal conventions are usually regarded as
normative, and conventions particular to relational networks, insofar as they
significantly differ from societal ones, are often disregarded and are criticised
by those who do not identify as members of that given network.
What, however, makes convention a complex phenomenon is that even the
seemingly non-controversal category of societal conventions may also have
different interpretations across relational networks within that society. For
example, in 2004, a British author, Charles Purdy, wrote a popular book entitled
Urban Etiquette, in which he argued:
When I tell nice people that I write about etiquette, I can see from their faces that I am
metamorphosing into Great Aunt Vivian before their very eyes: I have brought etiquette
to a perfectly pleasant cocktail party. I am there to stop the fun; impose meaningless,
archaic rules; and worst of all; to strongly disapprove.
But I would like you to forget about Great Aunt Vivian’s misinterpretation of etiquette
(although the dear lady does have her uses as a disciplinarian, and she knows many things
we would be wise to keep in mind). Let’s leave her to her sugary sherry and her often
incorrect interpretation of etiquette. (2004: 2)
This folk description of politeness is rather illustrative with regard to the

interpretation of societal conventions. While ‘etiquette’ is generally understood
as a collective term for polite social conventions – or, more precisely, social
conventions comprise the norms of etiquette (see Brody 1970) – the above
discussion shows that such conventions are perceived differently by many.
The author, by positioning Great Aunt Vivian’s ‘version’ of etiquette as being
‘incorrect’ and ‘old-fashioned’, makes it clear that he (and the readers he
presumes to speak for) have different interpretations of what counts as socially
conventional politeness in modern times. However, such differences cannot be

put under the umbrella of changes over time. For example, as Purdy notes about
business etiquette:
Some people automatically practice social manners at the office – but, for example, a
gentleman’s racing to a table to hold a woman’s chair for her is generally incorrect at a
strictly business lunch . . . If they so desire, ladies can greatly help confused gentlemen
and set a proper professional tone by saying something like: ‘Please don’t get up’ if
someone does so when she leaves the conference-room table, for example. (2004: 83)
That is, there are different understandings of societal conventions constituted

across different relational networks and groups, and the way in which these
societal conventions are held to differ intersects, in part, with the ways in
which individuals, and groups of individuals, identify themselves in terms of
age, gender and professional status, for instance (see more on such factors
in Chapter 11). And, as the above-cited example illustrates, there are even
conventional linguistic and non-linguistic means to handle situations in which
different societal conventions conflict with each other, that leave evaluations of
politeness open to contestation.
It should also be noted that polite societal and network conventions co-exist,
and the choice and the interpretation of a given convention depend on one’s
‘footing’ in a given context (see Chapters 4 and 6). For example, many work-
places, which Wenger (1998) argues can involve one or more communities of
practice where a group within the workplace (or sometimes the whole work-
place) is focused on some common task, tend to develop their own conventions,
and this impacts upon understandings of politeness. A larger workplace is con-
stituted by different communities of practice, which have their own, potentially
different, conventions vis-à-vis evaluations of politeness, but when members
of different communities of practice interact with each other, they may invoke
societal conventions.
Every convention has a specific history of development. As we saw in the
case of the Anglo-English convention of indirectness, and its association in
many contexts (although not all) with politeness, it can be major social changes
that generate the birth of certain – in fact, often a set of – societal conventions,
as social changes transform the ways in which people work out their relation-
ships with each other. Since such changes take place at the societal level, the
conventions which they evoke reflect dominant societal values which are per-
petuated through socialisation (and sometimes even explicit education). Such
conventions are thus often transparent to anyone who observes a conventional
interaction, even though they are subject to challenge and variation as we could
see in the case of Purdy’s examples. However, in relational networks that tend
to be closed, conventions are often evoked by ‘local histories’. These local his-
tories, which should be defined as relational history, refer to the way in which
members of the given network recurrently, and then, through conventionalisa-

tion, interact with each other in ways that are both constrained and afforded by
those schemata. Network conventions thus evolve through relational histories
that reflect both the biography and evolving prospects of the network, which can
be somewhat hidden to the external, or non-member, observer (see Garfinkel
1967). More precisely, conventions which are developed in a distinct group are
often not intentionally hidden, but it is simply that they are constituted in ways
that only make sense for those who belong to the network. Although some
conventions which are associated with politeness within certain relational net-
works, like the Hungarian teenager greeting köszike above, may be open to the
researcher, in that they make sense to anyone irrespective of age (even though
they may sound strange to many), there are some other conventions, created
by smaller networks – often a group of few or just two people – which can be
understood only with some explanation.
Example (4), cited from Gaëlle Planchenault’s (2010: 99) study of a French
language transvestite website, illustrates this point.
(4) Bonjour à vous toutes je suis très émue à la pensée de me trouver

parmi vous et d’être la copine de la semaine je ne l’aurais jamais
imaginé . . . Merci de vos témoignages à toutes qui me donnent
aussi la force d’être et un merci tout particulier à Isabelle pour
son site.
‘Hello to allf of youf I am very movedf to be among you and
to be the girlfriend of the week. I would never have expected
it . . . Thanks to allf of you for your life stories; they give me the
strength to be myself and a special thank you to Isabelle for her
website.’
According to Planchenault, the posters at this website conventionally use fem-

inine French grammatical forms (marked with ‘f’),2 and also apply markedly
polite forms and avoid any rudeness in their interactions. These behavioural
schemata are considered atypical in comparison to many online interactions,
and so may appear unusual from the etic perspective of a non-member of the
network. The localised conventions for this relational network become under-
standable, however, if one reads the webmaster’s description for newcomers,
which prescribes conflict avoidance and a ‘soft’ style for posters, in order to
generate a harmonious style, which is needed by many in the socially disadvan-
taged group of transvestites. In other words, what we can see here is a particular
convention vis-à-vis politeness being ‘codified’ by a network as the ‘insider’
or emic understanding of politeness, in a somewhat similar way to etiquette
manuals that codify social conventions. However, unlike social conventions
these codified conventions are acquired only by those who join the network.
Example (4) represents a network convention, which is somewhat hidden but

which can be ‘decoded’ by the observant because (a) it is codified in writing,
and (b) because the above-mentioned ‘soft’ behaviour is a stereotypical marker
of femininity, which is then associated with transvestitism. There are, how-
ever, some other conventions, which are not formally codified and, even more
importantly, do not make any sense to outsiders (i.e. from an etic perspective)
unless one clearly understands the specific relational history of a network. As
a simple representative example, let us refer to one of the authors’ personal
story. When Kádár lived in Taiwan he used to go to martial art exercises on a
daily basis and during the training he made friends with a young Taiwanese
who attended a Chinese chef school. As this person was eager to speak about
the new recipes he learnt and also frequently gave advice to Kádár – who
he probably regarded as a foreigner who needed to be educated in Chinese
culture – as to which Chinese dishes he should try, the latter asked him a
schematic question (example (5)) whenever they met:
(5) dddddd?
Lit. ‘What do we need to eat today?’
This question, a symbolic request for the young Taiwanese’s advice with regard
to what to eat, became an in-group convention, which functioned as a greeting.
From a participant perspective it was associated with politeness as it appealed
to the Taiwanese person’s professional identity as a chef (despite the fact that he
was a student at that time). For network outsiders, and in isolation (i.e. without
knowing the interactants’ relational history and the identities they have in the
given network) this utterance does not make much sense because it differs
from conventions of greeting in Chinese. In other words, this convention is not
transparent to the observer.
As we can see, conventions have different degrees of opacity – or, perhaps,
we should say ‘transparency’ as they are not intentionally hidden – depending
on the size and type of the network, which creates a given convention. This
difference also determines the life-cycle of polite conventions: social conven-
tions are likely to last for a very long time, until major social changes invalidate
them, while network conventions cease to exist when a network dissolves.
Semi-hidden conventions of larger networks like the Hungarian teenagers’
form köszike above are more likely to survive for a longer period than hidden
ones, simply because they are more likely to be ‘inherited’ by new networks.
For example, while new groups of teenagers have developed their own conven-
tions, köszike continues to be in use as a pragmatic ‘heritage’ inherited from
previous generations of teenagers. Also, köszike has been adopted by other
network-types such as males who often use this form in a new sense, i.e. as a
source of humour (see more in Kádár 2013).
The above-discussed open or less transparent nature of recurrent behaviour

is the so-called visibility issue, which is related to expectations. That is, as has
been noted already, members of a network do not usually hide their conventions
as such (although there are intentionally hidden forms of recurrent behaviour
like secret rituals), but simply take them for granted as they constitute expected
linguistic behaviour.
Expectations do not only differ across societal and relational networks. There
is also an important distinction that can be drawn between recurrent forms or
practices (a) which network members evaluate as likely to happen (sometimes
called ‘empirical norms’), based on their personal experiences and relational
histories, and others (b) which they regard as should happen (sometimes called
‘moral norms’); see Eelen (2001), Haugh (2003) and Culpeper (2008). In other
words, there are conventions, which we simply expect to ‘be there’, and we
tend to regard a breach of these expectations as grounds for evaluations of
impoliteness. For example, an utterance which does not use feminine French
grammatical forms in the aforementioned transvestite website (see example (4))
is open to being interpreted as impolite, irrespective of whether the person who
has produced it means to be impolite or not. There is, however, another type
of overtly moralistic expectation. This expectation occurs when conventions,
in particular societal ones, are not followed in the way in which and the extent
to which one would prefer them to be followed, as we could see in the case of
Mr Purdy’s claim, and which also manifests itself in grumpy complaints about
the manners of the youth. For example, the British writer Thomas Blaikie
has written books and articles about the lack of civility among the younger
generations. In an article published in the Telegraph he argued,
Young people have always been rude, far ruder than anybody else. It goes back at least
as far as Jane Austen . . . Even the Queen, aged 19, knocked off a policeman’s helmet
on VE [Victory in Europe] Day, so she once told the writer Hammond Innes.
But the young of today are worse than preceding generations. This is the depressing
conclusion of a survey by the Left-wing think tank Demos. (www.telegraph.co.uk/
culture/3653126/Why-are-the-youth-of-today-so-rude.html#)
As this example illustrates, moral expectations inevitably involve contestation.

Thus, it can be argued that conventions, in particular those which are more
societal in scope, are open to being challenged by members of certain social
networks. Such challenges are less likely to emerge in the case of more local
conventions. That is, conventions which are societal in scope are accessible
to various networks with potentially different values, and this is obviously a
source of different understandings of a given convention as ‘(in)appropriate’,
as well as debates that arise from such different understandings.
To sum up, the operation of conventions is bound up with expectations, both
empirical and moral. Conventions remain unnoticed insofar as they conform
with expectations, but they become visible, often in the form of debates and
complaints, once expectations are breached.
So far we have discussed the conventional aspect of schemata, and the
roles they play in understandings of politeness, with a particular emphasis on
conformance (i.e. the need to conform to network expectations) to the sets
of expectancies of societal or relational networks. There is, however, another
important way in which recurrent schemata can operate in interaction: namely,
when such schemata are performed. These are termed rituals to distinguish
them from the conventions we have discussed thus far.
Rituals
Ritual is a fundamental notion in anthropological studies. As the renowned
anthropologist and sociologist Durkheim (1915) argued, ever since the dawn
of humankind ritual has been a key factor because it has aided, and con-
tinues to aid, humans to form social or relational networks, by providing a
powerful way in which people’s social dependence can be expressed. For
example, a tribal religious ritual of dancing has an important role in reinforc-
ing the bonds of the tribe, as it provides a joint experience which is recurrent
(usually ritual events take place in prescribed times), and also it symbolically
codifies the roles of the dancers, as well as their relationship with the perfor-
mance. That is, to stick to the example of the ritual act of dancing, it codifies
certain roles like ‘chief dancer’, ‘subordinate dancer’, ‘leading musician’ and so
on, as well as the relationship between the performance and the external world.
For instance, the group performs particular dances in order to commemorate
the story of a particular deity. Thus, the act of dancing symbolically ‘encodes’
the social order of the community, as well as the community’s values (respect
towards that deity). This symbolic value can give rise to politeness as well,
which in itself has a symbolic value. Similar to conventions, then, not every
ritual is polite. However, politeness is arguably one of the most representative
manifestations of ritual behaviour.
Ritual plays an important role not only in tribal societies but also in modern
ones: there are socially coded rituals, and also families, workplaces and all
other networks form their own ritualistic practices. For example, ‘Welcome
on board!’ is a widely spread polite rite of passage (see more on such rites in
van Gennep 2004), which signals acceptance in a network. It is not simply a
convention because in terms of politeness behaviour a ritual like ‘Welcome on
board!’ does not simply conform to expectations. By uttering these words the
speaker symbolically changes the addressee’s status, by providing her or him
with membership in the network. Uttering these words in a specific institutional
setting is a powerful act because the speaker does not speak for him or herself,
but instead she or he animates the voice of the network or institution; in a way
this is not so different from the leader of a tribe who provides adult membership
for a young warrior who has passed through a rite of passage. In other words,
the above ritual animates the voice of the network, and the person who utters it
is undertaking a performance, something which is often referred to as mimesis
in the anthropological literature (see Wallace 2007 for a useful description).
So how does ritual come into existence and how is it related to convention? A
likely explanation is that once a convention is adopted by a social network, and
when it takes on mimetic functions, it becomes ritual. That is, a conventional
practice becomes a ritual one if it is recognisibly performed, a process which
is described as ritualisation (note, however, that our interpretation of rituali-
sation differs to some extent from the way in which anthropologists like Bell
1992 describe it). The phenomenon of ritualisation implies that every ritual is
convention(alised) but not every convention is ritual(ised). In order to illustrate
this difference, let us briefly analyse example (6).
(6) Queen Gorgo: Spartan!

King Leonidas: Yes, my lady?
Queen Gorgo: Come back with your shield, or on it.
King Leonidas: Yes, my lady.
(300, 2006)
Example (6) is cited from the action film 300 which retells the Battle of
Thermopylae in an epic way. In this interaction Queen Gorgo – wife of the
Spartan King Leonidas – bids farewell to the king, leader of 300 Spartans who
set off on a suicidal mission to protect their kingdom from the Persian army.
The queen’s farewell includes two rituals, which neatly represent the differ-
ence between ritual and convention. First, Queen Gorgo addresses her husband
in the third person as ‘Spartan!’ and then she utters ‘Come back with your
shield, or on it’; this latter utterance refers to the habit that it was a symbol
of defeat if a Spartan lost his shield in war. With the context in mind, it is
obvious that these utterances are more than simply conventional acts, as the
queen goes beyond conforming with contextually situated expectances. While
it would be proper for the queen to address a Spartan commoner as ‘Spartan’
and remind him of his duties, and in such a context these would be regarded as
conventional, she interacts here with her superior ranked husband to whom she
bids farewell forever. The rationale behind this seeming discrepancy resides in
the mimetic ritual nature of these utterances. That is, in addressing the king
by taking a ‘Spartan’ (i.e. rather puritanical) convention, instead of choosing
a more emotive form of greeting, the queen seems to emphasise, more pre-
cisely mimetically re-evoke, the heroic, stereotypically Spartan, spirit of their
relationship, which is reinforced by the king’s brief and seemingly emotionless
responses to the queen, as they co-construct the ritual. In other words, the queen
plays a certain role here and convention becomes a ritual through this situated
performance.
The reason why this performance functions effectively is related to its emo-
tive value (see also Chapter 10). In general, politeness and emotions are inter-
connected, and this connection usually resides in the relational history of a
network. That is, it can be argued that a particular usage of politeness evokes
emotions, if it is formed in a way that reflects on the given network’s history,
often referred to as a network ethos. In other words, in many networks polite-
ness involves an emotive experience, which is constructed through interactions
(see more on this matter in Chapter 10). This emotive function is particularly
salient in the case of ritual actions, due to their ‘staged’, mimetic nature (even
though mimesis is arguably a matter of degree, i.e. certain ritual practices are
more theatrical than others, see Kádár 2013). For example, the interactional
rituals of farewell in example (6) come into operation through the pathos of the
utterances: the strength of saying goodbye in a seeming emotionless and heroic
tone when weaker people would weep, which reflects the queen and king’s in-
group ethos of being representatives of the Spartans. This seeming emotionless
performance is what seems to generate emotions in the given context for both
participants and observers of this interaction.
The emotive function of ritual should not be understood as autotelic (i.e.
having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening), and it is not a
coincidence that it is referred to as ‘function’. Emotions often address interac-
tional needs, as they have a psychological effect on those who participate in
the ritual. As noted by Manfred Kienpointner (1997: 262), ritual acts create
an atmosphere in which states of mind alter, an atmosphere which ‘cannot be
endangered even by seemingly rude utterances’. This state of mind is often
referred to in the field as the ritual moment. Jan Koster notes that the ritual
moment has a key communicational function because it creates ‘a temporary
destruction of awareness of the wider meaningful relations of one’s individu-
ality and the reduction of the self to the immediate physical experience of the
here-and-now’ (2003: 219). This physical experience is a ‘recurrent here-and-
now’ (see Section 7.1), in the sense that ritual language use ties one into all
of the other times such a ritual schema has been used. That is, the moment is
experienced through looking into and relying on a series of events, or in other
words the utterance is connected to another time and place and potentially even
another context. In the case of example (6), speaking in a ritual heroic way
supposedly results in a state of mind in which saying goodbye becomes easier.
The ritual moment, evoked by mimesis, is indeed a key element of ritual
practice. Often by means of ritual practice the interactants can playfully defy
‘regular’ behaviour: they act beyond societal conventions. As we discussed in
the section on conventions, relational network conventions often differ from
societal ones, and the same also applies to ritual, but the difference between
convention and ritual resides in the mimetic value of ritual practices. That is,
ritual can not only provide an alternative behaviour to conforming to conven-
tions, but performers of ritual can also intentionally display difference and
uniqueness through the ritual act. This illustrates that a seemingly polite act
of ritual can be creative in spite of its schematic nature, not only because it
is often co-constructed by the interactants (see example (6)), but also because
ritual is often a playful act. The potential playful creativity of ritual vis-à-vis
politeness is illustrated by example (7), drawn from Chinese:
(7) dddd, dddddddddd, dddd, ddddd

d, ddddddd!
‘Chen Zun [of old] gained a great reputation amongst his gen-
eration for [his expertise in] letter writing. However, he formed
an overtly high opinion of himself and he spared his ink as if it
was gold, not willing to send a letter to anyone [if it were not
necessary]. [I wonder,] sir, whether you are not on the edge of
falling into the error of his conceit?’
(Cited from Kádár 2010a: 140)
Example (7) is cited from the correspondence of a group of Chinese men of

letters, who developed extravagant ritual practices in order to distinguish them-
selves from others and reinforce their in-group solidarity. These ritual prac-
tices, among other things, prescribed that network members express politeness
in most unusual ways in order to display their high intelligence and extensive
education. In this fragment, the author writes to a close friend of his, and draws
an analogy between the behaviour of Chen Zun dd, a renowned historical
man of letters, and that of the addressee. This reference expresses a seem-
ingly ‘negative’ meaning, that is, the author – longing for the correspondent’s
letter – symbolically reprimands him for sparing his ink like Chen Zun, and
wonders whether the correspondent has not ‘fallen into the error of Chen’s
conceit’. However, at the same time the author emphasises the great expertise
of Chen in epistolary art, and so by symbolically scolding the addressee for
behaviour that resembles that of Chen Zun, he conveys a secondary elevating
meaning by comparing the correspondent’s talent to that of Chen.
It is pertinent to note in passing that, because ritual performance constitutes
an alternative reality, rituals are adopted by different types of networks. Ritual,
just like convention, can be constituted at a societal or a network level. For
example, example (6) represents a societal convention being used ritually in
a particular relational network, and example (7) is a case of ritual formed at
the level of a particular relational network. However, rituals associated with
politeness are often formed by another, noteworthy type of network, namely
the network of the individual and the unseen world. More specifically, there are
certain rituals – defined in the field as the so-called ‘covert rituals’ – which are
performed by individuals towards imagined/spiritual entities (see more details
in Kádár 2013).3
7.3 Key studies

Key studies on schematic forms of politeness describe convention and ritual
from an outsider or etic perspective. The rationale behind this approach is
that the words ‘convention’ and ‘ritual’ have very different implications across
cultures. For example, ‘ritual’ can mean a potentially negative and superficial
action in Western cultures, while in East Asian cultures it refers to a pre-
dominantly positive phenomenon. ‘Ritual’ also carries connotations from a
diachronic perspective, as in many cultures it is associated with the past rather
than the present. Thus, a technical instead of a lay definition of ritual brings us
closer to understanding the mechanisms of this phenomenon. In terms of ana-
lytic methodology, key theories of convention and ritual adopt first-order loci:
they analyse the participants’ evaluations with reference to conventions and
rituals.
Watts (2003) is a groundbreaking study on conventions vis-à-vis politeness,
which examines the ways in which conventionalised utterances convey polite-
ness in schematic ways. In order to describe this phenomenon, Watts uses the
label EPM (‘expression of procedural meaning’) to describe ‘a linguistic or
paralinguistic expression that is focused on instructing the addressee how to
process the propositional content of the utterance’ (p. 274). Watts argues that
EPMs are conventionalised expressions, many of which are regarded as nor-
mative ‘politic’ behaviour. Through this analysis, Watts integrates conventions
into a wider framework of politeness. Watts’ volume is fundamental read-
ing for those who are interested in the relationship between conventions and
illocutionary force.
An article by Bax (2010a) provides an insightful conceptualisation of the
historical development of rituality. As Bax, relying on evolutionary research,
argues, ritual is one of the most ancient manifestations of linguistic polite-
ness, and diachronic changes of rituality greatly influenced the development of
politeness across cultures. Bax provides a useful overview of rituality research
and he gives a framework by means of which rituals (also vis-à-vis politeness)
can be categorised.
Kádár’s (2013) monograph, Relational Rituals and Communication, pro-
vides a framework dedicated to conventions and rituals. This is a general
framework, which aims to describe conventions and rituals in their own right,
and it regards politeness as one of the many possible manifestations of these
phenomena. Kádár defines convention and ritual by using the aforementioned
7.5 Exercises 153
concepts of ‘conformance’ and ‘performance’, and he uses these concepts to

elaborate a complex theory of relational ritual. In terms of polite usage, Kádár
examines the way in which ‘ritual’ interrelates with politeness, and integrates
this relationship into a theory of relational ritual.
7.4 Summary
In certain contexts, the interactants are expected to follow certain ‘scripted’
expectations. In such contexts politeness tends to follow pre-existing patterns
of thought or behaviour used in recurrent ways that are readily recognisable
to network members. We have distinguished two types of such schematic
thought/behaviour, namely conventions and rituals. Performance of conven-
tions presupposes a particular emphasis on conformance, i.e. the need to
conform to network expectancies, and that of rituals presupposes performance.
Understandings of conventions and rituals are influenced, among other fac-
tors, by the societal vs. more ‘local’ scope of a given pattern as well as the
transparency that this scope implies.
In order to analyse convention and ritual, it is necessary to approach these
phenomena from a technical instead of a lay perspective. Such a perspective
brings us closer to understanding the mechanisms of these phenomena, which
have very different implications and definitions across cultures.
7.5 Exercises
1. Can you identify polite societal conventions in your native language? Can
you find specific polite conventions used within your family or group of
friends/colleagues? If yes, how do these conventions differ from societal
ones?
2. Can you list the relational networks within which you interact daily? Do
these networks have different expectations with regard to politeness?
3. Is there any polite ritual which you perform on a regular basis? If yes,
can you describe and analyse this ritual?
II. Read the following examples, which represent increasingly complex cases,
and analyse the politeness phenomena occurring in them. Compare your
analysis with the brief annotations below:
(a) On occasions when any little group of men and women are gathered
together, nothing spoils the evening more than the absence of introduc-
tions. The perfect hostess will always attend to this branch of her duties
first of all. Miss Putnam lost no time in making her identity clear.
‘Presenting Kate Amelia Putnam, of the James B. Flaherty Detective
Agency of New York’, she said amiably, holding the pistol in her hand
on a steady line with Mr Carlisle’s pelvis. ‘Drop that gun. And you’,
she added to Packy, ‘keep your hands up.’
Mr Carlisle’s automatic dropped to the floor. Miss Putnam seemed well
content.
‘Now we’re all set’, she said. ‘Mrs G., might I trouble you to step across
and pick that cannon . . . ’
(b) (Conversation between lovers)
Chad: Is it the eggs?
Dylan: It’s not the eggs.
Chad: Is it the boat?
Dylan: No, it’s not the boat, I have to go though.
Chad: Is it the Chad?
Dylan: It might be the Chad.
Chad: The Chad . . . It’s the Chad!
((Chad falls into the water))
...
Chad: Starfish, I would just like to say that I’m honored, honored to
see you taking an interest in my work and I also think you’re
very pretty and . . .
((sees girls getting scuba gear on))
Starfish? Where are you going? Starfish are you going swim-
ming? Where are you going? Where are you going again
Starfish? Was it the Chad?
Dylan: No, the Chad was great.
Chad: The Chad was great.
(Charlie’s Angels, 2000)
Example (a) represents an instance of humour, the source of which is
a stylistic discrepancy. This discrepancy roots in the contrast between the
conventionally polite act of self-introduction and the context in which it
occurs. The detective Ms Putnam introduces herself ‘amiably’, and so she
follows a socially coded convention of politeness, yet she threatens the
addressees with a pistol.
Example (b), from the film Charlie’s Angels, represents the complex and
often hidden way in which in-group rituals operate. What the reader can
observe here is an indirect, step-by-step ritual confirmation of one’s love
emotions, which Brown and Levinson (1987) would supposedly define as
‘positive politeness’, as there is a ‘face-threat’ operating here (Chad might
be disliked by Dylan). However, this confirmation takes place through
an unusual, romantic and playful performance, which makes sense if one
knows that in the network of Dylan and Chad it is a ritual practice to talk
7.5 Exercises 155
about Chad in the third person (the Chad), as an adored entity. What happens
in these two interactions is that Chad wants Dylan to confirm that she loves
him, and so he involves her in a ritual game of talking about him. In the first
interaction Dylan has to leave and Chad inquires as to why she needs to
leave. While Dylan obviously loves Chad, she teases him and she hints that
‘It might be the Chad’ as the reason why she leaves. However, she makes
this utterance vague, hence minimising the face-threat (and keeping the door
open to Chad to continue courting). In the next interaction, Dylan and Chad
continue to talk about ‘the Chad’, this time in a very flattering way. What
these interactions illustrate is that rituals are often jointly co-constructed in
localised relational networks.
8 Politeness and history
8.1 Introduction
The norms and manifestations of politeness are historically relative. Relativity
means that what is understood as appropriate is not only relative to social
space, which is more often emphasised in the literature to date (e.g. norms
differ across cultures), but perhaps even more importantly it is relative to time.
With the passing of time, understandings are subject to change.
Changes evoked by time are particularly salient if we observe understand-
ings of norms. There are certain polite usages that people once regarded as
normative, but which now appear to be anachronistic, and even potentially
nonsensical, to a contemporary observer. For example, medieval knightly chal-
lenges, studied by the historical pragmatician Bax (1999), may sound somewhat
unusual, as the challenge in example (1) (made in Dutch) illustrates:
(1) Sprac hi te lancelote saen: He spoke to Lancelot right

away:
‘Riddere, nv doet mi verstaen ‘Knight, enlighten me now
Van ere dinc die ic begere, On a matter that I desire to
know about,
Oft wacht v iegen min spere Or beware of my lance.
... ...
Bericht mi, ridder, bi vwer trouwen, Tell me, knight, upon your
honour,
Anders maget v wel berouwen, Or otherwise you will
regret it,
Die beste waerheit die gi wet As truthfully as you can
Dat ic v sal vragen ende nine let.’ What I will ask you, and do
not fail to respond.’
Doe seide min her lanceloet: Then said Sir Lancelot:
‘Ic ware mi vele liuer doet ‘I would fain be dead,
Dan mi een ridder dwingen soude Than suffer a knight to
force me
156
Van dies ic doen nine woude.’ To do something against

my will.’
... ...
Die swarte hi en hilt niet stille, The black [knight] did not
remain standing still,
Die op lancelote was erre; He who was angry at
Lancelot.
Hi omhaelde sinen loep verre He made his horse take a
good run-up
Ende verrechte sijn spere And couched his lance
Alse die te vechtene heuet gere. Like one who enjoys com-
bat.
(Bax 2010b: 70–1)
This conversation represents a schema which was associated with the knightly
code of appropriate behaviour in many parts of medieval Europe (see Chapter 7).
That is, the knight Moriaen challenges the knight Lancelot by using a schematic
practice (a pre-existing pattern of behaviour) as he makes an inquiry. This is
not a ‘harmless’ inquiry: according to the knightly custom, upon challenging
the other, instead of directly stating ‘We will fight to death, knight’ one was
expected to make the challenge indirectly, by ‘forcing’ the other to answer a
question, who in turn is expected to decline this request, which gives a green
light to the fight.
It is obvious that the schema in example (1) does not exist anymore, at least
not in the form represented above. Politeness, just like any other linguistic
phenomenon is subject to diachronic change. This is why we can say that the
‘appropriateness’ of a manifestation of politeness is essentially relative: we
cannot be sure, for example, whether a certain understanding of politeness
which we take for granted will be understood by our grandchildren as well.
Who could have imagined just a few decades ago, for instance, that such a
thing as ‘netiquette’ (descriptions of norms of politeness in online interactions)
would have come into existence?
It might seem tempting to brush historical politeness aside as an area which
is perhaps interesting but essentially irrelevant to those who intend to examine
politeness in the contemporary world in which we live. Obviously, medieval
knights do not have much to offer, insofar as our aim is to understand how
politeness is used in a modern urban life, for instance. Or do they? We can
attempt to look beyond Sir Moriaen’s and Sir Lancelot’s archaic style – indeed,
nobody would say ‘I fain be dead’ in a brawl – and look at the practice
underlying this interaction. What these knights are essentially doing is using
polite forms and expressions to conceal aggression. But does this not happen
in our day? Ritual challenges continue to exist, as example (2) illustrates:
(2) Mark Darcy: Would you step outside please?

Daniel Cleaver: I’m afraid it’s not possible.
Mark Darcy: Look, are you gonna step outside or do I have to
drag you?
Daniel Cleaver: I think you’re gonna have to drag me.
(Bridget Jones II: The Edge of Reason, 2004)
This interaction, which is a fictional representation just like the interaction in

example (1), represents a contemporary British gentlemanly challenge made
by Mark Darcy for the honour of a ‘lady’, the protagonist Bridget Jones. The
source of humour in example (2) is that this challenge is refused in a clearly
cowardly tone by Daniel Cleaver who knows that Darcy is stronger than him.
Just as we saw in Sir Moriaen’s inquiry, Darcy’s question ‘Would you step
outside please?’ is not a neutral question or proposal: in a similar way as in
example (1), there is an expected (or preferred, to use a technical term, see e.g.
Drew 1997) response to this turn, that is, acceptance of the challenge. When,
however, a different answer is given by Cleaver, the schematic nature of Darcy’s
question becomes clear: Cleaver is not being given a real choice to refuse this
challenge. In other words, while Cleaver makes an indirect response (‘I am
afraid it’s not possible’), which could be understood as appropriate in other
settings, it is definitely not acceptable here from the participants’ perspective.
In brief, the appropriacy of certain forms and practices of politeness are
temporally relative, and the actual language used in examples (1) and (2) is
arguably different. However, as the comparison of these interactions illustrates,
studying the pragmatic features of historical texts can nevertheless shed light on
certain properties of politeness as social practice in contemporary interactions.
With this interconnection in mind, in this chapter, which is dedicated to his-
torical politeness, we will not only focus on historicity but, more importantly,
also on the implications of historicity for understanding politeness. Historic-
ity is a complex philosophical concept (see sources of this notion in Martin
Heidegger 1991 [1927]; and Foucault 1970[1966]), and it is sufficient here to
limit its interpretation to saying: all actions (and things) in the world have their
place and time, and so every action is part of history. The way in which we see
the world, also in terms of politeness, is thus historically situated, and human
behaviour can often be properly explained if we attempt to distance ourselves
from assumptions.
That is, we will study historical politeness not simply out of pragma-
philological interest (see e.g. Jacobs and Jucker 1995) to understand historically
situated usages of politeness, but also in order to identify various key features
that are significant for the analysis of contemporary politeness data. In fact,
one could rightly argue that any theory of politeness, irrespective of the data it
studies, must include historicity as a core concept, and relativity as the key to
understanding this concept. In other words, every attempt to theorise linguistic

politeness should represent the data studied as relatively polite in terms of time.
If the key question for social space is ‘To whom and in what context does utter-
ance X express politeness?’, then the question we need to ask ourselves when it
comes to time is ‘To whom and when does utterance X express politeness’ (and
also, ‘Whose politeness does a historical text represent?’, see below). In a sense
it does not even matter whether a text is ‘really’ historical or not, even though
studying old texts has its own advantages because the relativity of politeness
becomes fairly obvious to the analyst when one examines interactions that
occurred a long time ago. But arguably any utterance which does not emerge at
this very moment is historical to some extent. To provide a simple example, even
our personal understandings of politeness or impoliteness can change with the
passing of time. Moreover, some utterances such as metapragmatic comments
(see Chapter 9), which generally reflect on past events, include elements of his-
toricity. An analysis which is based on this broad definition of ‘historical’ can
include various data types: for example, an email written some time ago can be
regarded as ‘historical’ as a medieval codex. In terms of politeness and time, if
understanding of politeness in localised interactions (Chapter 6) represents the
‘here-and-now’, and evaluations of politeness occasioned through convention
and ritual (Chapter 7) represent the ‘recurrent here-and-now’, then historical
politeness constitutes the realm of ‘there-and-then’ that provides a fundamental
link to the broader social spaces in which understandings of politeness arise.
In sum, the question we pursue is not so much how we define ‘historical’,
but rather how we can incorporate historicity (and the notion of relativity)
into research on politeness. The relativity of historicity is an issue that can
challenge theoretical understandings of politeness, since as Kádár and Culpeper
(2010) argue, historical politeness is an important ‘testing ground’ for politeness
theories. In this respect, historical politeness is very close to intercultural and
cross-cultural data in that assumptions that we take for granted often turn out
to be invalid in historical settings. Thus, no theory of politeness that fails to
include at least some recourse to historical analysis can be considered truly
comprehensive.
8.2 Key concepts
Comparability and representation

The relativity of understandings of politeness manifests itself in a fundamental
problem for the researcher, namely, comparability. That is, upon examining
historical politeness phenomena, it becomes evident that it is often difficult
to compare contemporary and historical data. This difficulty manifests itself
in basic terminology. Just as conventions and rituals have different meanings
across space and time (see Section 7.3), the very word politeness is problem-
atic as in many historical cultures it does not have any direct counterpart, or
practice that would equate to what early modern or modern British etiquette
manuals describe as politeness. As discussed by Kopytko (1995), the English
word politeness, which originates in the Latin politus (‘refined’, ‘elegant’), and
which was borrowed from the French, appeared in the sixteenth century, and it
spread in the contemporary sense of courteous from only the eighteenth century
onwards. Before the term politeness had entered into general usage, the French
loanword curteisie was used in English to refer to manifestations of normative
behaviour (see below, in the present section). Yet this brief analysis of polite-
ness represents a historical development in a single culture only. While in many
European languages the equivalent of politeness stems from politus, similar to
English, in many other languages politeness has a different lexical origin, as in
the case of the German term höflichkeit, the Hungarian notion of udvariasság,
not mentioning non-European cases such as the Japanese concept of reigi, and
the Chinese term limao, a point we will return to consider in more detail in
Chapter 9. That is, the historical politeness researcher needs to examine a phe-
nomenon which is not only labelled differently across languages and cultures
(and defined differently by various networks of a single culture, see Chapter
11), but also differently over time. And, obviously, different metalanguage may
involve different conceptualisations of politeness.
This problem calls for a careful consideration as to how we use the word
politeness in the field when it comes to historical issues, considering that
politeness can be grounded in various different loci of understanding (see
Chapter 5). As far as we take the perspectives of relativity and historicity
as key concepts, it is evident that politeness should be preferably used as
a technical term, partly because it is a recently coined expression from a
diachronic perspective.
In terms of methodology, it is difficult to reconstruct historical states of
mind with full precision, even if reconstruction to some extent is possible
in the case of certain text types. What makes it difficult for the researcher
to get a grip on language users’ (first-order) views on a historical term is
that these views themselves would be mediated indirectly through sources,
i.e. they are represented (see representation later in this section). Thus, it
is relatively difficult to access an emic (i.e. insider’s) understanding when it
comes to historical data, and so our analyses inevitably are grounded in an
etic (i.e. outsider’s) understanding. However, we argue that one should try to
tease out the participant’s perspective whenever there is an opportunity to do
this. Considering that we often do not know what a specific manifestation
of politeness meant in a given setting, our politeness interpretations need to
be guided by the evidence in the text – the hearer’s/recipient’s evaluations
of certain utterances – and not by our intuitions, because those intuitions are
likely to reflect our present-day assumptions. So the analysis of historical data
necessitates studying evaluations, as well as conducting careful examination

of historical facts. We are forced to make deductions about the interactants’
motivations, not only because the interactants themselves cannot communicate
to us (as in the case of an interview), but also because their reasons for a certain
action might be entirely different from what we would assume on the basis of
our contemporary understanding of politeness.
In order to illustrate this point, let us analyse the historical Chinese extract
in example (3):
(3) ddddddd: ⌈dddddddd, ddddddddd

dd ddddd . . . ⌋
ddd: ⌈dddddddddd . . . ddddddd! . . . ⌋
Shaoyou said with a cold smile: ‘When any other graduate [of the
first degree]1 takes part in the exam, as soon as he receives the
task, he will answer it easily. I, this worthless official (xiaguan)
have already passed the exam . . . ’
The servant girl said: ‘My Madame is not like those blind exam
officials . . . her tasks are quite difficult!’
(Xingshi hengyan dddd, Chapter 11)
Upon approaching the first utterance in this conversation, from a seventeenth-

century Chinese novel, the analyst cannot safely make any deductions without
examining the following points:
(i) the socio-pragmatic context (i.e. the historically situated communicational
norms);
(ii) the interactants’ reactions (i.e. the hearer’s evaluation of an utterance, and
her or his reaction in the course of constructing the interaction); and
(iii) narrow-sense contextual factors (i.e. the relationship developed through
the actual interaction).
Without distancing ourselves from contemporary understandings of politeness,
a most plausible explanation for the self-denigrating form ‘I, this worthless
official’ (xiaguan dd) is that the speaker uses this honorific form in order
to express politeness in a form that Brown and Levinson (1987) would define
as ‘negative politeness’. Such a view is supported by the fact that in East
Asian societies the appropriate usage of honorifics is a marker of one’s level
of education (see e.g. Ide 2005). However, the situation is more complex than
this. As Kádár’s (2007) historical pragmatic research on Chinese data shows,
historical Chinese honorific forms displayed (or indexed, to use a technical
term, see e.g. Silverstein 2003) the rank of both the speaker and the addressee,
and the form used in example (3) is an honorific used by officials, specifically.
What does this imply? Let us consider each of the three analytic points above
to answer this question.
First, the form above is not polite in the sense in which politeness is inter-
preted in many contemporary cultures, but instead it displays the speaker’s rank,
which is understandably important in a hierarchical society like the Chinese.
Thus, this utterance is not necessarily other-focused but instead it is potentially
self-focused.2
Second, a discursive analysis of the hearer’s evaluation confirms this claim.
The servant girl does not seem to be too enthusiastic about the young official’s
language usage, which also illustrates that even in a society that is described
as hierarchical, norms of hierarchy do not always operate in interaction. She
responds to the official’s utterance – words referring to his recent result in an
imperial exam – by describing officials who conduct examinations as ‘blind
exam officials’ (mang shiguan ddd). She also avoids using honorific forms
as it is only the higher ranking official who applies ostensibly ‘polite’ lexical
items.
Third, examination of narrow-sense contextual factors reveals that the servant
girl has the necessary power to act in the way she does. That is, when the
interaction in example (3) takes place, the servant girl is ‘guarding’ her lady’s
door; the lady is the newly wed wife of the official, and she makes playful
‘exam questions’ for the young man, who is told that he can only spend the
night with her if he can answer the questions.
To sum up, due to the issue of comparability we must be careful to avoid
projecting our contemporary assumptions about politeness onto the data stud-
ied. Yet we should also recall the point that the notion of historicity does not
inherently imply many years: in fact, most of the institutions in our societies
are historical, as Foucault argued (1970[1966]). Indeed, the ‘order of things’
as we often perceive them, also in terms of politeness, can often be prop-
erly explained if we attempt to distance ourselves from assumptions, and in
this respect the above-discussed methodological stance is arguably valid for
politeness research in general.
The above-discussed analysis of participants’ understandings and evalua-
tions in historical data has its obstacles. Historical texts are problematic in
comparison with contemporary data as they provide a textual representation of
speech rather than the speech itself. Because of this, historical texts sometimes
offer less analytical affordances for the researchers than interactions which
have been audio- or video-recorded. This makes it difficult for the analyst to
examine the interactants’ evaluation of certain utterances. As Culpeper (2009a:
182) notes,
Whilst researchers do have recourse to research conducted by social historians, it must be

remembered that much of that research is (a) itself underpinned by written documents,
and (b) often insufficiently detailed to assist in understanding the rich dynamics of
particular situations.
That is, the fact that datasets are less rich from the analyst’s perspective is an
important aspect of historical politeness research, which manifests itself in the
comparability issue as well (one cannot compare historical and contemporary
texts, simply because they offer different degrees of detail in the datasets). Due
to this problem, historical pragmaticians divide evaluation into the following
forms of behaviour:
(i) Metapragmatic comments (e.g. ‘you’re so polite’)
(ii) Follow-up politeness behaviours (e.g. ‘thank you so much’)
(iii) Challenges to inappropriate talk signalled in the co-text (e.g. ‘no, wait a
minute, take that back!’).
Dividing evaluations in this way helps the analyst to examine evaluations in
relatively limited historical datasets (see also Chapter 9).
An alternative and useful way of exploring politeness in historical texts is
the so-called ‘corpus method’, which has been developed, for example, by
Culpeper and Kytö (2010). This method encompasses the reconstruction of
politeness behaviour through the comparison of several corpora. The corpus
method is particularly suited to texts that do not have any personal interactional
history or other sources for the analyst to draw upon in interpreting evaluative
moments of politeness in that dataset.
The approaches which have been discussed so far represent methodologies
by means of which historical politeness can be described without taking a
prescriptive view. However, there are two sources for forming prescriptive views
on politeness: we can project our prescriptions on historical data, but it can also
happen that prescriptive views are projected back on us through historical
data. The comparability issue is present in another problem: representation in
historical data means that historical texts are prone to represent politeness in a
biased way.
Some of the limitations of historical data have been noted already. When
we venture into the analysis of historical texts, the perhaps most challenging
question is not so much whether a certain source is in a good condition or not,
or even how it represents interaction. Of course, problems like missing parts of
a text due to the dilapidation of a manuscript are sometimes painful realities for
the researcher (see e.g. Kádár 2010b), not to mention the lack of interactional
dynamics in historical materials. However, the most problematic question we
always need to ask ourselves is ‘whose politeness does the text represent?’ It
can be argued that the majority of historical texts have been written by highly
educated people (writing was a privilege of the powerful in most historical
societies), and so the understandings of politeness that arise in historical data
reflect dominant views and ideologies (see e.g. Iggers 2007), often even in
cases when they animate the language usage of lower classes.
There is not much the researcher can do about this problem, apart from
adding disclaimers about the extent to which the politeness phenomenon being
studied is socially representative. To put it simply, it is dangerous to claim that

‘historical politeness was like X, and this was the only way to express politeness
in the period Y’, due to this issue of representativeness – we often simply don’t
know how the masses understood politeness in a historical society. Taking this
train of thought further, if we consider that historicity is relative, it is in fact
possible to also project this problem onto contemporary data. Indeed, we often
represent understandings of politeness from the perspective of well-educated
classes, and thus inadvertently exclude other understandings of politeness, such
as working-class interpretations of this phenomenon (see more on this issue in
Chapter 11).
The fact that any text can potentially represent certain dominating values
implies that practically any interaction – which does not take place in front of us
or in a setting that makes it possible to study the dynamics of an interaction (e.g.
video-recording) – is in a sense biased (see more on this problem in Culpeper
and Kytö 2000). In other words, when a polite interaction is reported to us,
some degree of caution is inevitably due. In such reports representations often
inadvertently become mispresentations, a transformation that can go unnoticed.
For example, we tend to automatically disregard diachronic differences when
instances of historical politeness are represented to us, because we take it for
granted that politeness in certain periods nevertheless operates similarly with
our time. This phenomenon becomes salient when we observe representations
of historical language usage in popular genres such as films, as seen in examples
(4) and (5).
(4) The Emperor of China: I’ve heard a great deal about you, Fa
Mulan. You stole your father’s armor,
ran away from home, impersonated
a soldier, deceived your commanding
officer, dishonored the Chinese Army,
destroyed my palace, and . . . you have
saved us all.
(Mulan, 1998)
(5) D’Artagnan: WAIT!

Cardinal Richelieu: You object to losing your head?
D’Artagnan: Yes, I like it where it is!
Cardinal Richelieu: Then tell me what I want to know, and maybe
you will keep it a while longer!
D’Artagnan: I don’t know where they are.
Cardinal Richelieu: And if you did?
D’Artagnan: I wouldn’t tell you . . .
Cardinal Richelieu: I admire your courage, D’Artagnan. You

might have made a great musketeer. But now
we’ll never know – will we?
(The Three Musketeers, 1993)
In example (4), cited from the animated film Mulan, the Emperor of China
addresses the protagonist, the young heroine Mulan, in front of a crowd, by
using mock scolding in order to express politeness. While this utterance repre-
sents behaviour what we would expect from a good emperor, and which looks
nicely ‘majestic’, this utterance reflects a contemporary egalitarian view on
the way in which a high-ranking leader (e.g. the President of the US) should
communicate with a young girl who has saved the country. In historical China
such a manifestation of politeness would have been unimaginable, not only
because the emperor would have not spoken with a commoner (especially not
in public) irrespective of her merits, but also because even if this interaction
had taken place he would have displayed his own rank (cf. example (3)) instead
of expressing ‘politeness’ towards Mulan (it is another question whether the
very fact that someone can communicate with an emperor occasions the feeling
of being honoured).
The same phenomenon arises in the second example from the film The
Three Musketeers, in which the protagonist, the young French swordsman
D’Artagnan, interacts with the infamous Cardinal Richelieu. Their style
represents the clash of good and bad, and it fits our expectations with regard to
the way a young hero should speak with a corrupt cardinal who aims (according
to the plot of the story) to betray his king. The cardinal seems to reward
D’Artagnan by politely noting that he admires his courage, which seems to be
appropriate in the present context. However, in historical France (as anywhere
in Europe) interactions with high-ranking people necessitated considerably
more sophisticated and ritualised exchanges than represented in example (5),
and it is likely that in a real situation D’Artagnan would have been killed or
tortured for breaching these norms. The noteworthy aspect in these interactions
is not so much that they mispresent historical politeness through the currently
dominating ideology of egalitarianism (which is perhaps not surprising given
these are essentially American films), but rather that such mispresentations are
likely to pass unnoticed. Supposedly, dramatisation has an important role in
this unnoticedness: due to the dramatic effects, the involved observer is less
likely to notice that something is amiss in these interactions.
Representation has yet another dimension of interest, namely, the area where
metapragmatics (discussed in Chapter 9) intersects with historical politeness
research. As it has been noted already, practically any time lag can transform
an interaction into the state of being ‘historical’. This implies that representa-
tion is a potential problem when we retrospectively examine understandings
of politeness in an interaction that has taken place before, because such

retrospection can generate equivocality or additional possible understandings
(Chapter 5). Retelling a story often raises debates about the actual, historical
intentions of interactants (de Berg 1995), and the way in which these inten-
tions are reattributed to the interactants in representing the narrator’s views in
subsequent discourse, as the following case illustrates.
Recently, an email written by a mother-in-law, a certain Carolyn Bourne,
has received a significant amount of publicity in the British press. This person
wrote an email to her daughter-in-law-to-be, in which she ‘educated’ her about
‘good manners’, with this ‘education’ being ‘wrapped’ up in ostensibly ‘polite’
discourse. The text of the email itself is available online, but if one intends
to analyse it, it becomes essential to get a grip on the background of this
interaction. In other words, some form of retrospective inquiry is needed, and
we unavoidably need to rely on sources such as the following one:
(6) Meeting Carolyn Bourne is a prospect many people might find

somewhat intimidating. After all, she is the woman who has
widely been described as ‘the mother-in-law from hell’ following
the now notorious email she sent to her stepson Freddie’s fiancée.
In it, she attacked Heidi Withers’s ‘staggering uncouthness and
lack of grace’ before suggesting she attend a finishing school at
the earliest opportunity to correct her ‘bad manners’.
...
However, The Mail on Sunday has learned from a close family
friend in London that the couple have been worried about Freddie
for three years, believed to be a result of his relationship with
Heidi.
The email is understood to refer to several incidents over the
period in which Heidi’s behaviour upset the Bournes and other
members of the family.
...
It would be easy to accuse Carolyn of being anachronistic and
snobby. She and Edward enjoy a privileged lifestyle, with a
sprawling home set in grounds that contain a beautifully land-
scaped garden, stables for their horses and greenhouses for
Carolyn’s plant nursery, Whetman Pinks.
The walls of their five-bedroom house are adorned with
photographs of Edward rowing at Cambridge, and Victorian
advertisements for his family’s former business, Bourne and
Hollingsworth, which was once an upmarket department store
in London’s West End.
But Carolyn insists her attitude towards etiquette has been mis-
interpreted. And, much as she wishes the email had not been made
public, she stands by its fundamental message.
‘Manners are not a class thing, they are about treating others with
consideration,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re a tramp in a
hedgerow, if you know how to behave towards people, to be polite
and kind, that’s a great gift.’
(www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2013020/Carolyn-Bourne-
mother-law-hell-hits-Politeness-greatest-gift-
tramp-hedgerow.html#ixzz20PqCUTcS)
Example (6), cited from the online edition of the newspaper The Daily Mail,
reveals that there are several discourses on the appropriateness of the email
in existence, and also the mother-in-law retrospectively evaluates (narrates)
her own behaviour in a way that positions her understanding vis-à-vis these
discourses. One of these is, of course, the discourse on politeness as a marker
of exclusion from the middle or upper classes in British society, and it is this
discourse to which Carolyn orients. But the most important issue from the per-
spective of the historical pragmatician is the way in which the mother-in-law’s
behaviour is represented by the narrator of this article. It is first mentioned
that ‘It would be [our emphasis] easy to accuse Carolyn of being anachronistic
and snobby’, and hints are made to extenuating circumstances, such as the par-
ents were actually worrying about their son, due to several ‘incidents’ that had
previously occurred with the daughter-in-law-to-be. In other words, the mother-
in-law’s email is contextualised (that is, represented) in a way that motivates the
reader to regard it as appropriate if not polite. Representing the mother-in-law
as a person fond of ‘anachronistic’ politeness implies that her intention was to
constructively educate her prospective daughter-in-law, and so the politeness
in her email was indeed genuine. We will return to such issues in Chapter 9.
Transformation and continuity

Politeness is not a constant phenomenon: it goes through extensive changes
over time, and during these changes it is in what might be termed a transitional
state. The historical politeness researcher’s goal is to provide explanations for
changes in politeness in a society, both as a whole or within one or more
of the relational networks through which that society is constituted. The key
question is: why and how do understandings of politeness, and the language and
practices involved in achieving politeness, change over time? In fact, this is a
question one should also pose whenever one analyses data with any dimension
of historicity (which we would in fact argue is relevant to essentially any
discourse or interaction). The norms of politeness in a network imbued with
any kind of relational history tend to go through changes as evaluative moments
of politeness intersect and are recycled, revisited or invoked in the ongoing

chain of interactions that constitute this relational network. Due to this, it can
be argued that these norms are always in some degree of flux, or at least they
are inevitably likely to transform with the passing of time, even if flux might
be minimal in practice. Indeed, some norms are often inherently conservative
in the sense that it can take a long period of time for certain norms to change.
This phenomenon is defined as the so-called transformation issue.
In order to obtain a most representative example to illustrate the diachronic
change of politeness phenomena, a glimpse at the history of politeness in
English is quite sufficient. As historical pragmatic experts Thomas Kohnen
(2012) and Jucker (2010, 2012) argue, politeness has gone through extensive
transformations as Old English (used by the Saxons, in the period spanning
roughly the fifth to the twelfth century) developed into Middle English (used
in the period spanning roughly the late twelfth century to the late fifteenth
century), and then into Early Modern English (used from the late fifteenth
century to the late seventeenth century).
In the Germanic tribal Anglo-Saxon society where Old English developed,
the secular value of heroism played an important role. Due to this, self-assertion,
self-praise and even provocation (which is often referred to as ‘flyting’ in the
technical literature) were recurrent practices, as historical records reveal. As
Kohnen (2008: 142) notes,
the fabric of society depended very much on mutual obligation and kin loyalty, a tie
which seems to have been especially pervasive with regard to the bond between man
and lord. Apparently, it was only this bond which could guarantee a relatively normal
life in society because it implied protection and safety.
In this society, politeness was predominantly expressed by forms of self-display

(see example (3)) and other forms which reinforced bonds between superordi-
nate and subordinate. Consequently, directives were more frequently used than
in Modern English. In order to illustrate this, let us refer to example (7), which
is from Kohnen (2008: 30):
(7) Ic bidde eow ϸæt ʒe ʒymon eowra sylfra, swa eowere bec eow
wissiað.
I ask you to take care of yourselves, as your books teach you.
Accordingly, in many social settings, directness rather than indirectness
was preferred. However, phenomena resembling indirect or so-called ‘negative
politeness’ in a modern sense can be traced in Old English data, as example (8)
illustrates:
(8) Ic þe nu ða, brego Beorhtdena, biddan wille, eodor Scyldinga, anre
bene, þæt ðu me ne forwyrne, wigendra hleo, freowine folca, nu
ic þus feorran com, þæt ic mote ana <ond> minra eorla gedryht,
þes hearda heap, Heorot fælsian.
‘Now, therefore, sovereign lord of the glorious Danes, prince of
the Scyldings, I want to beg a single favour from you: that you
do not deny it me, refuge of warriors, noble friend of the people,
now that I have thus come from far away, that I be allowed to
cleanse Heorot alone, without even my retinue of noble soldiers,
this troop of hardy men.’
(Beowulf, cited from Kohnen 2012: 243)
The interaction in example (8), which takes place between the hero Beowulf
and King Hrothgar, represents language usage which resembles a contem-
porary understanding of politeness, more specifically, that of the first wave
of approaches to politeness (see Chapter 2) as an indirect form of commu-
nication. That is, Beowulf combines praise and humbleness (þæt ðu me ne
forwyrne . . . þæt ic mote ‘that you do not deny it me . . . that I be allowed’), in
order to express a request, and thus it can be considered an indirect speech act.
This usage might be taken to prove that Old English politeness had indirectness
as part of its inventory. However, this is a relatively rare usage in Old English
data, which is usually limited to religious texts (the heroic epos Beowulf is
a noteworthy exception in this sense). That is, apart from a few exceptions
like the one in example (8), we have little evidence that indirect speech acts
regularly occurred in Old English.
During the period of Middle English, the above situation changed dramat-
ically as a new conceptualisation of politeness gradually took shape that was
much closer in many respects to contemporary emic understandings of polite-
ness in Britain. Indirectness as means of projecting politeness started to spread
as a normative practice in English. This development took place as a new dom-
inating social value, curteisie (‘courtesy’) entered into emic understandings of
the British under the influence of the French court. Curteisie is a concept that is
relatively close to politeness. However, it describes an understanding of polite-
ness ‘in which the linguistic forms are chosen on the basis of interactional status
rather than on the ranking of imposition’ (Jucker 2010: 196). This shows that
in Medieval English society, politeness was perceived as a less individualistic
phenomenon than in contemporary Britain. If one observes Middle English data
it becomes evident that this understanding manifests itself in the tendency for
interactants to choose certain forms of politeness in accordance with the per-
ceived interpersonal relationship, instead of imposition. This poses a warning
for the researcher: although we can understand many Middle English sources
even without using a dictionary, and the politeness phenomena which occur in
these sources often seem to ‘make sense’, it is still as problematic to project
our preconceptions on these datasets as it is in the case of the more ‘alien’ Old
English sources. That is, if we interpret Middle English data through the lens
of ‘imposition’ then we are distorting it, as we represent what is essentially an
etic understanding as if it were an emic one.
The change of norms and practices has brought about various changes in
English, such as the spread of the ‘plain’ and ‘honorific’ pronominal forms
thou and you (see the so-called ‘T/V forms’ in Chapter 2). An examination of
the pragmatic usage of these new forms is insightful for the researcher because
they reflect the function of linguistic politeness in the Middle English period,
namely, that it was bound to the above-mentioned importance of interactional
status of relationships. This is illustrated by example (9):
(9) ‘What do ye, hony-comb, sweete Aliusun,
My faire byrd, my sweete cynamone?’
...
‘Why, nay,’ quod he, ‘God woot, my sweete leef,
I am thyn Absolon, my deerelyng.
Of gold,’ quod he, ‘I have thee broght a ryng.
My mooder yaf it me, so God me save;
Ful fyn it is, and therto wel ygrave.
This wol I yeve thee, if thou me kisse.’
(cited from Jucker 2010: 191, 192)
The modern rhyming ‘translation’ of this section is as follows:
‘What do you, honeycomb, sweet Alison.
My cinnamon, my fair bird, my sweetie?’
...
‘Why no,’ quoth he, ‘God knows, my sweet roseleaf,
I am your Absalom, my own darling!
Of gold,’ quoth he, ‘I have brought you a ring;
My mother gave it me, as I’ll be saved;
Fine gold it is, and it is well engraved;
This will I give you for another kiss.’
(Trans. A.S. Kleine, available online at
www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/English/
CanterburyTalesIII.htm)
This interaction, which is drawn from The Canterbury Tales, represents a funny
tale of the lovers Absolon and Alison. Absolon, who wants to make Alison
his lover, first uses inflectional variants of ‘you’, but as the story unfolds he
switches to variants of ‘thou’, which indicates changes in the way he perceives
his relationship with Alison. That is, first he seems to evaluate his relationship
with Alison as one that necessitates deference, while later he switches to a more
intimate style.
Finally, politeness in Early Modern English had a fairly similar shape to

its contemporary counterpart. However, the comparability issue is still lurking
there: although politeness in Early Modern texts is really not unfamiliar for the
contemporary reader, these texts are nevertheless products of a world which is
somewhat different from ours. As Watts (1999) has insightfully pointed out,
for a long time in England a proper command of politeness, which resulted
in the state of being a ‘gentleman’, was regarded as an exclusive property of
higher social classes. That is, the ideology behind politeness in Early Modern
texts does significantly differ from the contemporary, generally more egalitar-
ian, conceptualisations of politeness in modern English. Nevertheless, such a
discourse does still pervade British conceptualisations of politeness to some
extent as we saw from the above controversy over the email sent by Carolyn
Bourne in example (6), with the difference being that it is now a contested
rather than hegemonic ideology.
To sum up, change is an ever-present prospect for understandings of polite-
ness, which is thus always in a state of a relative transition. There are, of
course, many changes which are of a considerably smaller scope than the ones
described above, such as the way in which politeness practices transform as
the relational history of a group develops. But even in such settings awareness
of issues of comparability should enter our analyses: it cannot be taken for
granted that something which counted as polite yesterday will be evaluated in
the same way today, as both relationships within networks and perceptions of
contextual factors are open to change.
The fact that politeness is subject to (sometimes extensive) change raises
an important challenge for researchers, namely, the continuity issue. It is not
pre-evident that this development takes place in a gradual way, which in turn
influences the relationship between different stages of development of polite-
ness within a society or a relational network. In some cases the development
of politeness can be abrupt if not brutal, and such transformations may result
in conceptualisations or discourses of politeness that do not resemble at all
their previous state. A representative case of this phenomenon can be provided
through an examination of the history of politeness in Chinese.
Pan and Kádár (2011) argue that politeness in Chinese has undergone exten-
sive changes in its recent history. The practices that constituted so-called ‘polite
communication’ in Chinese underwent a dramatic transformation during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Mainland China. In the course of this
period, which is relatively brief from a diachronic perspective, the histori-
cal norms of deferential communication practically disappeared from Chinese
society and were replaced by a new set of politeness norms. The extinction
of these historical norms has resulted in the disappearance of the extensive
historical Chinese lexicon of honorifics, which in total included several thou-
sand words. More precisely, some honorifics survived into modernity, but their
number is extremely limited and they are used in a few special contexts only.
This large-scale change is a noteworthy phenomenon, because it resulted in the
birth of a ‘new’ emic understanding of politeness amongst Mainland Chinese
which is considerably different from its ancestor.
From the perspective of continuity, this phenomenon raises an interesting
question: what were the factors which might have provoked these changes?
Various historians argue that these large-scale transformations in Chinese have
taken place due to ideological changes. Historical Chinese honorifics developed
in such a way that they were perceived to encode and reinforce the historical
social order on China (cf. example (3)), and so during the nineteenth century,
when traditional understandings of societal structures were being replaced with
a new model in a response to attempts by the Western powers to colonise China,
such traditional forms of language usage were ‘doomed’ to disappear. This is,
in some respects at least, a convincing explanation, which can be supported
with a variety of different sources of evidence. Yet it does not answer an impor-
tant question: how it can be that no similar change has taken place in other
languages in which politeness has undergone major changes? It is enough only
to think about North Korea where traditional honorifics continue to be used,
irrespective of the fact that the extremist Communist regime has implemented
large-scale social and linguistic transformations. The answer resides in gram-
maticalisation: unlike honorifics in many other languages, Chinese honorifics
had never become part of the grammar, due to which their disappearance was
a relatively straightforward process.
Continuity, just like transformation, comparability and representation, is a
concept which connects historicity with research into contemporary data. In
fact, abrupt changes can take place in the practices of relational networks within
a short period. While more ‘local’ changes influence the lives of fewer people
than the ones described above, they tend to stir public interest and debates,
similarly to changes in more ‘social’ practices. For example, there was a recent
online discussion3 on the question as to why suddenly customers who were
reputedly ‘rude’ turn to being more unusually ‘polite’ when they have to pay
for a customer support service. In fact, changes in practices can be initiated by
a single person. This can be particularly the case (and such changes become
salient) when it is the behaviour of a person who has power and, consequently,
‘voice’ in the given network that changes. Such abrupt changes, e.g. when a
boss of a company or a politician changes their practices, are often contested,
as example (10) illustrates:
(10) Changes in Attitude? Fenty Suddenly Seems So Polite

Is the mayor playing nice or is his arrogant side playing possum?
WASHINGTON – D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty seems more polite
and less abrupt than we’re used to.
In recent months, Fenty attracted criticism for seeming arrogant,

dismissive, petty and even infantile. The mayor says that’s not
him.
The usually supportive Washington Post editorial page decried his
‘infantile’ and ‘petty’ refusal to share city baseball tickets with
the D.C. Council. In recent weeks, Fenty also has been criticized
for letting a private friend and contractor drive his government
issued car and for allowing a $75,000 heater to be installed in a
public pool Fenty uses.
Fenty apologized for the pool heater Thursday, saying he knew it
was being installed and he should not have let that happen, though
he noted that the city is in the process of upgrading all public pools
that need it.
The new burst of humility – and the fact that he turned the baseball
tickets over to the Council – is prompting questions about an
apparent change in attitude.
‘Well, I think when you make a mistake, I think part of being a
professional is admitting it and learning from it and getting past
it,’ Fenty said.
Fenty’s talked to a lot of big city mayors who told him that you’ve
got to roll with the punches and not have a lot of pent up anger
when you’re mayor.
(www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/
Changes-in-Attitude-Fenty-Suddenly-Seems-Polite.html)
As example (10) illustrates, although Mayor Fenty explains why he acts

‘politely’, as the title and text of this article suggests, this change is regarded
critically by the author of the above text (Fenty’s ‘politeness’ is ostensible) and
perhaps also by the wider public.
Thus far we have discussed general concepts that should underpin an exam-
ination of the ways in which understandings of politeness are imbued with
historicity. In what follows, we will focus on the interrelation between historic-
ity and contemporary research at the level of data, by studying the issue of
multimodality, which we briefly introduced in Chapter 6, but which has in fact
played and continues to play an important role in communication in both the
past and the present.
Historical multimodality
A property of certain text types and genres, which seems to be a continuous
source of creativity, is multimodality. Multimodal interaction is an expression
that originates in computer science, and it describes the option of inputting data
through multiple channels. For example, a blog is multimodal because it allows

the writer to make use of textual and graphical methods at the same time to
convey a message (on multimodal issues see also Chapter 1). This expression
is not commonly used with respect to historical communication, even though
in historical texts many of the properties of multimodality operate, albeit in a
technically less-developed way than in their contemporary counterparts (see e.g.
Ong 1984). For example, multimodality is a key feature of historical epistolary
genres (i.e. different genres of letter writing).
Examining multimodal dimensions of politeness is a topic of great interest
because it represents an interface between historicity and modernity. Further-
more, historical multimodal genres also have a noteworthy value from the
perspective of the politeness researcher. In this chapter, we have so far dis-
cussed the difficulties that a researcher of historical texts needs to cope with.
Nevertheless, it can be argued that multimodality in historical texts provides
some important analytical clues, which can aid us to reconstruct the way in
which certain meanings and actions have been produced and interpreted.
The operation of politeness through textual multimodality was illustrated in
Figure 7.1, the Taiwanese invitation letter written in Chinese. In historical and
contemporary traditional Chinese texts, the arrangement, size and style of cer-
tain characters conventionally conveyed and continue to occasion evaluations
of politeness. It is not only the text itself, but the way the message is reinforced
by the graphic features of the message, which can express politeness. There are
also conventional extra-textual tools that are commonly associated with ‘polite-
ness’, such as the choice of certain colours, paper types, drawings and paintings
on papers and so on. Such tools are not only popular in Chinese culture but
were also widely spread in many European epistolary cultures (see a detailed
description of this issue in Kádár 2010b, and see also Dury’s 2008 study on
handwriting and epistolary communication).
While textual features of multimodality in themselves provide an innova-
tive area to explore as they bring an unusual, artistic element into politeness
research, there is another aspect of multimodality, which has theoretical sig-
nificance. More specifically, multimodality is useful for observing the way in
which historical documents, in particular letters, have been transmitted, as well
as the way in which this transmission influenced the wording of texts, because
it reveals how communication – in particular written communication – was
regarded in terms of privacy. As the examination of historical epistolary docu-
ments reveals, in historical writings, politeness was often framed with different
types of audience in mind, thereby providing a noteworthy case of footing in
text-based discourse (see Chapters 4 and 6).
In historical societies letters were often transmitted in ways that are quite
different from our sense of private exchange, as is argued in the book edited
by Terttu Nevalainen and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (2007). Since there was no
modern sense of privacy, the courier of the letter not only gave the document
to the recipient but he also often read the text aloud to her or him, even in
cases when the recipient was literate. In some other cases, a local person was
supposed to read aloud the text for the recipients. The document – unless, of
course, its content was really confidential as in the case of secret plans – was
read aloud in front of kin and followers of the recipient, that is, the message
was transferred via at least two channels, writing and speaking.
Since the writer knew that their letter would be read aloud, they had to
formulate the letter vis-à-vis politeness with different audiences (i.e. both the
addressee and the overhearers) in mind. The group of overhearers also included
the courier, who in turn provided feedback to the writer with regards to the
reception of the message. Quite understandably, the multiple reception footings
in the audience resulted in practices addressing the multiple understandings of
politeness that could consequently arise, as example (11) illustrates:
(11) dd, dddddd, ddddd

The luck of Fourth and Sixth Brothers in the examination was
not good, but there is no need to worry about this.
(cited from Kádár 2010b: 57–8)
This is a fragment from a letter written by a renowned Chinese statesman Zeng

Guofan to his parents, in 1842. In the section cited above he reflects on the fact
that his younger brothers have failed to pass their imperial examinations (in
historical China people could only be appointed as officials after passing state
examinations). There is a noteworthy relational issue here: Zeng addresses the
letter to his parents – to whom he expresses utter deference – and so he is not
supposed to be tactful when it comes to a source of shame about which the
whole family is aware. Yet despite this, Zeng uses the euphemistic expression
kaoyun-buhao dddd (lit. ‘luck in the examination was not good’). The
obvious reason for this careful formulation is that Zeng was aware that his
brothers would be present when the letter was read aloud, or at least they
would be informed about its contents by some of the overhearers. Historical
evidence shows that the genre of family letters in China was one that was
both read and shown to members of a wider clan, and so Zeng’s awareness
of multiple possible recipient footings is understandable. What is interesting
to note in connecting historical and contemporary forms of multimodality
and the participant footings they afford is that this phenomenon bears more
than a passing resemblance to issues facing users of social media networks,
such as Facebook and the like, where the producer needs to bear in mind a
potentially complex set of participation footings vis-à-vis understandings of
politeness.
8.3 Key studies

Readers who are interested in historical pragmatics in general are recommended
to consult the article of Jacobs and Jucker (1995). This provides an excellent
overview of the main methodologies of historical pragmatics, and due to its rel-
ative brevity is a useful starting point for those who intend to further themselves
in this field.
An overview of the field of historical politeness research can be found
in the article ‘Historical (im)politeness: an introduction’, written by Kádár
and Culpeper (2010). This paper benchmarks the birth of historical politeness
research as an independent field, and it introduces the main theoretical and
methodological challenges of examining politeness in historically situated data.
Furthermore, it argues for the importance of revisiting descriptive, first-wave
approaches, such as Brown and Levinson (1987), to historical politeness from
a discursive perspective.
The edited volume of Taavitsainen and Jucker (2003) includes a series of
in-depth specialised analyses of terms of address. Research on terms of address
is one of the most common fields within historical politeness research, and this
volume offers examination of this phenomenon in a great variety of languages
and historical periods.
The article by Watts (1999), ‘Language and politeness in early eighteenth
century Britain’, has a most illustrative discussion of the way in which the
notion of politeness can transform within a society. Among other issues, Watts
discusses inequality in the social distribution of politeness, which was once
regarded as a ‘property’ of high social classes.
Pan and Kádár (2011) cover issues related with continuity, which have been
discussed in this chapter. Relying on an extensive interactional database, Pan
and Kádár reconstruct the way in which historical Chinese politeness has trans-
formed into its contemporary state. Importantly this research merges historical
pragmatics with cross-cultural research.
8.4 Summary
Ultimately, history is an area which cannot be ignored by any theory of polite-
ness. This chapter has argued that the norms and manifestations of politeness
are historically relative, i.e. what is understood as appropriate is relative to time.
Furthermore, understandings of politeness are influenced by historicity: with
the passing of time, understandings and practices, as well as particular interac-
tions, become historically situated, which has an impact on the ways in which
they are understood. Historical situatedness poses various challenges for the
researcher, such as comparability and representation, as well as transformation
and continuity. Whilst these challenges may seem to be specific to historical
data, as a matter of fact practically any time lag can transform an interaction
8.5 Exercises 177
into the state of being ‘historical’, and so arguably the challenges discussed
here are also present when one sets out to analyse any interaction that does not
occur in front of our eyes (or which cannot be replayed like a video-recording).
In this chapter we have devoted special attention to the point that ‘historical’
and ‘modern’ should not be treated in a dichotomic way, as any ‘modern’
understanding and practice of politeness is liable to become ‘historical’. We
have also discussed the importance of studying ‘real’ historical interactions,
such as historical manifestations of multimodality, which have important value
for research on contemporary data.
8.5 Exercises
1. Can you think of cases where you use politeness in order to display your
perceived rank rather than to express politeness towards the other? If
yes, compare these cases with example (3) above.
2. Can you identify any significant change in the practices of politeness in
your society? If yes, describe these changes in detail.
3. Have you ever experienced any situation when your language usage has
been represented or mispresented by others?
4. Think about cases when you formed a certain utterance cautiously, out
of awareness of multiple audiences who might have overheard your
message. How does this situation compare with the case represented by
example (9) above?
(a) Xerxes: But I am a generous god. I can make you rich beyond
all measure. I will make you warlord of all Greece. You
will carry my battle standard to the heart of Europa.
Your Athenian rivals will kneel at your feet if you will
but kneel at mine.
King Leonidas: You are generous as you are divine, O king of kings.
Such an offer only a madman would refuse. But the,
uh, the idea of kneeling, it’s – you see, slaughtering all
those men of yours has, uh, well it’s left a nasty cramp
in my leg, so kneeling will be hard for me.
(300, 2006)
(b) King Louis: You look beautiful.
Queen Anne: Thank you.
King Louis: Is something wrong?
Queen Anne: Cardinal Richelieu.
King Louis: Yes?

Queen Anne: He is an evil man.
King Louis: Do not believe every rumour you hear. He is powerful.
Queen Anne: I ride through the countryside every day, I’ve seen the
uses of his power.
King Louis: Power sometimes frightens.
Queen Anne: Here in the Palace I have seen it too.
King Louis: I know.
Queen Anne: What shall we do?
King Louis: I don’t know, but we will do it together.
(The Three Musketeers, 1993)
Example (a), in spite of the fact that it is a modern reproduction of a
historical interaction instead of being an authentic historical source, neatly
represents the use of politeness in a self-oriented rather than an other-
oriented way, which was illustrated in example (3). King Xerxes, leader of
the Persian army which is attemping to invade Greece, refers to himself as
being a ‘generous god’, and his interactant King Leonidas acknowledges
this rank deferentially (but in a somewhat mocking tone), by uttering ‘You
are generous as you are divine, O king of kings.’
Example (b) is a typical case of mispresentation. It seems to us natural
that the French King and Queen, who are young lovers, exchange words
of plain adoration, and that they promise to each other that they will go
through difficulties together. However, this is simply not the way in which
politeness worked in many societies of that age. The king and the queen of
a country like France were assumed to interact with some degree of formal
etiquette, for example, by using formal terms of address, and it is likely that
they rarely interacted in private (that is, without courtiers being around),
which would have thus influenced the ways in which understandings of
politeness arose given the presence of ‘overhearers’.
Part III
Politeness and social space:

from mind to society
9 Politeness and metapragmatics
9.1 Introduction
Politeness is something that we can all talk and think about. This talk about
politeness ranges from specific comments we might make to, or about, par-
ticipants in interactions through to whole books on etiquette or appropriate
social behaviour. Indeed, in some cultures we can find discourses on polite-
ness and related phenomena stretching back thousands of years, a point we
noted in Chapter 8. Such talk comes under the umbrella of metapragmatics,
which can be broadly defined as the study of awareness on the part of ordinary
or lay observers about the ways in which they use language to interact and
communicate with others.
In order to start thinking about how we might study the metapragmatics of
politeness, let us first consider example (1), from the movie Borat, where the
British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen plays the character of Borat Sadiyev,
a fictitious journalist from Kazakhstan who is travelling through the United
States interacting with real-life Americans. Here, Borat is receiving instruction
on how to act appropriately at a dinner party from a professional etiquette
coach (Kathie). He then takes what he has ‘learned’ and subsequently applies
it with members of a Dining Society at a dinner party in the Magnolia Springs
Manor in Helena, Alabama. The participants in both of these interactions were
not aware at the time that Borat was a fictional character being played by an
actor.
(1) Scene 1: Etiquette class with professional etiquette coach, Kathie

Martin.
Borat: ((walks in and shakes hands)) Hello. Nice meet you.
Kathie: Hello, it’s so nice to meet you. Welcome to America.
Borat: Will you please teach me how to dine like gentlemen?
Kathie: Of course, I’ll be happy to.
Borat: ((sitting at table)) Should I pay compliments to the
peoples?
Kathie: Yes, but only if you truly agree with that compliment.
181
Scene 2: Six people from the Dining Society are holding a dinner
party with Borat at the Magnolia Springs Manor. Borat
is seated between two ladies, Cindy and Sarah, with
another lady, Sally, sitting at the end of the table opposite
her husband, Cary.
Borat: ((orienting to Sarah)) You have a- very gentle face and
very erotic physique.
Sarah: ((softly)) Thank you.
Jared: You’re correct.
Cindy: ((laughs))
Cary: Yes, that’s a very good observation.
Borat: She is your wife?
Cary: No, that’s my wife ((points to his wife, Sally, at the end
of the table))
Borat: In my country they would go crazy, for these two
((gestures to Sarah and Cindy))
((laughter from several participants; Sarah and Cindy
smile))
Borat: Not so much . . . ((gestures to Sally))
((laughter drops off))
Cary: ((stares stonily at Borat))
(Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit
Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, 2006)
In the first scene, Borat learns that it is good to compliment others in the context
of a ‘polite’ dinner party, which is explicitly invoked here through Borat’s
reference to dining ‘like gentlemen’. The etiquette coach advises, however, that
his compliments should be sincere (or at least should be seen to be so). Insofar
as this is explicit talk about how to be a gentleman (i.e. ‘polite’), it constitutes
a very clear sign of awareness on the part of both of these participants that
there are certain expectations in relation to ‘polite’ dinner parties in the US, or
at least in the Southern States such as Alabama where these interactions took
place.
In the second scene, Borat applies what he has ‘learnt’ by complimenting
Sarah on her good looks. Despite the potentially inappropriate formulation
of his compliment in referring to her ‘erotic physique’, Sarah herself thanks
Borat for his compliment, and the other guests express agreement. Through this
reciprocation, it is evident they are treating Borat’s compliment as a polite one
(albeit perhaps in an attempt to accommodate Borat’s apparent outsider status
in this interaction). However, Borat’s apparent good work comes undone when
he implies that while Sarah and Cindy are very attractive, Cary’s wife Sally is
not particularly attractive. At this point it becomes apparent from the marked
drop in laughter in the group and the ‘stony’ expression on Cary’s face that this
latter implicature has caused offence. What we can observe in this second scene
is that metapragmatic awareness is not always limited to talk about politeness.
Here Borat is implicitly held accountable by the other participants, in particular
by Cary, for having an impolite attitude towards his wife. In attributing this
attitude to Borat, Cary and the others demonstrate reflexive thinking, where one
thinks about what others think one thinks and so on. In this case, Cary (and the
others) think that Borat thinks it is allowable to indicate that he does not think
highly of Cary’s wife, in particular, her looks. This attitude is characterisable
as impolite through an implicit appeal to the moral order, namely, the set of
expectancies around ‘polite’ dinner parties, including the expectation that one
will avoid negative assessments of the physical appearance of others. While
Borat is initially given leeway in that he is treated as an outsider, and thus
is treated as having an etic perspective on the moral order assumed by the
other participants, he is ultimately held accountable to the emic understandings
of these participants as to what constitutes impoliteness in ‘polite’ society
in Alabama – and more than likely amongst many Anglo-Americans (and
many other societies) more generally. The expectation that one avoids negative
assessments is here constituted through their responses, and thus it contributes
to perpetuating this expectation as part of the moral order of this particular
relational network over time.
In this chapter, we outline why a metapragmatic perspective on language use
and communication is of particular importance to the study of politeness. As
you will recall, we have proposed that lying at the heart of understandings of
politeness is the notion of social practice. We have suggested that politeness
constitutes a social practice because it involves evaluations (implicitly) appeal-
ing to a moral order, which are occasioned by social actions and meanings. In
other words, evaluations of politeness are not idiosyncratic, but are constituted
through the practices by which social actions and meanings are recognisable
as ‘familiar scenes of everyday affairs’, and are thus open, because of this,
to moral evaluation. However, as the pragmatician Verschueren (1999) points
out, social practices cannot be separated out from the understandings of partic-
ipants themselves without losing sight of what we have set out to understand
as analysts in the first place:
in social life, conceptualisations and practices are inseparable. Consequently, there is

no way of understanding forms of behaviour without gaining insight into the way in
which the social actors themselves habitually conceptualise what it is they are doing.
Preconceived theoretical frameworks just do not suffice. (1999: 196, emphasis added)
What Verschueren is arguing here is that we cannot understand the social

practices by which politeness arises without investigating the ways in which
participants generally conceptualise their own behaviour. In other words, we
need to systematically analyse the moral order, through which evaluations of
politeness are constituted, as an object of study in its own right.
The moral order is constituted, as we discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, through

practices by which social actions and meanings are recognisable to members,
and are thereby open to moral evaluation. The sets of expectancies through
which the recognisability of these practices is constituted can be divided into
three interleaving layers, where first-order expectancies (i.e. localised norms)
reflexively invoke second-order expectancies (i.e. group-based norms), which
can, in turn, reflexively invoke third-order expectancies (i.e. societal norms)
(see Figure 5.4 in Chapter 5). In this chapter we thus attempt to outline how we
can tap into politeness vis-à-vis all three layers of the moral order by examining
various forms of metapragmatic awareness.
9.2 Key concepts
Reflexivity and meta-awareness

The prefix meta, which comes from Greek μετά meaning ‘above’, ‘beyond’
or ‘among’, is normally used in English to indicate a concept or term that is
about another concept or term. For example, ‘metadata’ is data about data,
while metalanguage is language about language. The term metapragmatics
was first coined by the linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein (1976, see
also 1993), and defined as ‘reflexive pragmatic functioning’ (1976: 36). In other
words, it involves the study of reflexive awareness on the part of participants and
observers of interaction about the ways in which language is used. The notions
of reflexivity and awareness are thus critical to understanding metapragmatics.
Reflexivity arises when one level of interpretation or analysis is interde-
pendently related to another. In the case of politeness this means a circular
relationship invariably exists between what occasions an evaluation of polite-
ness and the evaluation itself. An action or meaning counts as polite because
it is recognisable to participants as polite, but it is recognisable to participants
as polite because it is recognised by at least some participants as polite. In
example (1), for instance, the way in which Borat implies Cary’s wife is not
attractive is recognisable as not polite (or even impolite) in part because Cary
recognises it as not polite through his non-verbal response (i.e. his ‘stony’ stare
and silence). However, Cary can only recognise it as not polite because it is
recognisably not polite with reference to the set of expectancies these partici-
pants have vis-à-vis polite complimenting at dinner parties. The recognisability
of politeness, impoliteness and so on is thus dependent on participants recog-
nising social actions/meanings as occasioning politeness, impoliteness and so
on, but recognising politeness, impoliteness and so on depends in turn on
the recognisability of this politeness, impoliteness and so on. In other words,
the recognition of politeness, impoliteness and so on (i.e. the evaluation) by
participants is interdependently or reflexively related to the recognisability of

politeness, impoliteness and so on (i.e. what occasions the evaluation).
This circular relationship between what occasions an evaluation of politeness
and the evaluation itself means that this evaluation enters into the past, current
ongoing and future evaluative moments of the person(s) to whom an evaluation
can be traced. In other words, these reflexive evaluations are also fundamen-
tally recursive across relational networks or social spaces. What we mean by
recursive is that these evaluations reoccur or are repeated in a self-similar way
over time and across social spaces, as we discussed in Chapter 7. For instance,
Borat’s remarks are recognisable to Cary and the other participants as impo-
lite or offensive, because they are not consistent with their taken-for-granted
expectancies in relation to compliments vis-à-vis this interpretative frame – in
other words, the conventions in that relational network as to what counts as a
polite compliment (cf. Chapter 7). Evaluations of politeness are thus potentially
recursive in the evaluative moment of the here-and-now in the sense that Cary’s
evaluation of Borat’s remarks as impolite rests in part on Cary’s assumption
that others present (excluding Borat) may evaluate Borat’s remarks as impolite,
and thus Cary might expect that the others would expect him to evaluate Borat’s
remarks as impolite, and furthermore that the others present might expect that
Cary might expect that the others might expect him to evaluate Borat’s remarks
as impolite and so on.
In practice, of course, evaluative moments of politeness cannot be infinitely
recursive, but they can readily reach a third or fourth degree of recursivity as we
can see, for instance, in the additional layers of metapragmatic understanding
that subsequently emerged when the interaction itself became the subject of
discussion in the local media. Comments from the unwitting participants were
elicited by reporters after they found out they had been misled by Sacha Baron
Cohen (i.e. the comedian playing Borat). Cary Speaker, for instance, was quoted
as saying in a local news report, ‘Hey, he fooled us; it’s funny. Watching this,
I’m sure it’s funny [to some people]’, but nevertheless admitting that ‘It was
just not funny that night.’ In other words, Cary alludes to the offence he took
at Borat’s remarks about his wife at the time, although in retrospect serious
offence did not last beyond the here-and-now of that particular moment. Sarah
Moseley, the lady who was ‘complimented’ by Borat, was quoted as saying, on
the other hand, ‘He insulted all of us’, thereby alluding to a sense of broader
offence at being misled by Sacha Baron Cohen. This talk about politeness and
offence thus became part of a broader intergroup concern, namely, the way
in which movie goers more generally view people from Alabama subsequent
to witnessing this scene, something which became most apparent in Sarah’s
reported comments, ‘I don’t want our city and our state to be embarrassed.’ A
local reporter reassured readers, however, that ‘they did Alabama proud’, as it
was only Borat who acted offensively, not the local Alabamans. In this way,
we can also observe how the evaluations of participants vis-à-vis politeness

can vary depending on their awareness of the extent to which the interaction in
question is being witnessed by others.
The question, then, for us as analysts is how do we open up the circular-
ity inherent in the recognition and recognisability of evaluative moments of
politeness? One option is to tap into the reflexive awareness of such evaluative
moments on the part of participants (and observers) themselves. Metapragmatic
awareness varies both in its degree of accessibility and level of salience to par-
ticipants. This means that while some indicators of metapragmatic awareness
may be easily accessible and/or highly salient to users, others may not. This
should not be taken to suggest, however, that metapragmatic awareness can
be equated with levels of consciousness. The folk linguists Nancy Niedzielski
and Dennis Preston (2009) suggest that there are at least four distinct modes of
awareness:
a. Unavailable: phenomena that users will not, or perhaps cannot, comment on
b. Available: phenomena that are discussed only if they are carefully described
c. Suggestible: phenomena that are seldom initiated by users, but nevertheless
are commented on without elaborate description
d. Common: frequent public topics of folk linguistic discussion.
(Niedzielski and Preston 2009: 147)
On this view, participants may not always be able to articulate their reflexive
understandings of politeness, despite such understandings being inherent in
that very same usage. It is also apparent that such awareness may become more
or less salient in different situated contexts. In example (1), Borat’s impolite
attitude towards Cary’s wife was highly salient. However, in other instances,
metapragmatic awareness on the part of participants can be much more subtle,
as we shall see.
Given that participants may not always be able to articulate their reflexive
understandings of politeness, then, a focus on the metapragmatics of politeness
is not simply a matter of analysing the talk of insiders (an emic perspective) –
or outsiders (an etic perspective) – about politeness. In fact, there are four key
forms of reflexive awareness that are relevant to understanding politeness:
(i) metalinguistic awareness, which involves reflexive representations of
evaluations of politeness, impoliteness and so on. A representation is
essentially a generalised interpretation of the world (including our social
reality) that we find displayed in or through natural language terms or
expressions. Essentially this involves the different expressions or meta-
language we can use in various languages to talk about politeness, impo-
liteness and so on, such as polite and courteous in English or teinei and
reigi in Japanese.
(ii) metacommunicative awareness, which refers to reflexive interpretations
and evaluations of social actions and meanings. This includes explicit
ETIC
metalinguistic metacognitive
EMIC
third-order
moral order
second-order
first-order
metacommunicative metadiscursive
Figure 9.1 Metapragmatics of politeness.
comments that participants make in interactions using terms such as polite

or courteous. Interpretations and evaluations lie at the core of politeness
as social practice, as we have discussed in the preceding chapters.
(iii) metadiscursive awareness, which refers to reflexive social discourses
on politeness that are constituted (and contested) at a societal or cultural
level. A social discourse encompasses a persistent frame of interpretation
and evaluation that has become objectified in ongoing metapragmatic talk
about politeness.1 This includes, for instance, talk about politeness or
courtesy in the popular media.
(iv) metacognitive awareness, which involves reflexive presentations of cog-
nitively grounded states, such as attitudes, expectations and so on, through
discourse or pragmatic markers.
In Figure 9.1 these four key types of metapragmatic awareness are sum-
marised as ways in which the moral order itself is constituted not only in
particular evaluative moments of politeness, but over time and across social
spaces. In this chapter, we suggest that an examination of these different forms
of metapragmatic awareness vis-à-vis politeness gives us, as analysts, a win-
dow into the reflexive layers of the moral order we introduced in Chapters 4
and 5. At the top of Figure 9.1 we have also added that these various forms
of metapragmatic understanding of the moral order can be situated vis-à-
vis emic (or insider) understandings, or vis-à-vis etic (or outsider) under-
standings. This interplay between emic and etic understandings of the moral
order is an ongoing theme that emerges when examining these different
forms of metapragmatic awareness, as we shall see. We will now move to
outline the first three types of metapragmatic awareness in the remainder
of this chapter, (i.e. metalinguistic, metacommunicative and metadiscursive
awareness), leaving our discussion of metacognitive awareness to Chapter 10,

where we focus more specifically on cognition and emotion in relation to
politeness.
Metalanguage
In order to describe and conceptualise our social reality, which includes polite-
ness among many other things, we need to use language. However, since our
social reality is itself constituted through language, the terms or expressions
used to describe politeness involve a particular kind of reflexive language use
that is termed metalanguage – essentially language which focuses on language
itself. What this means is we can examine the conceptual underpinnings of
politeness through careful analysis of the metalinguistic representations that
are constituted through politeness-related terms and expressions. As we noted
in Chapter 5, the sets of expectancies that constitute the moral order draw
in important ways from inter-related arrays of (im)politeness evaluators (the
metalanguage used by members to conceptualise their social world). It is thus
important to systematically investigate the metalanguage of ‘politeness’ across
different relational networks. In this way, we can tease out the emic worldviews
that underpin ‘(im)politeness’ metalanguage. In the following discussion of
(im)politeness evaluators, then, we will use quotation marks to indicate where
we are using ‘politeness’ in the etic sense (i.e. to discuss ‘(im)politeness’
evaluators across languages), and italics when we are referring to them in
the emic sense (i.e. to discuss how they are understood by speakers of those
languages).
An important point to note, however, when setting out to examine the meta-
language of ‘politeness’ across language and relational networks is to appreciate
that such terms do not exist in a conceptual vacuum. As Mills argues:
politeness only makes sense in relation to other terms within its semantic field, and the
meanings of these terms are defined in a complex process of being set apart from and
being conflated with other terms and playing off the meanings of those terms. (2009:
1055)
This means that we cannot study a term such as politeness in English in isola-
tion. Inevitably any discussion of politeness involves appeals (albeit implicit) to
understandings of impoliteness. It is for this reason we have not excluded ‘impo-
liteness’ and so on from our analyses in this volume. However, the interplay of
these different metalinguistic expressions is not restricted to the reflexive con-
ceptual underpinnings of politeness and impoliteness. Consider for a moment
example (2), from an interview with an informant about his views on how he
would rate a particular apology (which we discussed in Chapter 5) vis-à-vis
politeness.
(2) AM4: 5:13

69 A: maybe it’d- he’d be placing towards the neither polite nor
impolite or verging (.) on the polite, cer- certainly not very
polite?
70 W: mhm?
71 A: not obsequiously polite or not any not- not- not- overly
polite in any other sense, but (.) nor was he particularly
impolite, I thought.
The main point to note here is that the informant tries to characterise how he
would evaluate the apology in terms of both how it might be evaluated (verging
on polite), as well as how it would not be evaluated (not polite, not obsequiously
polite, not overly polite, not particularly impolite). These metalinguistic terms
in English are thus relativised within a semantic field: a set of related words that
denote a segment of presumed social reality (i.e. ‘politeness’). This semantic
field is occasioned through his localised talk in order to clarify what is meant
by his evaluation of the apology as neither polite nor impolite.
In Figure 9.2 we outline a basic framework through which we can represent
the ways in which we necessarily draw from both emic and etic perspectives
in understanding politeness across languages and relational networks. Some
of the basic evaluators that are used in politeness research, where English is
predominantly used as a scientific metalanguage, feature in the middle box
(cf. Figure 4.1). These go beyond simply ‘politeness’ and ‘impoliteness’, since
these do not exist in a vacuum, but within a larger semantic field, as we observed
in example (2). The various lexemes featured in the circles on both sides of the
middle box illustrate examples of emic ‘(im)politeness’-related evaluators in a
selection of four different languages: English, Japanese, Spanish and Chinese.
These are not meant as equivalents or translations of each other, but rather to
illustrate lexemes that occupy a similar conceptual space or semantic field in
those languages. What is important to note here is that (im)politeness evaluators
in English are treated on a par with those in other languages from an emic
perspective. From an etic perspective, however, they are necessarily privileged
given this book is itself written in English. Another point to note is that we
are only representing ‘politeness’ metalanguage at the ‘societal’ or ‘cultural’
level (which are third-order normative understandings), but the metalanguage
itself may carry different connotations within different first- and second-order
relational networks.
While a consideration of all these different metalinguistic terms inevitably
goes beyond the scope of this chapter, what Figure 9.2 is meant to suggest
is that rather than treating the metalanguage we use to describe politeness,
impoliteness and the like as simply a given, we need to make more serious
attempts to tease out the worldviews that underpin this analytical metalanguage.
courteous EMIC ETIC EMIC impolite

polite discourteous
considerate rude
friendly inconsiderate
mock impolite
reigi omoiyari bushitsuke shitsurei
teinei kikubari not impolite busah burei
polite neither polite nor impolite impolite
educación not polite descortés
simpatía respeto mock polite grosero impolítico
cortesía overpolite maleducado
limao zhoudao meilimao bukeqi
titie keqi búli jipo
Figure 9.2 An emic/etic model of ‘politeness’ evaluators.
Otherwise, as Haugh (2012a) argued, we may fall into one of two traps: first,
thinking we are talking about the same phenomena across languages and cul-
tures when in fact we are not; second, generating analytical artifacts that are
of no consequence for those people concerned through the imposition of tacit
worldviews that underlie the metalanguage we use. It is thus important to prop-
erly analyse and to understand the ‘politeness’ metalanguage of the language
that is the focus of analysis.
Take, for instance, two languages that have been characterised as ‘neg-
ative politeness’ cultures by Brown and Levinson (1987): (British) English
and Japanese. The word polite in (British) English is often associated with
terms such as courteous, respectful, friendly, pleasant, thoughtful, cheer-
ful, calm, gracious, charming and quiet according to Culpeper (2012). In
Japanese, in contrast, there are at least four possible ‘equivalents’ for polite:
teinei (lit. ‘warm/kind-hearted’), omoiyari (lit. ‘consideration’/‘empathy’),
kikubari/kizukai (lit. ‘attentiveness’) and reigi (lit. ‘manners’) (Fukushima
2004, 2011; Haugh 2004). However, if we look more closely at the conceptual
underpinnings of just one of these, take for instance reigi, we find an evaluator
reigi
sahō kei’i
‘manner/etiquette’ ‘vertical respect’
tsutsushimu uyamau
‘discretion’ ‘respect’ jinkaku
‘character’
hikaeme uyauyashii tattobu
‘modesty’ ‘in awe’ ‘revere’
mibun/chi’i
‘social position’
Figure 9.3 Semantic field of reigi in Japanese.
which has a rather different conceptual scope to that encompassed by the notion
of polite in English.
Consider the analysis of the conceptual underpinnings of one of these terms,
reigi, presented in Figure 9.3. What we find associated with the ‘(im)politeness’
evaluator reigi in Japanese are notions such as ‘status-oriented respect’ (kei’i),
‘discretion’ (tsutsushimu), ‘revere’ (tattobu) and ‘social position’ (mibun/chi’i).
What becomes apparent from this broad attempt at representing an emic under-
standing of a key ‘politeness’ evaluator in Japanese is that we are dealing with a
concept quite different to that encapsulated by polite in English.2 What we can
see is that the emic concept of reigi embodies a whole set of assumptions about
personhood, relationships and social structure that deserve much closer atten-
tion. The notion of reigi emphasises, for instance, a view of persons as defined
in part through their social ‘place’ (both the ‘place one stands’ and the ‘place
one belongs’), and a view of social structure as involving vertical, hierarchical
relationships. What becomes apparent, then, is that we are not dealing with
equivalent notions here but rather with analogous conceptualisations. To put it
more simply, there is little point in examining how understandings of politeness
arise in Japanese using an implicit notion of politeness in English, or even a
technical or operational definition of politeness that is meant to encompass
both, because they involve quite different sets of underlying assumptions.3 It
is therefore essential that analyses of politeness are informed – although not
overly constrained – by these emic conceptualisations.
How, then, might we study the metalanguage of politeness across different
relational networks or social spaces more broadly? In Table 9.1 we briefly
summarise three main approaches which have been utilised by politeness
researchers to date, and some exemplary studies that can be consulted for
Table 9.1 Approaches to analysing the metalanguage of

politeness.
Approach Exemplar studies
1. Corpus analysis Culpeper (2009b)

2. Lexical/conceptual mapping Ide et al. ([1992] 2005)
a. Statistical Pizziconi (2007)
b. Qualitative Wetzel (2004)
Watts (2008)
3. Metapragmatic interviews/questionnaires Bolı́var (2008)
Gagné (2010)
further details on how to operationalise these approaches. Corpus analysis

involves studying the relative frequency of metalinguistic expressions and the
ways in which they collocate (i.e. co-occur) with other terms in a corpus, which
is generally a large, representative and structured collection of texts sampled
from various types of discourse. Given the method of choice in lexicogra-
phy (i.e. the study of word meanings) is considered to be corpus linguistics
(Culpeper 2009b), it is clear that corpus analysis offers a firm ontological
basis for understanding ‘politeness’ across languages and relational networks.
For instance, Culpeper analysed the ‘impoliteness’ lexicon in English using
the Oxford English Corpus, a two-billion word corpus encompassing different
varieties of English. An important finding was that rude is much more common
than impolite, and indeed the latter has a more ‘formal’ or ‘highbrow flavor’
(p. 77). In other words, rude is the term of choice for ordinary speakers of
English, while impolite is the term of choice for academics. What this indicates
is that those interested in understanding the metalanguage of ‘impoliteness’
in English should be focusing on teasing out the conceptual underpinnings
of the expression rude in the first instance rather than treating impolite as
interchangeable with rude.4
However, while analyses of the metalanguage of ‘politeness’ through corpora
is an analytically powerful approach, it inevitably needs to be complemented
with other approaches for two reasons. One problem is there are not appropriate
corpora in existence for all languages or language varieties, and certainly not
many that can address differences in metalinguistic awareness across the dif-
ferent relational networks that constitute the broader community of speakers of
a particular language. A second possible limitation is that corpus analysis does
not necessarily always allow for in-depth analysis of the conceptual under-
pinnings of this metalanguage; in particular, the ways in which ‘politeness’
metalanguage inevitably forms semantic fields.
A second approach to analysing metalanguage that allows for the latter kind
of analysis is through lexical or conceptual mapping. Here, the focus is on
elucidating the conceptual network or field formed through metalinguistic
expressions through either statistical or qualitative means. Ide et al. (2005
[1992]), for instance, undertook multivariate analysis of ‘politeness’ terms in
American English and Japanese. A key finding was that friendliness was associ-
ated with politeness in American English, but not with teinei in Japanese. And
Pizziconi (2007) has employed another statistical method, multidimensional
scaling, to examine and compare the ‘politeness’ lexicon in British English
and Japanese, with her results independently confirming (as well as elaborating
on) the earlier findings of Ide et al. Other studies have used more qualita-
tive means to develop conceptual maps or networks of metalinguistic expres-
sions. Wetzel (2004), for instance, utilised discourse analysis in examining the
‘politeness’ lexicon in etiquette books about honorifics in Japanese, with a key
finding being that many of them are oriented to the notion of ‘vertical respect’
(kei’i ) and ‘place’ (tachiba ). Methods from cognitive linguistics
have also been employed, with Watts (2008), for instance, using the ‘mental
spaces model’ to analyse the ‘impoliteness’ lexicon in (British) English, with
a particular focus on how these mental spaces are ‘blended’ in the course of
interaction.
Finally, metapragmatic interviews and questionnaires have also been utilised
to offer further insights into the metalinguistic awareness of cultural insiders
or members. Adriana Bolı́var (2008), for instance, examined perceptions of
‘politeness’ in Venezuelan Spanish using a questionnaire. She reported that her
informants offered a wide range of words as somehow related to or equivalent
to ‘politeness’, but the tendency was for women to associate it with amabilidad
(‘kindness’) and educación (‘education/good behaviour’), while men felt more
inclined to associate it with norma (‘norms’) as well, the latter reflecting the
perceived need to act as caballeros (‘gentlemen’). And in a rather thought-
provoking study, Gagné (2010) examined further elements of the Japanese
‘(im)politeness’ lexicon through the analytical lens of the etic (in this case
theoretical) notion of negative face. What she found in interviews was that
while the informants could recognise negative face (the desire that one’s wants
be unimpeded) as an independent idea, they did not view it as naturally arising
in request situations. Instead, they reinterpreted their hesitancy or avoidance of
requests in some contexts in terms of the presumption they are shakaijin (‘adult
members of a society’) who understand that it is expected one does things by
oneself to cause as little meiwaku (‘trouble’) to others as possible. Crucially,
it was claimed that a shakaijin is someone who avoids meiwaku because he or
she can ‘independently recognise the importance and conditions of one’s social
embeddedness, and act according to it’ (p. 131). In other words, it was to their
relationships with each other that the informants oriented in conceptualising

‘polite’ requests.
Metacommunication
In the same way that metalanguage is language that focuses on language itself,
metacommunication involves communication about communicative events
themselves, in other words, communication that focuses on the interpretation
and evaluation of social actions and meanings in interaction. While the term
metadiscourse is sometimes also used to refer to this (see Culpeper 2011a),
we are reserving that term for a discussion of discourse in the more technical
sense of persistent frames of interpretation or ideologies in the subsequent sec-
tion. Various terms are used to describe instances where metacommunication
surfaces in language use, including metapragmatic comments, metalinguistic
comments, metadiscursive comments, or simply metacomments. These terms
are largely interchangeable, but since they generally reflect the home disci-
pline of the analyst (e.g. pragmatics, (socio)linguistics or discourse analysis),
they can carry with them an implicit set of theoretical assumptions, a point
which is important to bear in mind in situating different studies of polite-
ness relative to each other (see Chapter 5). Since spontaneous or naturally
occurring instances of metacommunication can, as Jaworski, Coupland and
Galasiński point out, ‘influence and negotiate how an utterance is or should
have been heard, or try to modify the values attributed to it’ (2004: 4), they
should be studied in the locally situated context in which they occur. However,
as Mills (2003) warns, even metacommunication which is elicited by analysts
when trying to tease out participant and/or emic understandings of politeness
itself constitutes a locally situated context, and so should also be treated as
such.
Underlying such instances of metacommunication is, of course, metacommu-
nicative awareness on the part of (meta)participants. This refers to our (implicit)
awareness in communication that not only do we interpret and evaluate what
we ourselves say and do, and what others say and do, but we also reflexively
interpret and evaluate these social actions and meanings through the eyes of
others. In other words, we include the perspective of others in our interpre-
tations and evaluations of politeness. This kind of perspective-taking is what
underpins metapragmatic comments, and thus what makes them so potentially
useful to furthering our understanding of politeness.
For instance, in example (3), from the film Gran Torino, we can see how
a young Vietnamese-American is being enculturated into a particular set of
practices through such metapragmatic comments. The film is set in Detroit
and the norms for interaction amongst males that are discussed in the example
reflect a (perceived) slice of American male blue-collar values. The example
involves Walt (a gruff Polish-American who has retired from the Ford factory)
trying to teach his young neighbour, Tao, how he should talk to guys. After
performing some ‘guy talk’ for Tao, where both Walt and the barber (Martin)
insult each other, with much of this insulting having a strong undertone of
racial stereotyping, Tao takes these instructions somewhat literally and begins
his performance of ‘guy talk’ by calling the barber an ‘old Italian prick’. They
then go on to explain to Tao the norms vis-à-vis politeness underlying this kind
of masculine talk.
(3) Walt: You know you don’t just come in and insult a man in
his own shop. You just don’t do that. What happens if
you meet some stranger? You get the wrong one and he’s
gonna blow your gook head right off.
Tao: What should I have said then?
Barber: Yeah kid. Why don’t you start with um ‘hi’ or ‘hello’?
Walt: Yeah just come in and say, ‘Sir I’d like a haircut if you
have the time.’
Barber: Yeah, be polite but don’t kiss ass.
Walt: In fact, you could talk about the construction job you just
came from. And bitch about your girlfriend in your car.
Barber: Uh, son of a bitch, I just got my brakes fixed, and those
sons of bitches really nailed me. I mean they screwed me
right in the ass.
Walt: Yeah, don’t swear at the guy. Just talk about people who
are not in the room. You could bitch about your boss
making you work overtime when it’s bowling night.
Barber: Right, or my old lady bitches for two goddamn hours
about how they uh don’t take expired coupons at the
grocery store. And the minute I turn on the fucking game,
she starts crying how we never talk.
Walt: You see? Now go out and come back and talk to him.
And it ain’t rocket science for Christ’s sake.
Tao: Yeah, but I don’t have a job, a car, or a girlfriend.
Barber: Jesus, I should have blown his head off when I had the
chance.
(Gran Torino, 2008)
A number of key features of this form of ‘guy talk’ emerge in the course
of example (3), as Walt and then also the barber (Martin) attempt to instruct
Tao. One key ‘rule’, according to Walt and the barber at least, is that you don’t
insult someone unless you know them well (as do Walt and Martin), but rather
you insult others who are not present. A second key ‘rule’ is that a balance
needs to be maintained between being sufficiently respectful (i.e. polite) but
Table 9.2 Approaches to analysing (im)politeness

metacommunication.
1. Naturally occurring
a. Face-to-face interaction Holmes, Marra and Vine (2012)
b. Computer-mediated interaction Graham (2007)
c. Fictional interaction Paternoster (2012)
2. Elicited
a. Interviews Spencer-Oatey (2011)
b. Diary/report method Culpeper (2011a)
not overly polite (what is colloquially termed kissing ass). A third key ‘rule’
is that a common topic of conversation is complaints (or what is colloquially
termed bitching). Complaining about others, particularly your boss or wife, or
about the services offered by others, is deemed by Walt and the barber to be
an acceptable way of making conversation. What is notable about this example
is not that it can be used to make any claims about blue-collar workers in
Detroit actually speaking like this per se, but rather that it illustrates, on the one
hand, how metacommunication can provide insight into the (localised) moral
order that grounds evaluative moments of politeness, and how non-members or
outsiders can be introduced to such emic understandings, on the other.
There are various ways in which we can study this underlying moral order
through the analysis of metacommunicative awareness on the part of partici-
pants and observers. Here we focus particularly on the analysis of metaprag-
matic comments vis-à-vis politeness. In Table 9.2 we summarise the key
approaches to collecting metapragmatic comments, and exemplar studies that
can be consulted for further details on how to operationalise these approaches.
The main key distinction to be made is between metacommunication that is nat-
urally occurring versus that which is elicited by the analyst. Naturally occurring
metapragmatic comments can arise in either face-to-face, computer-mediated
or fictional interactions, and may, in turn, be directed at evaluative moments of
politeness situated in the here-and-now or past evaluative moments of polite-
ness situated in the there-and-then. Metapragmatic commentary may also, in
some cases, be directed not only at pragmatic meanings or social actions, but
also at aspects of moral order itself. The focus in analysing naturally occurring
metapragmatic comments is thus on their locally situated functions, as well as
on what light they shed on the moral order to which they are appealing.
Holmes, Marra and Vine (2012), for instance, report on the explicit nego-
tiation of politeness norms in European (termed Pākehā) and Māori eth-
nolects of New Zealand English. The former has traditionally been considered
dominant or mainstream in New Zealand society, but in workplaces where
Maori predominate, such assumptions can be challenged. In example (4) we

can observe a clash between Pākehā and Māori interactional norms that sur-
faces in the form of metalinguistic commentary. The exchange occurs in one of
the regular meetings of Kiwi Consultations, where only three out of the regular
participants are Pākehā.
(4) 1 Steve: we have capability development um

2 the g m oversight here
3 ((overlapped by a quiet conversation involving Frank
and Daniel))
4 is from Frank with Caleb the manager
5 in charge budget of a hundred and eighty seven k
6 ((pause)) obviously key area we want to ensure that
um
7 one of the important: things in communication is
8 not to talk when others are talking
9 ((loud laughter))
10 Steve: I hope that the cameras picked up (that)
11 ((loud laughter))
12 Frank: Steve this indicates a need for you to be out in hui
13 ((laughter))
14 Frank: one of the things that you learn very quickly
15 is that a sign of respect is that other people are talking
16 about what [you’re saying while you’re saying it]
17 [((laughter)) ]
((laughter))
18 Steve: I see I see
(Holmes, Marra and Vine 2012: 1070–1)
In example (4), Steve asserts a third-level moral norm (for Pākehā New
Zealand English speakers), namely, that one should not speak while others are
speaking (lines 7–8). However, this is treated as an inappropriate assertion by
Frank, another Pākehā. Frank implies that Steve is not sufficiently acquainted
with Māori New Zealand English ways of speaking by suggesting that he needs
to attend more hui (i.e. traditional Māori meetings). By doing so it is suggested
that Steve would gain an appreciation of the Māori English taken-for-granted
understanding that ‘a sign of respect is that other people are talking about
what you’re saying while you’re saying it’ (lines 15–16). By asserting practice
as normative in the Māori moral order, Frank reframes Steve metapragmatic
comment as inappropriate for that workplace because it involves an orientation
to the assumed Pākehā moral order.
Analyses of metapragmatic comments in computer-mediated interactions

also offer considerable promise in expanding our understanding of the moral
order, in part because they are an increasingly common form of interaction
in their own right. Sage Graham (2007), for instance, focused on how expec-
tations about politeness and impoliteness were negotiated in email interactions
that arose in ChurchList. While elements of this moral order were specific to
the computer medium in question (e.g. the moral censure of ‘blatting’ to all
members of the list), and to that community of practice (e.g. prayers as the pre-
ferred response to requests for support), she nevertheless found that evaluative
moments of politeness in the here-and-now were influenced by expectations
based on prior behaviour of members, suggesting that elements of historicity
play out in online as well as face-to-face interactions.
Fictional or literary dialogues in novels, short stories, films and the like can
also offer a rich source of metapragmatic comments on politeness, following
what is termed the pragma-philological method (see Chapter 8). Paternoster
(2012), for instance, studied instances where metapragmatic comments about
overpoliteness and impoliteness arise in a series of books about two fic-
tional police investigators, Edinburgh-based John Rebus and Sicilian Salvo
Montalbano. The advantage of such data is that the attitudes of charac-
ters are sometimes commented on explicitly by the narrator even when the
characters themselves do not explicitly express such attitudes. An important
finding from this study is that characters who have identifiable overpolite
attitudes – ‘insincere’ politeness in this case – tend to be sceptical when eval-
uating others vis-à-vis politeness. Of course, findings from fictional dialogues
cannot be readily generalised to other forms of interaction, but they do provide
an alternative means of tapping into ‘thick descriptions’ of politeness and how
they relate to what people are thinking but not necessarily saying or indicating
in interaction (see Chapter 10).
Metapragmatic comments can, of course, also be elicited by analysts. The
first main approach to eliciting such comments is through interviews (see
Chapter 3). In a study of workplace project partnerships between British and
Chinese universities, Spencer-Oatey (2011) collected interview comments from
both British and Chinese informants on the interactions that occurred in the
course of developing their partnerships. Interviewees made a small number of
evaluative comments in terms of politeness or impoliteness. Their evaluations
of ‘polite behaviour’ were all attributed to others, while their evaluations of
‘impolite behaviour’ were largely attributed to self, generally involving self-
deprecatory comments to the interviewer about the issue being discussed. This
is also an interesting study in that the metapragmatic comments made in Chinese
were arguably ‘eticised’ to some extent, since the analysis of the Chinese
informants’ perceptions of (im)politeness focused on the comments translated
into English, not the original Chinese. While such a practice clearly aided
comparability it also throws up other questions about how the analysis should
be situated vis-à-vis emic and etic understandings.
A second approach to eliciting metapragmatic comments is through diaries
or written reports from informants about events they regard as involving polite-
ness, impoliteness and so on. Culpeper (2011a), for instance, uses metaprag-
matic comments elicited in this way to examine the various ways in which
impoliteness arises in interaction, such as in example (5), where an informant
reports that she felt the way an acquaintance acted when she walked up to her
at the local pub was rude.
(5) As I walked over to the table to collect the glasses, Sarah’s said
to Tim ‘come on Tim let’s 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. 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.
(2011a: 160)
What is notable here is that the informant’s interpretation of Sarah having

implied something here and thus her evaluation of it as rude rests, in turn,
on her assumption about their respective participation footings, namely, that
she is not a bystander but rather an indirect addressee. What is also quite
interesting to note is that along with reporting her evaluation of impoliteness
here, the informant also reports on her emotive stance (feeling angry although
not particularly bad). The close inter-relationship between (im)politeness and
emotivity is a theme we will explore further in Chapter 10.
While metapragmatic comments are a useful means for analysts to identify
instances of politeness, impoliteness and so on, and also very often offer insight
into the moral order through which evaluations of politeness are constituted,
they are grounded in the understandings of lay participants and observers,
and so reporting such comments does not constitute analysis in and of itself
(see Chapter 5). As Davies, Merrison and Haugh (2011) point out in their
epilogue, such metapragmatic comments have natural limitations about which
analysts should be cognisant. First, the lack of metapragmatic comments vis-
à-vis politeness in naturally occurring interactions cannot be taken as evidence
that the participants have not made such evaluations. Not all evaluations of
politeness necessarily surface in that way in interaction, as we shall discuss
further in Chapter 10. Second, metapragmatic comments more often than not
highlight ‘problematic’ talk where expectations have not been met, and thus
tend to be primarily invoked in relation to impoliteness, overpoliteness and the
like. In order to understand the metapragmatics of politeness, then, we need to
tap into the other forms of metapragmatic awareness, including awareness of

social discourses of politeness as we shall now consider.
Metadiscourse
While the term discourse can be used in an ordinary sense to refer to talk or
written texts, it can also be used in a more technical sense to refer to a persistent
frame of interpretation and evaluation that has become reified: treated as if
it has an objective reality in and of itself. The reification of this persistent
frame of interpretation and evaluation occurs through lay observers talking
about or ‘discoursing on’ social, cultural and historical patterns of language
use at a societal level to the point that they become accepted as encompassing
conventional wisdom, and so no longer open to doubt or questioning. Discourse
focusing on such discourses is termed metadiscourse: where lay observers
focus on how people should behave. In the sense that metadiscourse constitutes
explicit moralising about politeness norms, it also offers yet another window
on the moral order. However, since they are located at a different layer to
the localised, situated interactions in which evaluative moments of politeness
generally arise, their relevance to the latter is generally open to contestation
by participants. In other words, whether a particular discourse is judged to
be applicable to a particular evaluative moment of politeness is a matter open
to discussion (hence the possibility of metadiscourse). And while they are
prototypically not open to doubt or questioning, they can also be contested at
a societal level in some cases.
The metadiscourse on politeness in Japanese is illustrative in that respect.
As Haugh and Obana (2011) argue, metadiscourse on politeness in Japan has
long been associated with (neo-)Confucianism, in particular, the notion that
one should occupy one’s ‘proper place in society’. While this was initially
limited to the aristocratic classes where it sustained the system of absolute
honorifics (i.e. expressions that locate a person relative to a particular social
place no matter whom they are interacting with), this discourse began to have
an influence on wider Japanese society during the pre-modern era from the
seventeenth to the nineteenth century as the use of relative honorifics (i.e.
expressions that locate persons in relationship to other persons depending on
which parties are involved and the wider context) became more common.
From the twentieth century onwards, this metadiscourse on knowing one’s
place in society was promulgated more widely through the Japanese education
system and official language policies. As Pizziconi points out, then, stereotyp-
ical views of honorifics in Japanese have ‘facilitate[d] explicit metapragmatic
reasoning, the creation of reflexive models of social behaviour, discourses of
appropriateness and even language policies that target issues of morality and
civic education’ (2011: 70). In recent years, however, it has emerged from
various studies of politeness in Japanese that one’s ‘place’ (tachiba) in interac-

tion is much more dynamic and sensitive to locally situated contingencies than
such traditional metadiscourses allow for. The metadiscourse on politeness in
Japan is now heavily contested amongst academics at least, although it remains
an open question as to the extent to which it is contested amongst lay observers.
Metadiscourses on politeness can also become politically and ideologically
charged. It is often claimed through such metadiscourses that the behaviour
of ‘certain groups of people or individuals is not appropriate for a society’,
which in effect constitutes ‘a judgment about them in terms of whether they
“belong” to that language group or culture, or whether we value their culture’
(Mills 2009: 1055). The ‘Respect Action Plan’ of the British New Labour
Government was initiated by then Prime Minister Tony Blair, for instance, to
address concerns about certain individuals and families not adhering to values
that were asserted to be shared by almost everyone in Britain. These values
were couched in terms of respect towards others that everyone ‘knows’ and
so were treated as not open to doubt or questioning. As Haugh (2010c) points
out, there are now ongoing metadiscourses about the lack of respect shown to
others in public interactions in the media of many English-speaking societies.
Similar campaigns to promulgate metadiscourses on politeness have occurred
in other societies, such as the ‘National Courtesy Campaign’ in Singapore and
the ‘Smile campaign’ in Mainland China prior to the Beijing Olympics, as well
as a series of political campaigns in modern Chinese history (see Kádár 2007).
Metadiscourse is not, however, limited to societal-level communications via
the media and the like. We can also observe at an interactional level how such
metadiscourses can be explicitly oriented to by participants in interaction. In
example (6), for instance, Ildika is orienting to a particular metadiscourse on
gender and politeness.
(6) ERIK: 11:20
323 I: I’m a independent woman you know I live alone you
know I make my own way=
324 E: =yeah=
325 I: =but there’s nothing wrong with opening the door I
mean I’m not going to be insulted to me it’s just
good manne[rs that’s all
326 E: [yeah yeah
327 I: you know oh I’d open the door for you?
328 and you know who cares you know
Ildika first positions herself as an ‘independent woman’, and thus implicitly
not bound by traditional ‘ladies first’ norms of politeness (turn 323). She then
orients to such behaviour on the part of men as not insulting but rather a matter
of good manners (turn 325). In this way, she implicitly contests metadiscourses
Table 9.3 Approaches to analysing politeness

metadiscourses.
1. (Historical) documents/texts Sugimoto (1998)

Kádár and Pan (2011)
2. Media commentary Lakoff (2005)
Haugh (2008)
on gendered politeness that treat men opening doors for women not as polite
but rather as demeaning to those women.
It is important to note, however, that the focus in analysing such metadis-
courses is not primarily on whether they are objectively true as such, but rather
on how they are perpetuated as dominant within societies, as well as on how they
may be challenged or contested. There are a number of approaches by which
we can start to investigate such metadiscourses. In Table 9.3 we summarise
two key approaches for analysing metadiscourses on politeness, and exemplar
studies that can be consulted for further details on how to operationalise these
approaches.
One very useful window into metadiscourses on politeness can be gained
through careful discourse-based analyses of historical documents, etiquette
manuals and native speaker intuitions or introspections represented in personal
testimonies and ethnographic or cultural studies. Naomi Sugimoto (1998), for
instance, focused on stated norms of apology in a careful analysis of etiquette
and conduct manuals published in Japan and the US. She found in this metadis-
course that while there was a preference for ‘individualising’ apologies in the
American conduct manuals, there was a strong preference for ‘relationalising’
apologies in the Japanese ones. In other words, ‘good’ apologies in Japanese
were represented as ones that were tailored to the types of relationships that
existed between the speaker and the recipient(s) rather than the personal quali-
ties of the individuals concerned. In another study, Kádár and Pan (2011) make
use of various historical documents and texts to offer useful insight into changes
in the metadiscourse of ‘politeness’ (li, ‘propriety’), in particular, the decrease
in emphasis on ‘deference’ due to political changes in Mainland China during
the twentieth century.
A second useful window into metadiscourses on politeness comes from
analyses of media commentary or debates that arise in the media. Lakoff
(2005) examines debates playing out in the American media which reflect
a changing metadiscourse on politeness, including a preoccupation with the
apparent breakdown of various public taboos, such as sexual coarseness, cursing
and other bad language, uncontrolled displays of hostility (so-called ‘road rage’
9.3 Key studies 203
and so on), negative political advertising and so on, as well as the erosion of the
boundary between public and private life and the attendant sets of expectancies
associated with each. This can include analyses of (private) interactions that
have undergone ‘scale shifts’ into broader societal debates about politeness or
(in)appropriate behaviour more generally. In one such study, Haugh (2008) has
examined how attempts by supporters to normalise ‘offensive’ comments made
by a Muslim cleric during one of his sermons were resisted by others through
invoking broader societal norms. In example (7), the interviewer (KS) frames
the claim by one of the cleric’s supporters (KT) that the cleric’s comments had
been decontextualised as ‘unacceptable’ in broader Australian society.
(7) (‘Keysar Trad defends al-Hilali’, Today, Channel 9, 30 October

2006)
154 KT: Now to take that (.) into a different context and read it-
and really nitpick a speech that’s a really about modesty
and abstinence is very
very un[fa:ir.
155 KS: [Keysar he described women as me:at. You
ca:n’t do that.
156 No one accepts that that is acceptable.
(Haugh 2008: 217)
Here we can observe that the interviewer is invoking a particular metadiscourse;

namely, how one should (and should not) talk about women, and it is with refer-
ence to this metadiscourse that the cleric is held accountable and his comments
are evaluated as offensive. This norm is invoked through the interviewer’s claim
that ‘no one’ regards the cleric’s comments to be acceptable, thereby implying
that ‘everyone’ thinks they are unacceptable (cf. Charlie Brown’s response to
Lucy in Figure 4.1). It is important to note here that it is also presupposed by
the interviewer that this societal metadiscourse takes precedence over particu-
lar norms of religious teaching in a mosque. Such debates can thus be used
in positioning certain individuals or groups as either lying within or outside
‘normal’ society, often in an attempt to disempower certain groups through
exclusion. In that sense, then, the metadiscourse of politeness is highly charged
and ideological in nature, a point we will return to in Chapter 11.
9.3 Key studies

Chapter 3 of Culpeper’s (2011a) book Impoliteness is an excellent overview of
how the metalanguage of ‘impoliteness’ in English can be teased out and better
understood using techniques from corpus linguistics. Based on this work he
maps out terms such as rude, inconsiderate, verbally aggressive and hurtful in a
conceptual map that distinguishes between in-group and out-group orientation,

as well as the degree of symbolic violence involved.
Haugh and Kádár’s forthcoming monograph, Politeness in Chinese and
Japanese, offers an in-depth study of how studying the metapragmatics of
politeness can offer a useful window into politeness as social practice. They
draw from studies of politeness metalanguage, metapragmatic comments and
metadiscourses in China and Japan to see what light they can throw on the
various practices by which politeness arises in discourse and interaction.
In an article theorising politeness at an individual versus social level, Mills
(2009) argues that they need to be more clearly distinguished as distinct types
of approaches or understandings of politeness. She suggests that norms of
politeness can be examined at multiple levels, ranging from individual and
community of practice norms through to wider hypothesised or actual societal
norms.
The interplay of individual and societal norms in relation to evaluations of
(im)politeness are examined by Haugh (2010a) in an in-depth study of percep-
tions of the offensiveness of an email sent by an academic to an international
student that entered the public domain when the said academic was dismissed.
Metapragmatic comments made in online blogs and discussion boards about the
email were examined, with a key finding being that these exhibited significant
variability and argumentativeness.
Finally, a thought-provoking study by O’Driscoll (2013) examines how a
seemingly innocuous private email communication sent in Northern England
about the placement of a recycling bin was transformed into a public commu-
nication that was deemed highly offensive. He draws from Goffman’s notions
of footing and frame (discussed in Chapters 6 and 7 respectively) to show how
communications can be situationally transformed with reference to metadis-
courses of civility in British society.
9.4 Summary
In this chapter we have proposed that analysing different forms of metaprag-
matic awareness on the part of users and observers can provide valuable insight
into the moral order that lies at the heart of politeness as social practice. It
also helps us break open the inevitable circularity in the recognition and recog-
nisability of evaluative moments of politeness, given an action or meaning
counts as polite because it is recognisable to participants as polite, yet it is
ultimately recognisable as polite because it is recognised as polite by mem-
bers. We have focused, in particular, on metalinguistic, metacommunicative
and metadiscursive awarenesss in relation to understandings of politeness. And
we have shown how a great variety of methodologies, ranging from corpus
analysis and statistical analysis through to conversation analysis and discourse
9.5 Exercises 205
analysis can be utilised in teasing out these different forms of metapragmatic

awareness. It is thus in the study of the metapragmatics of politeness that the
truly interdisciplinary nature of politeness research becomes most salient.
9.5 Exercises
1. What expressions do you know that are somehow related to ‘politeness’?
Do you think they all mean the same thing? If you are a speaker of a lan-
guage other than English, can you compare the meaning and implications
of these words with their English counterparts?
2. Do you think people are more likely to make comments about politeness
or impoliteness? Why do you think that?
3. Do people always talk about politeness in a positive way? Can you think
of individuals or groups who contest generally accepted politeness norms
in your society?
II. Consider the following examples relating to a radio interview with Justin
Bieber that went wrong when the interviewer (Mojo) made a joke about
Harry Styles and Bieber’s mother, and analyse the politeness phenomena
(a) (Justin Bieber is interviewed on Mojo in the Morning, a Detroit-based
radio show, 28 June 2012)
1 Mojo: Do you worry about Harry [Styles], uh, you know when he’s
around your mom, since it seems he likes older women?
2 Bieber: Do I wonder (.) what?
3 Mojo: Do you worry Harry around your mum, since he (.) u:h (.)
he likes older women?
4 Bieber: I think you should worry about yo- your mom bro.
5 Mojo: .hhhHahhh I should worry about my mum?
6 Bieber: ye:a(hh)h
7 Mojo: Justin, my mum’s d[ead so unfortunately (.) that wouldn’t
work.
8 Bieber: [jeez
9 (10.0)
10 ((line goes dead))
(b) (‘Justin Bieber hangs up on radio interviewer after Harry Styles ‘mum’
joke goes wrong’, Jo Usmar, Mirror, 30 June 2012)
The radio folk wonder why Justin would get offended when even his
girlfriend, Selena Gomez, has said Justin doesn’t want Harry near his
mum – but we don’t reckon he’s offended at that at all, he’s offended by
the ‘dead’ comment which can only have been made to make him feel
uncomfortable. Yes, the interviewer’s mum is dead – but Justin clearly

didn’t know that and was just trying to make a joke.
(c) User comment, posted 5:27 a.m., 1/7/12
That was rude for him to say if he worries about Harry around his mom
he is just a kid not an adult. Mojo was wrong with the question. U all
r adults expecting kids to act like adults. Inappropriate question! Grow
up Mojo.
In example (a) the interviewer, Thomas ‘Mojo’ Carballot, teases Justin
Bieber about Harry Styles, as the latter was in the news at that time for
dating older women. Bieber initially responds with a request for a repeat
(turn 2), which is potentially indicative of him taking offence at the question,
but then responds with a counter tease in turn 4. However, the interviewer
points out the implausibility of Justin’s tease in turn 7, given the former’s
mother has already passed away. At this point in the interview there is a
long silence of 10 seconds before the line goes dead. Afterwards when
they tried to call back Bieber the technican reported that ‘He [Bieber] got a
little upset with the question.’ The question is whether Bieber was offended
by the tease (turns 1 and 3) or by the interviewer’s counter to Bieber’s
counter-tease (turns 5 and 7), namely, that the interviewer’s mother is dead.
According to Mojo the reason Bieber got offended was ‘he’s starting to take
himself way too seriously’, in other words, invoking the metadiscourse of
‘not taking yourself too seriously’ shared amongst (many) Anglo-English
speakers (see Goddard 2009).
In example (b), we can see the news reporter offers a different perspective.
She claims that Bieber was offended by the ‘dead’ comment rather than by
the initial tease, since in her view Bieber was trying to make a joke (in turn
4). There is some evidence to support this line of thinking given there are
laughter particles interpolated in Bieber’s subsequent affirmation in turn 6.
In example (c), a user posts a comment after example (b), claiming that
the question (i.e. the tease by the interviewer) was itself rude. She invokes
a metadiscourse about what is appropriate behaviour around kids versus
adults in justifying her evaluation of the incident.
10 Politeness, cognition and emotion
10.1 Introduction
While there are times when we may believe with absolute certainty that some-
one has been polite or rude, politeness is clearly not an objective behaviour, but
rather involves a perceived state of mind about behaviour. It involves an interpre-
tation or evaluation of situated behaviour as meaningful in some way in regards
to one’s person or relationship with others in some way, and so inevitably any
discussion of politeness leads us to a consideration of cognition. When we
think of cognition we generally think of what is often termed subjectivity:
the perceptions, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, desires and so on of an individual
person. However, clearly politeness does not only involve the perceptions of
an individual in isolation. At the heart of politeness lies a concern with what
others think of us, and so inevitably it also involves what is termed intersub-
jectivity: how we interpret or understand the perceptions, feelings, thoughts,
beliefs, desires of others, and in some cases reach agreement or a common
understanding about them. The way in which politeness resides in both sub-
jectivity and intersubjectivity lies, we suggest, at the core of the variability and
contestedness of politeness, alongside its oft taken-for-grantedness and seem-
ing unseen-unless-noticed qualities (see Chapters 3 and 4). The relationship
between politeness and cognition, both in the sense of subjectivity and in the
sense of intersubjectivity, is thus a key area of interest for politeness researchers.
While in first-wave approaches to politeness the focus was firmly on cogni-
tion as states of mind, in more recent years it has become widely accepted that
politeness inevitably also encompasses issues of emotion, or what in ordinary
talk might be termed states of heart. To see why this might be, let us consider
the following example from the American film, Jeepers Creepers 2, where
a horrific flying creature is attacking high school children on a broken-down
bus.
(1) (Two high school boys, Scotty who is a white American, and Deaun-
dre who is an African American, are arguing over what to do about
the creature)
Scotty: You want to play cock of the walk, bro?
207
Deaundre: Why do I think you want to call me something else?

You want to call me something else, Scotty?
’Cause I don’t think you get I can see you thinking it
whether you say it or not.
(Jeepers Creepers 2, 2003)
Example (1) begins with Scotty challenging Deaundre about the suggestions he
has been making in regard to how they should try to survive the attacks. He uses
the formulaic expression, ‘cock of the walk’, which here means a ‘dominating
or overbearing person in a group’, thereby implying that Deaundre is being
overbearing in making these suggestions. In doing so, Scotty also demonstrates
awareness of a relational pecking order – a hierarchy of dominance or decision
making – that is emerging in their group, and paints Deaundre’s suggestions
as an attempt to gain a dominant position in that pecking order. The use of the
referring expression ‘bro’ by Scotty to address Deaundre thus frames this as a
kind of baiting challenge or goad. From Deaundre’s response, however, we can
see that he perceives ‘bro’ to be implying something much more derogatory or
offensive, as he attributes a particular mental state to Scotty (i.e. the desire to call
Deaundre something worse), and becomes visibly upset. What is interesting
here is that Deaundre treats it as independent of whatever Scotty is taken
to intend to mean (‘I don’t think you get I can see you thinking it whether
you say it or not’), yet Scotty is nevertheless held accountable for having an
offensive (possibly racist) attitude, and the desire (albeit unrealised) to voice
it. In attributing this attitude and desire to Scotty, Deaundre displays reflexive
thinking, where one thinks about what others think one thinks and so on (see
Chapter 9). In this case, Deaundre is asserting that he thinks that Scotty thinks
that Deaundre won’t realise (i.e. think) that Scotty has a particular covert or
tacit attitude underpinning his use of ‘bro’. It is also reflexive in that Deaundre
indexes a particular social discourse on race relations in the US.
In light of the fact that Scotty (a white American) is addressing an African
American, and given the common ground between these characters and the
others witnessing the exchange with regard to their understanding of race
relations in the US at the time the film was set, it is more than likely that
Deaundre is alluding to the possible racist overtones attributed to this kind
of referring expression according to that discourse. In other words, Scotty’s
attributed mental state is treated as a transgression not only of Deaundre’s
expectations, but of the perceived set of expectancies in wider society (i.e. the
moral order), and in this sense implicitly indexes what Deaundre would consider
polite. From this brief example, then, we can see that politeness involves a
consideration of mental states as well as emotions from a lay perspective. It is
thus important for us to carefully analyse understandings of politeness as being
grounded in cognition and emotion.
In this chapter, we overview the key cognitive states and processes that have
been held to underpin politeness in research to date, and argue that politeness not
only involves rationality and states of mind, but is inherently emotive. We begin
by first discussing the various cognitive or mental states and processes that we
need to consider in examining politeness, highlighting the fact that these mental
states and processes are inevitably directed (what is termed intentionality) and
selective (what is termed attention). The concepts of attitude and evaluation,
which we have referred to throughout this volume, are then discussed in more
detail. We draw attention, in particular, to the ongoing tension between a
conceptualisation of them as a relatively stable cognitive predisposition, as
opposed to a form of social action or practice. The notion of metacognitive
awareness: reflexive presentations of cognitive states of others, which we briefly
introduced in Chapter 9 on metapragmatics, is then revisited and explained in
more detail. We next move to the questions of inference and intention and the
ongoing debates about what roles they play in understandings of politeness.
Finally, we move into a discussion of emotion and its importance for analysing
politeness.
10.2 Key concepts
Intentionality and attention

In our above discussion of example (1), where Deaundre evidently found
Scotty’s use of the expression ‘bro’ offensive, we referred either explicitly
or implicitly to a number of mental states-processes. These include:
r perception/perceiving
r intention/intending
r attitude/evaluating
r belief/believing
r desire/wanting
r thought/thinking
r inference/inferring
These are generally referred to as intentional states: mental representations of
objects, properties or states of affairs. This property of having content or being
about something is generally referred as intentionality. The notion of inten-
tionality stems from the Latin word intendere, which means to ‘aim in a certain
direction’ or to ‘direct thoughts to something’. However, not only are these
mental states held to be directed or about something, but intentionality is con-
ferred on linguistic acts as well (see Haugh and Jasczcolt 2012). In other words,
social actions and meanings that are occasioned through linguistic forms and
practices are assumed to have content: to be directed at something. Politeness
is thus doubly intentional. On the one hand, it necessarily involves mental-state
processes, given that it involves a subjective or intersubjective understanding,

not an objective behaviour. On the other hand, it involves forms and prac-
tices that influence the mental states of others. The presumed intentionality of
mental-state processes and linguistic acts is important, because alongside the
presumed agency of speakers – the fact that we are presumed to be acting of our
own volition within the (social) constraints of situated interaction – this pre-
sumed intentionality is what underlies why we are, or can be, held accountable
for understandings of politeness that arise through discourse and interaction
(see Chapter 6).
There are, of course, a massive number of mental-state processes that could
arise in interaction. Deaundre and the other side participants present could have
all sorts of thoughts or beliefs about Scotty, for instance, as a result of what
he has said, and how it has been cast by Deaundre in the subsequent turn.
The fact that these thoughts and beliefs are directed at Scotty (in particular,
Scotty’s attitude and alleged desire to voice that attitude), involves a second
critical property of cognition, namely, attention. There are a potentially infi-
nite number of things we can concentrate on in a situated context, including
both physical objects as well as intentional mental-state processes. Attention
or attending involves selectively concentrating on just some of these, although
this ranges from being foregrounded to being backgrounded. From the perspec-
tive of cognitive scientists or mainstream psychologists, attention is generally
taken to mean selective allocation of mental energy or processing resources,
and so is understood to be a matter of subjectivity. From an interactional per-
spective, attention/attending is taken to mean that participants are orienting to,
and thus demonstrably responsive to, social actions and meanings that arise
through talk or conduct, and so is understood to be a matter of intersubjectivity.
Understandings of politeness can, of course, arise as part of both subjective and
intersubjective experience, but most importantly they only arise when we are
attending to particular mental-state processes with particular content.
In Chapter 4, we attempted to broadly outline this content, suggesting that it
involves valenced categorisations of persons and relationships with respect to
some kind of normative frame of reference. We can now revisit this definition
from a more cognitively grounded perspective, or what is sometimes termed
social cognition. What we find is that the categorisation/categorising which lies
at the core of understandings of politeness, is part of a much more complex set
of inter-related intentional state-processes. We have summarised some of the
key ones, and what underpins them, in Figure 10.1.
At the core of evaluative moments of politeness lies categorisation, which
is ultimately grounded in our agency, rather than being a matter of blindly
following norms or the perceived intentions of speakers, and which is also
imbued with emotivity. Categorising naturally involves attending to or per-
ceiving these categorisations, as well as the processes of inferring (based on
evaluative moment of politeness
attending/perceiving (attention)
categorising (agency/emotivity)
beliefs
inferring (reasoning)
attitudes
anticipating (expectations)
Figure 10.1 Key intentional state-processes in understanding politeness.
reasoning), and anticipating (based on our expectations). All of these draw, in

turn, on dynamic and fluctuating sets of beliefs and attitudes. Rather than rep-
resenting these intentional state-processes as related in a linear way, however,
we have attempted to show is that these are interdependent and dynamically
inter-related in Figure 10.1. It is also important to note that what is repre-
sented in Figure 10.1 summarises only what research has found to date, and
thus it represents only a working model, not a definitive theoretical stance on
our part. With that proviso in mind we now move to consider in more detail
these various dimensions of social cognition, and the reflexive awareness of
participants in relation to them, before returning in the final section to consider
emotion.
Attitudes and evaluations

Attitudes are generally understood in fields such as social psychology and com-
munication studies as a relatively stable intentional mental state that is located
in the minds, or more specifically, cognitive-state processes of individuals.
Although there is no one standard definition they are generally characterised as
‘enduring and stable cognitive structures that evaluate a specific object, person
or issue’ (Augoustinos, Walker and Donaghue, 2006: 147). This builds on the
so-called ABC model of attitudes as ‘predispositions’ to respond to certain
classes of stimuli with particular affective, behavioural or cognitive responses.
In a useful overview of the field, Augoustinos et al. go on to argue that
attitudes are therefore first and foremost evaluations. They convey what we think and
how we feel about some object, or attitude referent. All attitudes have a referent, an
‘object of thought’, a ‘stimulus object’ . . . By denoting the attitude-holder’s ‘orientation’
to the referent, an attitude conveys that person’s evaluation of the referent. (2006: 113)
Consistent with ordinary, lay understandings, then, attitudes are generally

understood to encompass relatively enduring, valenced intentional mental
states. By intentional mental states it is meant that attitudes involve beliefs

or thoughts about a particular referent. By valenced, it is meant that they
are inevitably expressed through evaluative language, such as ‘good/bad’ and
‘like/dislike.’ And by enduring, it is meant that such beliefs or thoughts are
retained in the minds of individuals, and so can have an ongoing, persistent
effect on their behaviour, including their behaviour towards others. Attitudes
are thus understood to be cumulatively formed over periods of time, and to also
vary in their degree of salience or accessibility to individuals.
A number of researchers have characterised politeness as a particular kind
of interpersonal attitude, including Culpeper (2011a, 2011b), as we noted in
Chapter 5, and Watts (2008, 2011) who has proposed that politeness arises with
reference to a positively or negatively valenced attitudinal cognitorium. The
term attitudinal cognitorium was originally coined by the social psychologist
Milton Rosenberg (1968) to refer to ‘a set of microconcepts that are associated
with each other in varying degrees and that have, at any given moment, a certain
level of activation’ (Bassili and Brown 2005: 552). Watts claims that polite can
be located within a positive attitudinal cognitorium, where it is more closely
associated with micro-concepts such as well-mannered, avoiding conflict, con-
siderate, appropriate, courteous; or in a negative attitudinal cognitorium, where
it is more closely associated with micro-concepts such as haughty, insincere,
distant, standoffish, inappropriate and the like. Whether politeness is located
within a positive or negative attitudinal cognitorium is a function, in part, of the
attitudes of the individual concerned. It is in this sense, then, that we can account
for why particular individuals have a tendency to evaluate social actions and
meanings, and the forms and practices through which they are accomplished,
in certain ways vis-à-vis politeness. One issue that remains somewhat open to
question, however, is just how enduring or stable such attitudes really are over
time and across interactions.
Evaluations are conceptualised somewhat differently, for instance, in con-
versation analysis as a form of social action, such as an assessment, compli-
ment, complaint, blaming, criticism and the like. An evaluative social action
is recognisable to participants in the formulation of turns in talk and subse-
quent responses to that talk (and conduct more generally), as we discussed in
Chapter 6. The focus in analyses of evaluations as a form of social action is thus
on carefully tracing the participants’ understanding of each other’s conduct in
talk-in-interaction. This approach is taken further by the discursive psychol-
ogist Jonathan Potter who argues that attitudes should be reconceptualised as
‘evaluative practices which are used in different settings for different purposes’
(1998: 259), such as blaming, excusing, justifying and rationalising. The main
focus in this kind of approach, then, is on what is being done with evaluations
in interaction by participants and the discursive resources that are used for
constructing them. From this perspective it becomes clear that attitudes are not
always consistent across individuals within a particular social group or rela-

tional network, nor are they even consistent across the same individual over
time. This is variability is to be expected because, as Potter argues,
evaluations are flexibly constructed to mesh with specific ongoing practices. Variation is
[thus to be] expected as people perform different actions with their talk; for example, as
they respond to assessments, align themselves with friends and differentiate themselves
from enemies, and as they construct locally coherent versions of the social and moral
world. (1998: 244)
In other words, any attempt to aggregate data on evaluations of politeness must

be done in such a way that it does not inadvertently suppress this locally situated
variability.
Consider, for instance, example (2), which is from a conversation between
two Australians who are getting acquainted. Gary has been explicitly asked by
Natalie to ask her some questions just prior to this example, but he responds,
as we can see below, that he does not have any questions
(2) NJGR: 8:00
210 G: U:M I haven’t got any questions to ask you actually.
211 (1.2)
212 N: ↑you must be fun at parties.
213 G: .hhh don’t like parties
214 N: No: I can imagine. ahe parties probably don’t like you
either(h)
215 (0.6)
216 G: I guess so. ↑OH NO. (0.8) people always like someone
they can saddle up to (2.1) talk to.
At least someone in the corner they can talk to.
(Haugh 2011: 178)
Natalie responds to Gary’s apparent refusal to ask her some questions with an
ironically framed assessment in turn 212. While it appears she is saying he
would be ‘fun at parties’, it is hearable as sarcasm, as she places intonational
emphasis on ‘you’, thereby implying that Gary would not be fun at other
parties. In doing so, she also implies that Gary is socially inept. Gary responds
with a laughing in-breath and a claim that he does not ‘like parties’ in turn 213,
thereby implicitly affiliating with Natalie’s negative assessment. This occasions
a further negative assessment that is upgraded from implicit to explicit (‘parties
probably don’t like you’) in turn 214, with which Gary initially agrees in turn
216, although this is subsequently retracted and his response is reformulated
as qualified disagreement.
It becomes clear in the course of this interaction that Natalie and Gary have
reached a joint understanding that Natalie is evaluating Gary as not a very fun
person to have at a party, thereby implying he is socially inept. This negative

assessment appears to be occasioned by Gary’s refusal to ask questions despite
Natalie’s explicit request that he do so (data not shown here). The interactional
achievement of this negative assessment (i.e. as a social action) thus constitutes
evidence that Natalie is evaluating Gary’s current behaviour – refusing to ask
any questions – as impolite. In subsequent talk, Gary admits that he should ask
questions ‘to be polite’, which constitutes evidence that he is evaluating his
own behaviour as ‘not polite’, if not ‘impolite’. It remains an open question,
however, whether Gary evaluates Natalie’s behaviour – her sarcastic negative
assessment – as impolite. It is certainly possible, as Gary could have held
Natalie accountable for this sarcasm as impolite, but he nevertheless didn’t, at
least not during the course of this interaction.
Evaluations of politeness, impoliteness and the like can thus surface to vary-
ing degrees in interaction, and so clearly an account of understandings of
politeness must embrace in some manner interactional and cognitive perspec-
tives on evaluations. The problem is that a very real epistemological tension
continues to exist between them. Valenced categorisations, or evaluations, can
be conceptualised, on the one hand, as interpersonal attitudes, which are rela-
tively stable cognitive predispositions to respond to external stimuli (including
the behaviour of others) in particular ways. On the other hand, they can be
conceptualised as a form of social action, which varies according to the locally
situated context in which they arise. Politeness researchers, to date, have tended
to draw from both conceptualisations, despite this epistemological tension. One
point that is certain, however, is that such attitudes or evaluations are not only
socially distributed across participants, but also temporally distributed both
within and across interactions. This calls for a range of different approaches
vis-à-vis time in analysing politeness, as we discussed in Chapters 6–9.
Metacognition
In Chapter 9 we briefly introduced a fourth type of metapragmatic awareness,
metacognition – intentional mental states directed at intentional mental states
of others. We suggested that metacognitive awareness refers to reflexive pre-
sentations of cognitively grounded states, such as beliefs, thoughts, desires,
attitudes and expectations, as we saw in example (1). It includes reflexive
awareness of expectations of participants about what can, may or should hap-
pen (what is generally termed deontic aspects of the moral order), as well as
about who knows what and how certain they are about it, and what counts as
new or given information for participants (what is generally termed epistemic
aspects of the moral order).
In example (3) we can observe the way in which participants can orient
to particular deontic aspects of the moral order, thereby demonstrating how
metacognitive awareness can surface in interaction. It is an exchange between an

Anglo-Australian who was having dinner with a Taiwanese lady in Melbourne,
witnessed and noted down by the second author. The lady was silent throughout
the exchange, so here it is metacognitive awareness on the part of the man which
is most salient.
(3) 1 A: ((pours himself tea from the teapot – the lady’s cup is
empty))
2 T: ((picks up teapot after he has finished))
3 A: Too sweet.
4 T: ((moving to pour herself tea))
5 A: Are you alright?
6 T: ((pours tea))
7 A: I thought it was too sweet. I would have poured you tea, but
I thought it was too sweet for you.
The sequence began when the Australian man poured himself some tea, while
the lady’s cup remained empty. Straight after he put the teapot down, the lady
picked it up, at which point the man asserted ‘too sweet’ (turn 3). The lady
continued on to pour herself some tea, during the pouring of which the man
inquired whether she was okay (turn 5), and then finally in turn 7 indicates
through his account what he was orienting to, namely, her expectation that
he would pour some tea for her. In other words, in attempting to justify why
he didn’t pour some tea for her, as well for himself, he was orienting to the
expectation that it is ‘polite’, particularly from the lady’s emic (i.e. Taiwanese)
perspective, to pour drinks for others before serving oneself, or what is termed
titie (‘attentiveness’) in Chinese. He thus orients to the possibility that she might
be thinking he is ‘impolite’ having not met this expectation in this particular
case. What is interesting to note is that at no point did the Taiwanese lady give
any indication that she wanted the man to pour her some tea or that she thought
he should.
We can also observe the way in which participants can orient to particu-
lar epistemic aspects of the moral order. In Chapter 5 we discussed at some
length an example where diverging understandings of politeness arose when
an Australian, Wayne, apologised to a Taiwanese lady, Joyce, and her family
for not turning up to dinner despite having pre-arranged the dinner. We have
reproduced this in example (4).
(4) 1 W: It’s just, ah, I really apologise for not to you getting back
the other day but we couldn’t make it?
2 J: oh, that’s okay. yeah, yeah, yeah. I- I just thought oh prob-
ably you are busy with something so you ah probably were
easy to- to for(hhh)get it.
3 W: yeah we were pretty busy actually

4 J: oh, okay, yeah, yeah that’s fine. I just want to call you, that-
that- that’s okay.
(Chang and Haugh 2011a: 420) [from Chapter 5]
Here we wish to focus in particular on how Wayne subsequently responds

in turn 3 to Joyce’s attempt in turn 2 to ‘accept’ the apology through an
absolution (‘that’s okay’) and her proposed account for him not showing up
(i.e. that he was busy and so it was easy for him to forget things such as their
arrangements for dinner). What we might notice here is that Wayne concludes
in his response in turn 3, where he appears to affiliate with what Joyce has said,
with a turn-final ‘actually’. Clift (2001) suggests that ‘actually’ marks a stance
that is contrary to expectations when it occurs in an utterance-final position,
particularly when the prior turn is a question or involves the expression of
some kind of information or evaluation. In this case, it appears that Wayne is
orienting to aspects of the epistemic order, namely, that he knew what he was
doing, but that this is something about which Joyce cannot make any claims.
In other words, although from Joyce’s (emic) perspective she appears to be
offering an account for Wayne’s transgression, and this is open to evaluation as
‘polite’, from Wayne’s disaffiliative response, it appears that from his (emic)
perspective her offer of a potential account is impinging upon his epistemic
domain, and thus is potentially open to evaluation as ‘impolite’.
Close attention to linguistic or interactional markers of metacognitive aware-
ness are thus arguably of potentially great import for analyses of politeness,
as we have seen in examples (3) and (4). This is an area that has been rela-
tively neglected in politeness research to date, due in large part to much of the
focus being on examining two other dimensions of cognition: inferences and
intentions.
Inferring and anticipating

In the examples we have discussed thus far in this chapter, the participants’
understanding of the social actions and meanings that arise, and thus the eval-
uations vis-à-vis politeness they occasion, involves inference. An inference
generally refers either to some kind of conclusion or understanding reached
on the basis of evidence and reasoning, or to the process of reaching such a
conclusion. Here we will use the term inferring to make it clear when we are
focusing on the second sense. The philosopher John Woods (2010) describes
inferring as a basic form of reasoning whereby we draw the consequences that
a proposition logically has when the truth of the first proposition guarantees
the truth of further propositions, or alternatively the consequences that seem
necessary, permissible, or reasonable for one to draw. The latter type of infer-
ring leads to inferences that are defeasible, which means they always allow for
the possibility of error. In other words, they may not seem necessary, permis-
sible, or reasonable in certain situations. Understandings of politeness arise,
of course, through defeasible inferences. This is another reason why they are
inevitably open to being contested (see Chapter 3).
Now let us consider example (5), where Yoko is inviting Mari to go along to
karaoke.
(5) Yoko: Osoku natta kedo, karaoke yotte ikanai?
‘It’s late, but do you want to go to karaoke?’
Mari: Ashita hachi-ji ni juyona kaigi ga haitte-iru no.
‘I have an important meeting tomorrow at eight o’clock.’
Yoko: Wakatta. Ja mata kondo to iu koto de.
‘Okay. Well next time then’
(cited from Haugh 2003: 402–3)
Mari’s response implies a refusal of Yoko’s invitation, an understanding that is
clearly jointly reached when Yoko subsequently responds that she understands
and suggests they can make it another time. The Japanese relevance theorist
Tomoko Matsui (2001) suggests that this implied refusal could be understood
as ‘polite’ (teinei) since Mari gave a reason why she can’t make it this time, and
thus implicitly left open the possibility of joining Yoko for karaoke at another
more convenient time. The evaluation of politeness here must be inferred by
Yoko, because saying one has a meeting to attend the next day does not in itself
count as a recognisably polite utterance.
However, understandings of politeness do not always arise through infer-
ences. Marina Terkourafi (2001, 2005), in her frame-based approach to polite-
ness, suggests that an important distinction can be drawn between politeness
that arises through particularised implicatures and politeness that arises via
generalised implicatures. The former encompasses instances where the expres-
sion is not conventionalised for a particular use, while the latter involves
instances where an expression is conventionalised for some particular use
(cf. Chapter 7). Essentially this amounts to the claim that politeness can be
either inferred or anticipated by participants (Haugh 2003). Anticipating thus
involves presumptive forms of reasoning where inferences are grounded in
experience and associative links. It is often characterised as a default form of
reasoning, as opposed to the nonce or particularised reasoning that underpins
inferring. Politeness arises through anticipating rather than inferring when ‘the
regular co-occurrence of particular types of context and particular linguistic
expressions as the unchallenged realisations of particular acts . . . create the
perception of politeness’ (Terkourafi 2005: 248). For example, the expression
‘I was wondering if it is okay to open some windows’ is conventionalised (i.e. a
recurrent practice) in (British) English for orienting to contingencies in making

requests (see Chapter 4). Terkourafi’s claim is that based on prior experience in
similar situations, the participants will already hold the belief that this request
is polite, unless otherwise challenged. In this way, the evaluation of polite-
ness is not inferred but rather can be seen to be regularly anticipated by the
participants.
The way in which forms and expressions are identified as ‘conventionalised
for some particular use’ in the frame-based approach is through examining the
relative frequency of their occurrence in corpora (i.e. large datasets of naturally
occurring texts and interactions). If a particular form or expression is found
to regularly co-occur with a particular function relative to a particular mini-
mal context, then it is conventionalised to some degree. A minimal context, or
what Terkourafi (2001, 2005) terms a ‘frame’, involves the co-occurrence of
the expression with social categories, such as the gender, age and social class
of the participants, the relationship that exists between them (e.g. parent/child,
teacher/student, boss/employee), and the setting of the exchange (e.g. formal,
institutional, casual). A relatively high frequency of occurrence of such expres-
sions means that when we encounter them in the minimal context in which
their use is conventionalised, we can anticipate rather than having to infer (i.e.
derive via reasoning) politeness.
A number of studies have focused on the ways in which understandings of
politeness can influence inferences involved in person perception/impression
management, as well as language production and comprehension more broadly.
The social psychologist, Thomas Holtgraves (1998, 2000), for instance, has
shown in a series of experiments how inferences of politeness necessarily arise
in order for participants to make sense of indirect or implicit meanings. And
more recently, the cognitive scientist Jean-François Bonnefon and colleagues
have shown through a number of experiments how interpretations of politeness
can enter into the interpretation of the very ‘tool words’ of rational decision
making, such as quantifiers (‘some’, ‘possibly’) and connectives (‘or’, ‘if’).
In one study, Bonnefon and Villejoubert (2006) found that the more severe
a medical condition was judged to be, the more likely participants were to
interpret the use of ‘possibly’ as a hedge, and thus the more likely they would
interpret the prospect of the medical condition arising. While ‘possibly’ is
generally understood to mean something around 55% probability, it was found
amongst many participants that they assessed the probability as rising to up
to 70% when the medical condition was judged to be severe. Bonnefon and
Villejoubert’s (2006) conclusion was that the quantifier was being construed as
a politeness marker rather than as an uncertainty marker by the participants.
There is some debate, however, as to whether traditional accounts of infer-
ring and anticipating can account for the formal interdependence of at least
some of the understandings of politeness that rise through interaction (see
Chapters 4 and 6). Arundale and Good (2002), for instance, argue that while
traditional accounts of inference are necessary, they are not sufficient to account
for this formal interdependence. They propose that a dyadic form of cognising
needs to complement traditional monadic accounts of inferring and anticipating.
They argue this is necessary because traditional accounts of inference cannot
formally account for the inferential work involved in participants reciprocally
affording and constraining understandings of politeness through adjacent place-
ment of utterances that indicate their understandings of the interactional import
of prior and forthcoming utterances. It would be fair to say, then, that the role
of inferring and anticipating in understanding politeness is an area rich with
possibilities for further research and theorisation.
Intention
In first-wave approaches to politeness it was assumed, following Grice, that
participants are making inferences about the intentions of others (see Chapter
2). An intention is a specific kind of directed mental-state process which encom-
passes a person’s plans or goals. The notion of intention is often confused with
the notion of intentionality (see above). This is because when we talk of an act
being intentional we can either be referring to the speaker having the intention
to act in that way, or we can talk about the act itself having intentionality –
having content and thus being directed at something. The basic idea shared by
Brown and Levinson (1987), Leech (1983) and others is that a hearer under-
stands the speaker to be polite when he or she infers that the speaker has the
intention to be polite: that is, when the speaker is perceived to be intentionally
polite. The assumption that politeness involves inferring the speaker’s inten-
tions has been extended to theories of impoliteness. There is now an ongoing
debate as to whether a speaker has to have the intention to be impolite, or at
least to be perceived to have the intention to be impolite, for some form or
strategy to be evaluated as impolite, as discussed at length by Derek Bousfield
(2010). The question, then, is the same whether we are talking about under-
standings of politeness, impoliteness, mock politeness, mock impoliteness and
so on, namely, are we talking about ‘real’ intentions on the part of the speaker,
or simply perceptions of these intentions by the hearer? As Locher and Watts
point out, there are instances where participants do not recognise a speaker’s
(im)polite intention or attribute an intention to be (im)polite in spite of what
the speaker claims.
A speaker may wish to be aggressive and hurtful, but still not come across as such to
the hearer. Alternatively, a hearer may interpret the speaker’s utterance as negatively
marked with respect to appropriate behaviour, while the speaker did not intentionally
wish to appear as such. (2008: 80)
In other words, the demonstrable existence of cases of so-called ‘miscommuni-

cated’ impoliteness and ‘unintended’ impoliteness (and thus also ‘miscommu-
nicated’ or ‘unintended’ politeness, mock politeness, mock impoliteness and
so on) means that in analysing politeness we cannot simply make assumptions
about the speaker’s putative intentions, but must carefully examine how inten-
tions vis-à-vis politeness are treated by participants. If we take into account
the various participation footings that go beyond simply speakers and hearers
(see Chapters 4 and 6), then the analysis becomes more nuanced. Just as there
are multiple possible understandings of politeness that can arise in interac-
tion because of the possibility of multiple participation footings, there are also
multiple possible understandings of intentions vis-à-vis politeness.
However, there is a second complication when we are dealing with the issue
of intention vis-à-vis politeness. As Haugh (2012b) points out, not only are
there different types of intention, there are also various different theoretical
understandings of intention, and thus different usages of intention prevalent
in the field. In relation to understanding politeness the two most important
types of intention are communicative intentions, as described by Grice (see
Chapter 2), and higher order intentions. A communicative intention is an
intention to communicate certain content to the audience that is fulfilled by
its recognition (Grice 1957), which is generally associated with a particular
utterance. A higher order intention refers to the prospective goals of partici-
pants, which can include particular social actions, activity types and the like,
and so is generally, although not always, associated with longer stretches of
discourse.
The recognition of communicative intentions is generally assumed to under-
pin how we understand particular linguistic forms and strategies as polite. For
example, ‘I was wondering if it is okay to open some windows’ is understood
as a polite request that the addressee open some windows because he or she
recognises the speaker’s communicative intention. This communicative inten-
tion is formulated as reflexive, as not only does the speaker intend that the
addressee recognise that he/she has a certain desire, namely, that the addressee
open some windows, but the speaker also intends the addressee to recognise
that the speaker has the intention that the addressee recognise this desire. On
this view, to recognise a polite communicative intention means the addressee
perceives that the speaker not only intends that the addressee recognise that
he/she has a certain attitude, namely, a polite attitude, but also that he/she
intends the addressee to recognise that the speaker has the intention that the
addressee recognise this attitude. The upshot of this attribution of a polite com-
municative intention to the speaker is that the hearer holds the belief that the
speaker is polite (see Terkourafi 2005).
One challenge facing this view, however, is that evaluations of politeness
are not limited to utterances. Throughout this volume we have illustrated how
understandings of politeness arise over longer stretches of discourse or interac-

tion. In some cases, evaluations of politeness are tied to higher order intentions.
Consider the interaction in example (6), where the ‘I was wondering’ expres-
sion occurs not in a request per se, but in what is generally termed a pre-request:
an utterance that indicates a request is possibly forthcoming (depending on how
the addressee responds).
(6) 1 A: Hullo I was wondering whether you were intending to go
to Popper’s talk this afternoon.
2 B: Not today. I’m afraid I can’t make it to this one.
3 A: Ah okay.
4 B: You wanted me to record it didn’t you heh!
5 A: Yeah heheh
6 B: Heheh no I’m sorry about that.
(cited from Levinson 1983: 358)
The ‘pre-request’ in turn 1 is blocked in B’s response in turn 2, and so A
indicates understanding thereby moving to close this sequence in turn 3. What
is interesting to note here is that in turn 4, B orients to A’s intention to have
B record the talk, an intention A acknowledges as having (turn 5), to which B
responds with an apology (turn 6). This reciprocal display of concern here (i.e.
through apology) indicates that B has evaluated A’s request as polite. However,
in evaluating A’s request as polite, B has attributed a particular higher order
intention to A, namely, to get B to make a recording. The attribution of particular
communicative intentions in the case of each of these utterances, for example,
the intention to check a contingency relating to making a possible request
underpinning the pre-request in turn 1, depends, in turn, on B attributing this
higher order intention to A. It is from the discourse as a whole that B evaluates
A as polite, and thus this particular understanding of politeness is primarily
related to a higher order intention that is explicitly oriented to by the participants
in this interaction, not the various putative communicative intentions that an
analyst might attribute to these participants.
The analysis of intentions vis-à-vis politeness is also complicated by the
fact that there are different theoretical understandings of intentions. As we
discussed in Chapter 5, politeness can be conceptualised in different ways
according to different theoretical, proto-theoretical or folk-theoretical stances.
The same range of understandings can be observed in relation to intentions and
the ways in which they can be deployed by analysts in examining politeness:
Intention can be used definitionally . . . without any necessary commitment to its psy-
chological reality, and in that sense constitutes a theoretical construct only. Intention
may also be assumed to constitute a crucial component of the cognitive activities
involved in communicative interaction, and thus in that sense is a working analyti-
cal construct . . . Finally, intention can be understood as a discursive construct, where
the focus is on the normative work intention in the folk sense does in communicative
interaction. (Haugh 2012b: 169)
It is thus critical that any discussion of intentions vis-à-vis politeness care-

fully situates the analysis both in terms of the type of intention involved (e.g.
communicative versus higher order intention) and the implicit theoretical con-
ceptualisation of intention by the analyst.
In the interaction in example (7) we can see how the participants are orienting
to a higher order intention on the part of one of the characters, and thus, here,
intention is being understood discursively. Example (7) also illustrates how
an addressee can be arguably more hurt when they attribute an intention to
inflict this hurt in evaluating the behaviour as impolite, as Culpeper (2011b)
also argues.
(7) Cuddy: Working with people actually makes you a better doctor.
House: When did I sign up for that course?
Cuddy: When did I give you the impression that I care?
House: Working in this clinic obviously instills a deep sense of
compassion. I’ve got your home number, right? In case
anything comes up at 3 o’clock in the morning.
Cuddy: It’s not going to work. You know why? Because this is
fun. You think of something to make me miserable, I
think of something to make you miserable: it’s a game!
And I’m going to win, because I’ve got a head start. You
are already miserable.
(‘Occam’s razor’, House MD, Season 3, Episode 1, 2004)
This interaction takes place between the grumpy doctor Gregory House and
his colleague, Cuddy. House is reputed for his nasty remarks, and in the con-
versation in example (7) Cuddy interprets his words in light of the destructive
intentions she attributes to him (‘You think of something to make me miser-
able’). In other words, House’s behaviour is evaluated particularly badly – and
consequently it generates negative emotions – because Cuddy knows that his
asocial behaviour is intentional. Although intention is generally more visible in
the case of impoliteness than in that of politeness, in the following section on
emotivity we will illustrate that it also plays an important role in the evaluation
of politeness, as well as the consequent emotive reactions to an utterance.
Given that intention may be understood from the participants’ perspective
as a folk-theoretic, and thus a discursive construct, such intentions vis-à-vis
politeness can become contested. In a study of the widespread offence over
comments made in a sermon given by Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali in a mosque
in Sydney, for instance, Haugh (2008) focused on how al-Hilali’s intentions
to cause offence were disputed in media reports. For instance, in example
(8), from 60 Minutes, Hilali’s daughter Asama al-Hilali is talking about her
understanding of her father’s comments as ‘not offensive’, while the interviewer
Ray Martin alludes to the way in which they were regarded as offensive by
many in Australia.
(8) (‘Defending the faith: Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali’, 60 Minutes,
Channel 9, 12 November 2006)
1 AH: I wasn’t offended by the remarks (0.5) cause I understood
the meaning what what’s behind it.
2 RM: Well uncovered meat is the problem. That’s pretty
specific. Uncovered meat is the [problem.
3 AH: [Yeah. Because that was
the analogy that he used.
4 RM: Well the- the analogy has a meaning and the meaning is
that if you walk around without clothes on then you’ll get
raped.
(cited from Haugh 2008: 212)
Asama al-Hilali claims here to have ‘correctly’ understood her father’s intended
meaning (namely, that Muslim women should dress and behave modestly) and
so was not offended (turns 1 and 3). The interviewer Ray Martin, on the
other hand, claims that what was implied by his comments was women who
dress inappropriately deserve rape (turns 2 and 4), and thus the cleric’s com-
ments were offensive. In doing so, Martin explicitly rejects the claim that
the cleric could have intended something else by his comments (turn 4). In
other words, in spite of the claims by Asama al-Hilali about her father’s inten-
tions, the comments are nevertheless treated as offensive. Cases of seemingly
unintended offence can thus go beyond disputes about the speaker’s putative
intentions to attempts to invoke aspects of the moral order, as Martin does
here.
Emotivity
First-wave theories – and, in fact, some second-wave theories – tend to describe
politeness as a rational activity. Rationality on this view means that the inter-
actional use of politeness operates by means of quasi-logical reasoning with
reference to various intentional mental-state processes. As we discussed in
Chapter 2, Brown and Levinson argue that rationality means ‘the application
of a specific mode of reasoning . . . which guarantees inferences from ends or
goals to means that will satisfy those ends’ (1987: 64). That is, the addressee
recognises polite utterances as having been motivated by such rational and
strategic states of mind. However, Brown and Levinson and other first-wave
scholars did not claim that rationality excludes emotive actions and reactions,
that is, cases where the usage of politeness is (at least partly) influenced by one’s
emotion rather than crystal-clear rationality. Due to the overwhelming focus
on rationality, research on emotion has been relatively neglected in analyses of
politeness until recent times.
In post-2000 research, a number of scholars – most representatively,
Spencer-Oatey (2005), Locher and Langlotz (2008), Ruhi (2009) and Culpeper
(2011b) – have argued that the emotive aspect of politeness and impoliteness
should not be neglected. As Locher and Langlotz (2008) claim, politeness
and emotions are interdependent because certain acts of politeness and impo-
liteness are meant to evoke emotions. On this interpretation, politeness and
emotion become interconnected through intentions (cf. intentionality): a cer-
tain utterance generates a specific emotion as the ‘interactants must be aware
of the relative norms of a particular practice in order to adjust the relational
work accordingly’ (Locher and Langlotz 2008: 173). Putting it simply, the
interactants follow or violate a particular practice with the other’s feelings in
mind.
Locher and Langlotz’s claim that emotions can come into existence through
the intentional usage of politeness clearly illustrates that emotions and ratio-
nality are not contradictory aspects of human cognition. This argument accords
with recent findings in other areas, such as social psychology, where it is
claimed that emotions evoked by the production and evaluation of social actions
presuppose some degree of consciousness, and consequently they necessitate
intentionality. As Schermerhorn et al. explain, it is necessary to ‘differentiate
between self-conscious emotions that arise from internal sources and social
emotions [our emphasis] that are stimulated by external sources’ (2011: 56).
Social emotions are generated by external stimuli, such as an interaction, and
they are cognitively of a higher order than self-conscious emotions (e.g. feel-
ing sorrow for an unknown reason) because they ‘require self-consciousness,
a capacity that begins to emerge in the second year of life’ (Goleman 2011:
131). They therefore necessitate more than simple reflexivity as they operate
with ‘heightened social consciousness’ (Goleman 2011: 131). In other words,
when following or deviating from a certain norm of politeness, we are often
very much aware of the potential emotional consequences of our deeds.
Example (9) illustrates the interdependence between emotions evoked by
certain usages of politeness.
(9) ‘Apparently, this was more intense than a little squabble, Love.’
The way he ended the sentence made it sound as if there was
more to say and he was uncomfortable about continuing. Doreen
sensed this and was glad to see Glenn hadn’t changed a bit. He
was incapable of dishonesty, but that quality was often overridden
by the desire to spare the feelings of those he cared for.
‘I know you want to be kind, and I love you for it, but please tell
me what happened. I’m all grown up now,’ Doreen pleaded.
(http://voices.yahoo.com/father-where-part-v-10846943.html)
This interaction from a novella illustrates the emotion-evoking function of
intentionally polite utterances. The protagonist Doreen senses that Glenn is
being intentionally indirect, due to his ‘desire to spare the feelings of those
he cared for’. In other words, she orients to the intentions she attributes to
him as underlying his behaviour. What is notable here is that this perceived
intentionally polite behaviour generates positive emotions: Doreen ‘was glad
to see Glenn hadn’t changed a bit’.
Although Locher and Langlotz’s approach covers a key dimension of the
emotive aspect of politeness and impoliteness, they treat emotions as bound
to intentional actions. An important addition to this view has been made by
Ruhi (2009) and Kádár (2013) who depart from intentional emotivity and
argue that emotions should be studied in every manifestation of politeness. As
both Ruhi and Kádár argue, human cognition is always in an emotional flux,
and therefore one cannot be entirely emotionless, and the researcher cannot
completely describe what is going on in terms of emotions, even though one
can attempt to model the emotive process. While there are certain cases, as
in example (9), in which intention is salient, one cannot generally predict the
presence or lack of emotion in any interaction without examining the way in
which (1) a given interaction is constructed, and/or (2) drawing from post-
interaction interviews and the like to understand the emotive function and
effect of a certain utterance. In other words, their view is that emotions should
be studied irrespective of (perceived) intentions, in order to understand the
interrelation between politeness and emotivity.
In principle, the researcher can attempt to capture emotion in any interaction
type. However, it makes sense to focus on emotively invested actions, that
is, practices of politeness, which tend to be emotive by their nature. A typical
example for the category of emotively invested action is ritual (see Chapter 7).
Ritual tends to primarily appeal to the speech partner’s senses and emotions,
as it operates as a mimetic performance. Consider the following interaction
between three family members, for instance.1
(10) 1. D: ha (inaudible) ha kérdik az az iskolában (0.3) hogy ki az
apád=
N: =Grievous ↑tábornok
K: már megint kezditek
2. D: igen és aki= majd
N: (.) = >mit mond Grievous tábornok a buta (.)
↑gyerekeknek
K:
3. D: (.2) ((altered bronchial voice)) bántottad a lányomat ezért

megfizetsz te kis
N:
K: (inaudible)
4. D: rohadék basszus
N: folytatnád ezt szeretem
K: @közön@ségetek van
1. D: if (inaudible) if they ask in the school (.3) who your
father is=
N: =General ↑Grievous
K: you start it again
2. D: yes and who= then
N: (.) = >what does General Grievous say to the
silly (.) ↑children
K:
3. D: (.2) ((altered bronchial voice)) you’ve hurt my daughter
and you will pay for this you little
N:
K: (inaudible)
4. D: bastard shoot
N: would you continue I like it
K: you are having @gal@lery
This interaction in Hungarian took place among Kádár’s daughter (N), his wife
(K) and Kádár himself (D), in front of his daughter’s school. After his daughter
started to attend infant school and as many other children began to protest in
the mornings against going to school, she and Kádár formed a fairly complex
ritual practice. That is, Kádár’s daughter, supposedly in order to ease morning
starts, invented imaginary conversations between herself and her otherwise real
friends who are the ‘good children’ and who voluntary agree to attend school,
and a group of imaginary ‘silly children’ who disagree to attend school and
who must be convinced that school is not a bad place. Their tacit agreement was
that Kádár’s duty in these imaginary games was to put himself into the shoes
of book and film characters and help her convince ‘silly children’ to attend
school. In the interaction above, which took place after they watched the film
Star Wars, Kádár acted as the evil character General Grievous who needs to
teach the ‘silly children’ a lesson because they assaulted his daughter and her
friends after they attempted to convince them to go to school.
This relational ritual represents a case of politeness in the sense of involving
an evaluation of support for their relationship: Kádár behaved in a way that
was evaluated as positive (and supposedly supportive) by his daughter. This is
evident from Turn 4, at which point Kádár intended to stop this ritual when he
found that other parents were watching him with surprise, where his daughter
requested him to continue, by evaluating the performance positively (‘Would
you continue, I like it.’). It is also clear that in such a performance – and its
evaluation – the emphasis is on the positive emotions that arise through the
influence of the emotively invested action of performance.
Both theories that focus on intentions and others that describe emotions
on a more general level are still at an experimental stage, and the emo-
tive aspect of politeness remains to be fully mapped out. Accordingly, while
there are hypothesised models, such as that of Ruhi (2009), by means of
which emotions can be described, the testing of these models is subject to
future research. An important element in these models is the categorisation
of emotions: the systematic description of different emotive states evoked
by evaluations of politeness and impoliteness. A noteworthy categorisation is
offered by Spencer-Oatey (2005: 116) who distinguishes the following emotive
categories:
emotional reactions (own and other)
joy contentment/pleasure
pride
surprise surprise/amazement
anger irritation/annoyance
frustration
disgust/disapproval
sadness disappointment/displeasure
shame/guilt
embarrassment/insult/humiliation
Reliance on these categories is useful in helping researchers to describe mani-
festations of emotions in a systematic way. An important task for future research
on politeness and emotions is to combine the analysis of linguistic politeness
with that of facial expression, gestures and other non-linguistic and paralinguis-
tic aspects of communication (see Chapter 6). As emotions are often evident in
non-linguistic communication, this is a key area to examine. We would suggest
such an approach would also accord with the treatment of politeness as social
practice.
10.3 Key studies

Langlotz (2010) gives a very useful overview of different theories and frame-
works for examining the relationship between cognition and politeness. He also
draws attention to the ongoing tension between traditional approaches to cog-
nition in social psychology and discursive psychology, and outlines attempts
to bridge that gap.
In Chapter 2 of his book Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence,

Culpeper (2011a) develops an integrated socio-cognitive model for exam-
ining cognitive, normative and emotive aspects of impoliteness, which is
applicable in many respects to politeness. The emotions associated with
evaluations of impoliteness are empirically investigated, drawing from diary
reports from informants who noted down salient events from their own
perspective.
A paper by Holtgraves (2005) summarises a series of experimental studies
on politeness and how it enters into processes of person perception and lan-
guage comprehension. His work draws primarily from first-wave approaches
to politeness, in particular, the model proposed by Brown and Levinson
(1987).
The implications of drawing from a discursive approach to intention are
explored in a chapter by Davies (2011). She examines how a statement from
then Prime Minister Tony Blair, in which he expressed ‘deep sorrow’ about
the past involvement of the UK in the slave trade, was treated in the media,
in particular, the way in which they commented on his intent in issuing this
apology.
Finally, a paper by Langlotz and Locher (2013), ‘The role of emotions
in a discursive approach to relational work’, explores connections between
relational meanings, under which politeness, impoliteness and the like fall,
and emotional meanings. They propose that participants draw from composite
emotional signals in integrating these socio-emotional meanings.
10.4 Exercises
1. What do you think are the key cognitive-state processes when examining
politeness?
2. Do you think behaviour which is regarded as intentionally polite or
impolite is always regarded as more polite/impolite than behaviour which
appears to be unintentionally polite/impolite?
3. Have you ever encountered situations where someone being ostensibly
polite made you feel bad? Why was that?
II. Consider the following examples and analyse the politeness phenomena
(a) (Dominic does the washing-up, with help from four-year-old Sophie,
and recounts how he helped an old lady cross the road earlier in the
day)
‘She was saying ‘It’s very nice of you to do this.’
And I said, ‘Why it’s just polite- ah it’s just normal. You just do it.
10.4 Exercises 229
If you see someone who needs help like that you just do it.’
She said, ‘You’re English, aren’t you?’
I said, ‘Well’, I said, ‘yeah’.
She said, ‘Oh’, she said, ‘All Englishmen are gentlemen,’ she said.
And that made me feel good. But that’s one thing I’ll always make time
for. I’m not blowing my own trumpet, I’m just saying what my personal
feeling about it. You go out of your way to help someone every now
and again like that you got more respect for yourself, not- As well as
for other people, you show respect for other people you got- you got a
good feeling inside, you got respect for yourself. And nobody can take
that away from you.
(www.bbc.co.uk/videonation/articles/u/uk politeness.shtml)
(b) ((Neal has been forced to walk a long way back from the carpark having
found his rental car was not there))
Agent: (smiling with a cheerful voice) Welcome to Marathon, may I
help you?
Neal: Yes.
Agent: How may I help you?
Neal: You can start by wiping that fucking dumb-ass smile off your
rosey, fucking, cheeks! And you can give me a fucking automo-
bile: a fucking Datsun, a fucking Toyota, a fucking Mustang, a
fucking Buick! Four fucking wheels and a seat!
Agent: I really don’t care for the way you’re speaking to me.
Neal: And I really don’t care for the way your company left me in
the middle of fucking nowhere with fucking keys to a fucking
car that isn’t fucking there. And I really didn’t care to fucking
walk, down a fucking highway, and across a fucking runway to
get back here to have you smile in my fucking face. I want a
fucking car RIGHT FUCKING NOW!
Agent: May I see your rental agreement?
Neal: I threw it away.
Agent: Oh boy.
Neal: Oh boy, what?
Agent: You’re fucked!
(Trains, Planes and Automobiles, 1987)
In example (a), we can see how the narrator is recounting an experience
where an evaluation of him as polite made him ‘feel good’. He is also
orienting to his belief that showing respect for others (i.e. being polite) is a
way of showing respect for oneself, and that this self-respect makes oneself
have ‘a good feeling inside’. In this case, then, the informant associates
very positive emotions with evaluations of politeness.
In example (b), which we previously discussed in Chapter 6, we can see

how Neal is projecting an impolite attitude in order to express his anger,
while the agent express her displeasure through projecting a polite attitude.
It is this contrast between projecting negative emotions through an impolite
attitude by Neal, and an polite attitude by the agent, which gives her final
utterance, where she projects an impolite attitude, a greater impact than it
might otherwise have had.
11 Culture, identity and politeness
11.1 Introduction
For many, being polite is regarded as an important symbol of human culture.
According to some, what distinguishes humans from other beings is that they
can act in a ‘civilised’ way, by expressing politeness in different forms towards
fellow humans. Within human civilisation, politeness is often regarded as a
benchmark of civility, where a ‘proper’ command of politeness represents a
certain type and level of culture, and so, politeness is claimed to distinguish
certain individuals from others. The present chapter will not comment on the
first point: opinions may differ across disciplines such as sociology, anthropol-
ogy and ethnology as to whether politeness in the sense of relationality is a
solely human property, even if there is no doubt that the abstract phenomenon
of linguistic politeness is an absolutely human phenomenon. We will, however,
consider in some detail the second point, by claiming that a treatment of polite-
ness as a ruling norm, which is commanded by some and not by others, is an
inherently biased and ideologically charged one: the association of politeness
with ‘standard’ norms only reflects the view of the powerful classes and groups
within a society.
If one ventures into politeness research, it is tempting to associate certain
forms of behaviour with culture. This leads to simplistic essentialist views
of culture and politeness. Certain researchers claim that politeness operates in
binaries: in one culture it operates in form x, and in another culture it operates in
form y. The above-mentioned distinction made between individuals who have
civility and those who do not also presumes an essentialised binary view of
politeness. Moreover, such essentialist views are not only present in research on
politeness and culture but have also featured in traditional work on politeness
and gender, for instance. According to the essentialist view, which will be
challenged in a number of respects in the present chapter, culture manifests itself
in one’s identity, and consequently one’s linguistic interpersonal behaviour
is regarded as unavoidably driven by one’s cultural identity. Since values,
perceptions and the like appear to vary across cultures, politeness also seems
to be a culture-specific phenomenon. This is often used to explain differences
in norms of linguistic appropriateness behaviour. When people from different
231
cultures interact, it is presumed that misunderstandings are likely to arise, as

illustrated by example (1).
(1) C: Teacher, how do you do?
B: How do you do? Where do you teach?
C: No, I’m not a teacher, I’m a student.
(Cited from Gu 1990: 250)
This interaction took place between a Chinese university student and a British
lecturer. The Chinese student addressed the lecturer by using the job title
‘teacher’, which has a deferential implication in Chinese (since teachers, at least
traditionally, have a respected social status). The British lecturer misunderstood
this form of address as being a form of self-introduction, as ‘teacher’ is rarely
used in English for this function. In other words, the interactants failed to
properly understand each other because their interpretations of the meaning
of this expression and the politeness occasioned by it – which to some extent
reflect different worldviews (e.g. the social status of teachers) – differ. Thus,
although the present chapter will illustrate that this is a vast overstatement,
at first glance it might seem that people who come from different cultures
are doomed to misunderstand each other in terms of their understandings of
politeness, unless they are well-versed in the other’s cultural norms.
Following this train of thought, and if we describe culture somewhat more
broadly, it is possible to capture other oft-quoted examples of misunderstand-
ings as well. For example, certain scholars, such as Deborah Tannen (1990),
argue that men and women have different cultures. Differences in feminine and
masculine ‘cultures’ manifest themselves in differences in gender identities,
and thus in their communicative practices. Tannen argues that different gender
identities are also held to be responsible for misunderstandings, as in example
(2) by Tannen.
(2) HE: I’m really tired. I didn’t sleep well last night.
SHE: I didn’t sleep well either. I never do.
HE: Why are you trying to belittle me?
SHE: I’m not! I’m just trying to show that I understand!
This woman was not only hurt by her husband’s reaction; she was
mystified by it. How could he think she was belittling him? By
‘belittle me,’ he meant ‘belittle my experience.’ He was filtering
her attempts to establish connection through his concern with
preserving independence and avoiding being put down.
(Tannen 1990: 51)
Since masculine identity is claimed to be dominated by status and power,
the woman’s attempt above to establish sympathy is argued to be doomed to
fail. Males and females seem to speak different ‘languages’, and unless they
are well-versed with the other’s ‘culture’ (e.g. a male studying feminine speech
styles), there is an inevitable ‘intercultural’ gap between them, which often
leads to misunderstandings, in a similar way to the case of the Chinese student
and the lecturer in example (1). Example (2) is used to support a claim that it
is due to gender – and consequently cultural in the broad sense – differences
that the woman’s claimed polite intention was interpreted as impolite by the
man.
Examples (1) and (2) both represent essentialist descriptions of language
usage. The essentialist view has turned out to be problematic for researchers
who regard culture critically, as a notion which is constructed in interac-
tion (Chapter 4). This critical view questions notions that operate with bina-
ries, such as male and female cultures. For example, in critical feminist
research, Mills and Louise Mullany (2011) question the validity of the above-
discussed representation of gendered language. By taking a non-essentialist
and social constructionist line, Mills and Mullany argue that gender in dis-
course depends on context and negotiation: there are no pre-existing masculine
and feminine cultures that control understandings of politeness in essentialistic
ways.
This critical point, in our view, also applies to the relationship between culture
and politeness more generally. Rather than operating as ‘cultural dopes’ who
are ‘controlled’ by politeness norms of the culture in question, we take the
view that we co-construct understandings of politeness as representative of
cultural identities through discourse and interaction itself. In other words, the
relationship between politeness and culture is constituted through discourse.
However, in being taken-for-granted, our perceptions of cultural identities can
of course, in some cases, be constitutive of evaluative moments of politeness
in interaction as well, in the same way as the moral order which we discussed
in Chapter 4.
Thus, in reality, understandings of politeness vis-à-vis cultural identities can
be fairly complex. First, cultural identity is more often than not a locally situated
phenomenon. Although it is tempting to regard differences in cultural identity
as a source of misunderstanding, one’s cultural identity is often deployed in a
utilitarian way when it comes to politeness, as example (3) illustrates.
(3) I looked up angrily. Over the wall, to my left, there appeared

a face. An egg-shaped head, partially covered with suspiciously
black hair, two immense moustaches, and a pair of watchful eyes.
It was our mysterious neighbour, Mr Porrott [the narrator makes
a typo here; authors’ remark].
He broke at once into fluent apologies.
‘I demand of you a thousand pardons, monsieur. I am without
defence. For some months now I cultivate the marrows. This
morning suddenly I enrage myself with these marrows. I send

them to promenade themselves – alas! Not only mentally but
physically. I seize the biggest. I hurl him over the wall. Monsieur,
I am ashamed. I prostrate myself.’
Before such profuse apologies, my anger was forced to melt.
(Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Chapter 2, 1926)
This interaction is cited from a novel of the famous crime story writer Agatha
Christie. The protagonist, Hercule Poirot, is a Belgian detective who is a resident
in England. Poirot is known to be a very fluent, if not native, speaker of
English who has spent most of his life in England. Nevertheless, he tends
to utilise French lexical items, as well as a typical overexagerrated form of
‘gentlemanly behaviour’ which, as Christie tells us, the British associate with
his ‘Latin-ness’. It is thus obvious that through this linguistic behaviour he
indexes, or represents, himself as ‘alien’. However, this does not cause any
communication failure or misunderstanding, but in fact helps Poirot to cope
with certain problematic situations, as example (3) illustrates. He uses this
stance to gain advantage in different situations. For example, by displaying
his foreignness he can make indiscreet inquiries as, according to Christie, the
British tend to forgive foreigners certain failures which they would not forgive
themselves. Or, as in the case of example (3), he can use foreign Latin-ness
simply to make people sympathetic to him.
Due to the way in which identity is locally situated and intepreted, the
borderline between certain ‘cultures’ can also become rather blurred at the
level of social groups. To return to the example of gender in example (2), while
some men and women may speak differently, masculinity and femininity can
be observed to be utilised just as much as discursive resources by males and
females, alongside the essentialistic claims about them being practices inherent
in one gender. In fact, there are several alternative explanations for what occurs
in example (2), many of which would stem from prior interactions between
the couple. Without being familiar with communicative practices amongst
couples more generally, and the interactants’ relational history, in particular,
we have no evidence at all for the claim that the wife protesting she has been
‘misunderstood’ by her husband has anything to do with their genders.
Second, politeness is often discursively constructed: the interactants con-
tinuously reflect on the interaction as it unfolds (see e.g. different studies in
Linguistic Politeness Research Group 2011). We can usually sense – especially
in longer interactions – if something begins to ‘go wrong’, and we can modify
our behaviour according to the situation. Thus, even in interactions in which
significant cultural differences apply, the interactants usually have opportunities
to recognise a given misunderstanding and to develop the trajectory of the given
conversation accordingly, hence decreasing communicational problems caused
by cultural distance. Example (4) illustrates this activity of interactional repair.

This interaction took place in England between Kádár, a native Hungarian, and
a British acquaintance of his.
(4) AC: You’re all right?
DK: Well, not really. We are still struggling to find a property.
AC: [short surprised silence] Well, it’s difficult to find an appro-
priate rental property in place X.
DK: Yeah . . .
This person greeted Kádár by using the form ‘You’re all right?’ This is a sym-
bolic question just like ‘How do you do?’, and the preferred response is to
give a brief positive answer. This is particularly applicable in the case of the
present conversation because the interactants meet quite often, and the interac-
tion reported in example (4) took place upon them passing each other at work.
This norm, however, does not fully apply in Hungarian, in which questions like
this are open to be interpreted as real ones. Kádár was not yet familiar with
the proper usage of this English form, and, upon interpreting it as a genuine
question, he gave a dispreferred (i.e. detailed) response. The dispreferred nature
of this response was marked by a short silence, after which the British person
reacted to Kádár’s answer, by sympathetically affiliating with Kádár’s com-
plaint. That is, he recognised the misunderstanding and modified his response
according to how he interpreted Kádár to be interpreting his initial question,
hence smoothing over communicational discrepancy. This repair process was
apparently facilitated by Kádár’s perceived identity as non-British. To sum up,
different perceptions of what counts as normative (and consequently polite)
did not ultimately result in a communication failure due to AC’s flexibility in
accommodating to Kádár’s interpretation of his utterance, and modifying the
trajectory of the interaction accordingly.
The relationship politeness, culture and identity is thus clearly not a simple
one, and so it cannot be described in terms of essentialised differences. In this
chapter, we will outline how we can deal with this complexity in examining
understandings of politeness vis-à-vis culture and identity.
11.2 Key concepts
Relativity, self-reflexivity and variability

As examples (3) and (4) in Section 11.1 have illustrated, national ‘culture’ is
often more like a tool than an ‘inherited’ property – it is a discursive resource,
to use a term which occurs in different discourse analytic works such as Thorn-
borrow (2002) (see also Chapter 7). Therefore, it can be argued that ‘cul-
ture’ is a much more inclusive notion than simply referring to nationality.
Apart from nations such as the British, the Americans and the Chinese, cer-
tain groups within a society such as certain age groups, gender groups and
different classes, constitute ‘cultural groups’ which participants can identify
with, and with politeness practices which that cultural identity implies. Here
we need to refer again to the notion of network, (see Chapters 4 and 7): a
society is constituted by a network of social and relational networks, within
which members can adopt different norms of politeness. This does not mean
that there is not a single set of dominating norms, formed by those within a
society who have the power to let their voice be heard, but it is likely that these
norms do not universally apply to all the networks through which a society is
constituted.
These normative differences represent themselves in debates on culture and
(im)politeness, a point we briefly discussed in Chapter 9. Since extensive
research on this topic has been undertaken in an article by Mills and Kádár
(2011), in what follows let us refer to this research. As Mills argues in this
work, within all cultures, there is not one single set of politeness rules that
remains uncontested. Thus, if one does not recognise such rules are inevitably
contested, one can easily form overly simplistic views of politeness at the
societal level. Such overgeneralisations manifest themselves, most typically, in
discourses on the politeness practices of certain marginalised groups such as
working-class people and younger generations. To provide a most representa-
tive example, according to Lakoff (2005), politeness norms in American culture
are changing from a so-called respect-based culture to a camaraderie culture.
These changes manifest themselves, for example, in sexual coarseness in public
contexts, violence in the media, agonism (the unwillingness to acknowledge a
middle ground in debate), uncontrolled displays of hostility, negative political
advertising; cursing and other bad language, flaming on the internet, the loss
of polite conventions (such as ‘please’ and ‘thank you’), invasions of privacy
and the rise of conventional anti-formality (Lakoff 2005: 30–4).
The surprising aspect of this claim is that the author seems to be confident
that she has the right and ability to claim that these changes are actually taking
place, when she is drawing from metapragmatic evidence (i.e. what people
are reporting) rather than close empirical examination of practices amongst
Americans, and also that they are taking place at a cultural rather than at
a sub-cultural level. But, as Mills demonstrates, there is an explanation for
this confidence: the author tracks these changes down to social tensions over
whose norms will hold sway, and to a discourse playing out in some parts
of American society that identifies multiculturalism as the source of some
of the ills of America. That is, there are ‘Americans’ who are threatened by
incivility, and they are those Americans who are in a dominant position, that
is white middle-class Americans. Lakoff outlines this emerging discourse as
follows:
Americans have always been multicultural. But until very recently, those who were
not white, male and middle-class and above had no access to public discourse, no
way to compete for the right to make their own standards of meaning and language.
Since the 1960s, more and more formerly disenfranchised groups have demanded, and
to some degree received, the right to make language, make interpretations, and make
meaning for themselves. The sharing of the right to make meaning turns America truly
multicultural – and pretty scary for the formerly ‘in’ now moving toward the periphery.
(2005: 36)
This description suggests that the ‘new people’ include African Americans,
Hispanics and working-class Americans, whose supposed lack of civility
is treated as problematic in this white, middle-class American discourse.
She argues that what is problematic is that instead of ‘respect’ there is a
growing ‘camaraderie’ that has gone too far in that that a ‘good American’ is
increasingly:
one who is able to talk to anyone about anything, with nothing left unmention-
able . . . [T]he sense of symbolic difference that permits the use of distance and deference
politeness may be becoming too threatening in a society that is, in fact, increasingly
diverse. (Lakoff 2005: 38)
Many readers may feel that this description overgeneralises, and indeed it
does, because it reflects a metapragmatic discourse, not careful empirical exam-
ination of practices across interactions. But it also constitutes an overgeneralisa-
tion because the author treats her understanding of politeness as representative
of American culture, thereby ignoring all the obvious diversity she alludes to in
her discussion. It can rightly be argued that no researcher is exempt from rep-
resenting politeness from her or his social group’s or network’s point of view.
However, it is possible that the changes described above would be perceived as
positive rather than negative by someone who belongs to a marginalised group.
As Mills makes clear, the problem is that Lakoff has represented only one under-
standing of this discourse, treating it as uncontested, neglecting to acknowledge
that it is more likely than not a highly contested discourse in American society.
From this discussion we can see that it is quite difficult to remain objective
when it comes to discussing politeness vis-à-vis cultures. The perhaps most
obvious way to address this problem is to conduct a self-reflexive analysis (on
self-reflexivity see e.g. Baxter 2004). This means that the researcher should
reflect on her or his own folk theory of culture and politeness in a critical
way, acknowledging that any theory is likely to reflect a worldview that is
rooted in the researcher’s specific understanding of politeness, and which is
inherited from the ideologies of the relational networks to which the researcher
belongs. Such a self-reflexive approach necessitates that we do not confound
politeness and culture. That is, we need to regard culture as a contested rather
than normative notion. Culturally situated politeness practices are likely to be
regarded as normative if a particular culture is associated with a ‘standard’

national culture – which inevitably means the dominant or ‘mainstream’ under-
standing of appropriate behaviour. For instance, in the discourse described
above it is implicitly assumed there is only a single ‘American culture’, which
allows for only one ‘correct’ usage of politeness.
In sum, a self-reflexive analysis requires us to acknowledge different under-
standings with regards to appropriate norms of politeness. The issue of vari-
ability in understandings of politeness is one we have noted throughout this
volume. Our contention is that this variability in understandings reflects in
many instances variability in perceptions of politeness norms. It is pertinent
to note that variability does not always manifest itself in what are regarded as
more or less ‘standard’ norms. As a recent study by the Chinese researcher Yun
He (2012) has illustrated, some of the differences between network-specific
understandings of politeness, such as generational ones, are so visible to mem-
bers that one can rightly argue that there are different ‘standards’ in which
different understandings of politeness are grounded within a single culture.
In other words, when examining discourses of politeness at a societal level
and relating these to practices across different social networks or groups with
which individuals can identify, it is becoming increasingly clear that even lay
understandings of norms acknowledge the existence of more than one set of
expectancies or norms in relation to politeness within that culture. It is thus
incumbent upon us as researchers to recognise the relativity and variability of
politeness norms as well.
Identification: association and dissociation

The ambiguity of the notion of culture has some important implications when
it comes to practices of politeness. When we engage in an interaction, it is
possible to take certain stances with regard to the culture we represent, or we
think we may represent in the eyes of others in a social network, and project our
identity accordingly. As the sociolinguist Mary Bucholtz argues, identification
practices – the processes by which identities are projected, negotiated and
contested in interaction – manifest themselves in two ways.
Negative identity practices are those that individuals employ to distance themselves
from a rejected identity, while positive identity practices are those in which individuals
engage in order actively to construct a chosen identity. In other words, negative identity
practices define what their users are not, and hence emphasize identity as an intergroup
phenomenon; positive identity practices define what their users are, and thus emphasize
the intragroup aspects of social identity. (1999: 211–12)
Negative and positive practices operate jointly in forming cultural identities:

if one positions oneself as aligned with or taking up a certain cultural identity,
one distances oneself from other cultures at the same time. Positive identity
practices are often referred to as practices of association, and their negative
counterparts as practices of dissociation. The question of what counts as dis-
sociation or association is unavoidably relative, as it depends on the nature of a
given network, and how individuals position themselves, or are positioned, as
members or non-members. For example, detective Poirot’s ‘Latin’ politeness
in example (3) is recognisable as technique of dissociation, as he markedly
emphasises his ‘foreignness’ in a British setting by using a practice that differs
from local norms. Should he behave in the same way in a group of Belgians
who use English as a lingua franca, his use of language could be interpreted
as an example of association, provided, of course, that it is noted at all. In
this sense, then, arguably both association and dissociation presupposes some
degree of visibility: the speaker needs to clearly use certain forms or practices
for occasioning politeness, which are associated with a certain cultural stance,
in order for them to be recognised as associative or disassociative.
Association emphasises similarity. It often becomes most salient when a non-
member, someone positioned as an ‘outsider’ relative to a particular relational
network, attempts to associate him or herself with members or ‘insiders’ of that
network. Consider example (5), for instance.
(5) DK: Well dun, as we Yorkshire people say!
SL: [smiles and amiably hits DK’s shoulder]
Our identities are constituted by many dimensions of indentifications, and
national culture is only one. However, in some instances it can become highly
salient with regard to understandings of politeness. This point is illustrated by
example (5) in which the focus of association is a regional group (i.e. York-
shire) within a nation, rather than a nation per se (i.e. Britain). This interaction
took place between Kádár and his acquaintance SL in Yorkshire. Upon con-
gratulating his acquaintance on an achievement, Kádár switched to a Yorkshire
accent by pronouncing done as dun, and also markedly emphasised his associ-
ation with Yorkshire identity through positioning himself as a member (albeit
temporarily in this locally, situated interaction) through using an inclusive ‘we’
pronoun. It is clear from the reaction of SL, who is a native of Yorkshire, that
this technique of association was interpreted as polite, an understanding that
was confirmed in a post-event chat between Kádár and SL.
Normative differences among networks can manifest in practices of asso-
ciation and dissociation. Since groups and networks have different norms of
politeness, manifestations of politeness often unavoidably associate the speaker
with certain groups and networks and dissociate her or him from others. For
example, in many parts of England, using stereotypically ‘British’ practices
of politeness can be interpreted as the speaker associating him or herself with
the upper classes, an identity with which others may dissociate. Recall, for
instance, the description of ‘politeness’ offered by a local in northern England,

which we discussed in passing in Chapter 4:
(6) to him it was just another form of dishonesty, either used by

‘wankers’ who did not dare deliver a straight and honest message
(he was probably indirectly referring to me and my rather pathetic
attempts to order a drink), or by ‘slimy bastards’ whose mild
manners concealed some devious ulterior motive.
He was, on the whole, rather suspicious of polite people.
(Deutschmann 2003: 23–4)
What we can see in example (6) is that perceptions of ‘politeness’ as positive

or negative can be grounded relative to whether a person is associating or
disassociating with the identity with which the practice is taken to be aligned.
It can be argued, then, that many of our linguistic choices can be interpreted
as instances of association/dissociation. A most notable example of this can
be found in Japanese, in which evaluations of politeness arise in part through
the use of an elaborate system of honorifics. As the sociolinguist Shigeko
Okamoto (1999) argues, in Japanese not only the choice to use honorifics, but
also their omission indexes a certain stance: any usage represents the speaker’s
(claimed) sociocultural standing, as well as her or his claimed association
with or dissociation from the interactant. Due to this, interactants may adopt
certain forms, in order to ‘manipulate’ their social standing and their consequent
relationship with the other.
It is pertinent to note that whether an act of association or dissociation is
taken to be intentional or not itself constitutes an evaluation by participants, and
so this too can be discursively disputed. Thus, whether association and conse-
quent dissociation (or vice-versa) are taken to be unintended or deliberate, we
are dealing with instances of identification, where one identifies oneself with
recognisable groups. As the gender researcher Judith Butler (1990) argues, for
a group to be recognisable it inevitably involves overgeneralisation and overho-
mogenisation. Obviously, it is makes no sense to attempt to claim membership
with a group (and, automatically, distance oneself from others) if the given
group is not known by the other. Thus, identification can often become charged
with stereotypes, as example (7) from the American comedy Rush Hour 3
(2007), which plots the adventures of a Chinese detective (Chief Inspector
Lee) and his black American colleague (Detective James Carter), illustrates.
(7) Carter: Well, for your information, I’m part Chinese now. That’s
right, Lee. For the last three years, I have studied the
ancient teachings of Buddha, earning two black belts in
Wu Shu martial arts, spending every afternoon at the Hong
Kong Massage parlor. I’m half Chinese, baby!
Lee: If you’re half Chinese, I’m half black. I’m your brother
and I’m fly. You down with that, Snoopy? That’s dope,
innit?
Carter: Sorry, Lee. You can’t be black. There’s a height require-
ment.
(Rush Hour 3, 2007)
In this interaction, both of the interactants claim in-group relationship with

the other’s ethnicity, by listing characteristics they associate with the other.
Detective Carter restricts his ‘Chinese-ness’ to activities which he thinks are
stereotypically Chinese, such as earning black belts and going to massage
parlors. On the other hand, Chief Inspector Lee attempts to associate himself
with black Americans through the formulation of his utterances, such as ‘You
down with that, Snoopy’ and ‘That’s dope, innit?’, elements he thinks are from
African American vernacular English.
The source of humour here is that both of these attempts to associate and
claim insider status are quite obviously from non-members. This is made clear
when Lee’s attempts to associate himself with Carter’s ethnic identity are
rejected by Carter through an insult that invokes yet another stereotype (namely,
the height of Chinese). While Carter’s response might be evaluated as ‘mock’
impolite rather than genuinely impolite, it nevertheless indicates that he is
disaffiliating from Lee’s attempts to associate with him.
The real complexity of identification resides in its bidirectional nature. That
is, we not only perform our identities, we also tend to attribute identities to
others. For example, Hercule Poirot’s words through which his identification
with his ‘Belgian-ness’ is performed in example (3) pass by relatively unno-
ticed, while those of Chief Inspector Lee’s become noticed as there are different
values attributed to the speakers. It is represented as ‘natural’ that a Belgian
uses French lexical items and expresses himself through a stereotypical ‘Latin’
temperament in Agatha Christie’s book – even though this may be not at all
‘natural’ to many Belgians in reality. On the other hand, as we do not read-
ily attribute the use of African American vernacular to native Chinese, Chief
Inspector Lee’s words are treated as marked.
Example (7) thus illustrates that a claim to association is subject to evaluation
by others. In fact, it is not only an addressee who can evaluate a certain claim,
but bystanders can also make evaluative comments (see Chapters 4 and 6). This
is illustrated in example (8), which was observed by Kádár while he was guest
teaching basic sociolinguistics for a group of Hungarian university students
learning Japanese.
(8) Anita: Annyira cuki, hogy a japán női nyelvről egy férfi
beszél! Én magamar is Harajuku-onna-nak tartom!
‘It is so cute that a man speaks about Japanese female

language. I also regard myself as a Harajuku-onna
[Harajuku girl]!’
Bystander: (whispering to another) Atyavilág . . .
‘O gosh . . . ’
When it came to a discussion of Japanese language and gender, the person

who occurs here with the pseudonym Anita interrupted Kádár and attempted
to associate herself with a stereotypical group of Japanese young women from
Tokyo’s Harajuku district who are called Harajuku-onna (‘Harajuku girls’).
This group of Japanese females is known for its habits of dressing in ‘cute’
ways, and indexing this ‘cuteness’ in language by using childish lexical items.1
X accentuated her claimed similarity with Harajuku females by utilising the
Hungarian word cuki (cute), in a stressed form. As cuki is a word associated
with female teenager language, it functions as stereotypical Japanese ‘cute’
female language, i.e. as a means to narrow the intercultural difference between
Harajuku females and the speaker. Anita’s utterance was not directly evaluated,
although Kádár felt slightly offended by being positioned in this way, but as
he thought that Anita meant to be kind in her act of appraisal, he simply
nodded and continued his presentation without commenting on this utterance.
However, next to Kádár a student whispered Atyavilág (‘O gosh’) to his peer,
thus indicating that he evaluated this attempt at association by Anita (and
perhaps also her interruption of the lecturer) negatively. This negative evaluation
might have been motivated both by Anita’s attempt to associate with an ‘exotic’
foreign out-group and her consequent dissociation from her fellow students,
because of the way she associated Kádár with this group.
The difference between the negative evaluations in examples (6) and (7)
resides in the claimed role of the evaluating person: Detective Carter, as a black
American, invokes the right to decide on the acceptability of Lee’s claimed
association, while the bystander student in example (7) simply communicated
his negative opinion. Once a hearer has a recognised right to comment on a
claimed cultural identity, he or she takes a positive stance on that identification,
a process defined as ratifying (on ratification, see e.g. Selting 2009: 29). The
function of ratifying was illustrated in example (5). The difference between
examples (7) and (8) neatly illustrates the relativity of cultural identities in
terms of politeness: neither Kádár nor Chief Inspector Lee are real culture
insiders, and so the symbolic acceptance of their claims to insider membership
depends on whether their indentification attempts have been ratified or not.
Cross-cultural versus intercultural

A very large body of work in politeness research has focused on comparing how
politeness arises in a particular languaculture, such as (Mainland) Mandarin
Chinese, (British, American, Australian) English, Japanese, Turkish and so on,

and then comparing that with how these forms or strategies differ with those
in other cultures. This is generally termed cross-cultural politeness research,
where interactions or other forms of data are ‘obtained independently from
different cultural groups’ (Spencer-Oatey 2008 [2000]: 4). There are literally
thousands of published studies, including dozens of monographs and edited
volumes focusing on politeness from a cross-cultural perspective. Many of the
earlier studies, inspired by the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project
led by Blum-Kulka and colleagues, were focused on forms and strategies
associated with polite expressions of speech acts across languages and cultures,
with DCTs being the method of choice (see Chapter 2). While a much greater
range of data types and methodologies are now used, the focus on speech acts
when examining politeness across cultures remains a popular one (see, for
example, an edited collection by Leyre Ruiz de Zarobe and Yolanda Ruiz de
Zarobe, 2012), with the most popular speech acts in cross-cultural politeness
research being requests, apologies and compliments/compliment responses.
While such studies clearly continue to be a mainstay of politeness research,
and indeed have contributed a considerable amount to academic understandings
of differences in the way politeness arises through different forms and practices
across cultures, the assumptions underpinning such work have been largely
inherited from first-wave approaches to politeness (see Chapter 2). This has
(inadvertently) created two (unnecessary) constraints on cross-cultural polite-
ness research. The first is the continuing reliance on basic assumptions in speech
act theory, in particular, the narrow focus on social actions that are labelled
in vernacular English, such as requests, apologies, invitations, refusals and the
like. There are hundreds and hundreds of social actions, many of which are
not labelled in the vernacular, but nevertheless are recognisable to participants
(Schegloff 2007a). One such example is what Culpeper and Haugh (forthcom-
ing), in their review of speech acts, term the generic act of ‘soliciting’, where
another social action, such as inviting, complimenting, complaining or account-
ing, is embedded within a frame where the speaker is trying to get the recipient
to undertake responsibility for the act in question. We all know there can be
a big difference between inviting someone and, for instance, getting them to
invite us somewhere. And this difference can be consequential for the ongoing
relationship between those participants and for understandings of politeness.
The second is the relative neglect of intracultural variation in cross-cultural
politeness research. While it is often noted in passing by scholars that we should
refrain from overgeneralising about politeness at the level of cultures, the fact
that there have been thus far very few studies of variability in understandings
of politeness amongst members of a culture (see Chapter 3), is rather telling,
and indeed without it, cross-cultural politeness research continues to rest on
rather shaky empirical grounds. However, it is worth noting such research is
slowly beginning to emerge, with much of this is grounded in the variational

pragmatics movement founded by Klaus P. Schneider and Anne Barron (2008),
where five key macro-social identities that are displayed and perceived by
participants in interaction have been recognised as particularly salient in that
respect: namely, region, social class, ethnicity, gender and age. A special issue
on ‘Im/politeness across Englishes’ edited by Haugh and Schneider (2012), for
instance, represents one of the first attempts to move the variational pragmatics
paradigm, and its attendant focus on intracultural (as well as cross-cultural)
variability, into politeness research proper.
While it has been enormously popular to compare forms and practices that
occasion politeness across cultural groups, it has been much less common for
researchers to focus on examining understandings of politeness in interactions
where the participants have different (socio–)cultural backgrounds claimed by
or attributed to them. The latter is termed intercultural politeness research,
where interactions or other forms of data are obtained when people from two
different cultural groups interact with each other (Spencer-Oatey 2008 [2000]:
4).2 Many, if not most, of these studies have focused on the ways in which
divergent practices and expectations can give rise to discomfort or even offence
in intercultural interactions. Differences in these practices are assumed to arise
from pragmatic transfer, where particular lexical items, syntactic structures,
pragmatic routines and the like used in the L1 (first language) of one (or more)
of the participants are also used in their L2 (second language). There has been
a much more limited amount of research focusing on how participants may in
fact attempt to accommodate to these diverging forms and practices or expecta-
tions of the cultural ‘other’. For instance, in recent work on understandings of
politeness in English Lingua Franca (ELF) interactions, where none of the par-
ticipants identify with English as their first language, the cross-cultural expert
Juliane House (2008) found evidence that challenges the view that intercultural
interactions inevitably give rise to perceptions of impoliteness or offence.
It is worth briefly considering why researchers have opted overwhelmingly to
undertake cross-cultural studies of politeness as opposed to studies of intercul-
tural politeness. One reason is that to date there has been no specific theorising
of intercultural politeness. All the major theories of politeness that have been
proposed have focused primarily on explicating how politeness arises within
particular cultures, and then making comparisons of these so-called polite-
ness forms and practices across cultures. This overwhelming focus on theo-
rising politeness cross-culturally is arguably what has led to the rather unfor-
tunate neglect of politeness in intercultural settings to date. Yet as Rehbein
and Fienemann (2004) have argued, politeness in intercultural interactions
involves a complex interweaving and emergence of localised, situated norma-
tive practices, not simply a transfer and possible ‘clashes’ of different sets of
norms or expectancies. Such complexity poses a challenge for current theories
of politeness, which have been developed largely for the study of politeness
cross-culturally.
Stereotypical contrasting as a discursive resource

We have so far studied cases where a participant takes a certain cultural stance,
which is either approved or refuted by others. There is, however, another
important interactional situation, namely, when a certain cultural identity is
positioned against other cultural identities in terms of politeness in order to
reinforce relationships within a network. We refer to this situation as stereo-
typical contrasting. This phenomenon operates through overgeneralising and
overhomogenising just as in the case of identification more generally, but it
represents these features in a clear contrast with others. The function of stereo-
typical contrasting is illustrated by the following case, described by Kádár in
Mills and Kádár (2011).
If one observes the way in which the Chinese describe their (in)directness, it
becomes evident that it is a rather ‘idealistic’ concept. The Chinese stereotype
their own cultural identity in different ways. The Chinese researcher Zhengdao
Ye, for instance, comments that
The rules of ‘being polite’ are so different between Chinese and Anglo-Australian
cultures that sometimes I find Aussies to be utterly impolite or sans renqingwei (human
touch/interest) from the vantage point of Chinese culture. An honest response . . . simply
leaves a Chinese with little mianzi (face). (2008: 57)
Here Ye is alluding to an ‘honest response’ as being one that is too direct. It is

interesting to note that in other contexts Chinese authors describe the speech
style of the ‘Chinese nation’ as a considerably direct one. For example, in
2007 a lengthy article was published in a rather nationalistic mainland Chinese
website with the title: ddddddddd’d” – dddddddd
d (‘The Japanese never directly say ‘no’ – [Such an] ambiguous culture is
difficult to get on with’). In this paper, the author characterises the Japanese
culture as an overtly deferential and indirect one, in contrast to the way the
Chinese are represented as preferring to be direct in communication. There is
a thought-provoking contrast between this description and that of Ye, which
demonstrates that the degree of (in)directness is an ideological judgement that
can serve the maintenance of superiority in discourses on cultural identity.
In other words, such stereotypical constrasting can function as a discursive
resource. When compared to Westerners, the supposed Chinese indirectness is
held to be a superior property, while in relation to the Japanese, the Chinese
often represent themselves as a direct culture exempt from the decadence and
social problems that are claimed to characterise the Japanese, and thus Chinese
directness is treated as the superior notion.
Although stereotypes can conflict with each other, as in the case above, these
different views provide useful materials for the researcher because they reflect
the way in which politeness in one culture is contrasted with that in another
culture. Although such differences must be treated critically, they inform the
researcher about the most dominant attributes of discourse about politeness
within a culture (see Chapter 9).
It is also pertinent to note that while stereotyping is often self-oriented, it can
also be other-oriented, as illustrated in example (9), which takes place between
the Hungarian Count Almásy and his colleagues, who are planning the details
of an excavation in the Sahara.
(9) Madox: Latitude 25, 33. Longitude 25, 16. We attempt to drive
northeast of Kofer, we’ll leave our bones in the desert.
Almásy: I disagree.
Madox: You’re Hungarian. You always disagree.
(The English Patient, 1996)
When Almásy disagrees with the others’ ideas about how to remove the exca-
vated bones, they dismiss his disagreement by labelling him a Hungarian. Hun-
garians are often stereotypically represented as people who do things differently
from others. While this form of stereotyping appears mocking, it nevertheless
can be evaluated as polite, or at least not impolite. Although it is potentially
offensive to label others in such a way, here this stereotype helps to resolve a
difficult situation: Almásy is not only a renowned academic but he also occurs
in the film as a headstrong figure. Thus, this somewhat humorous stereotyping
seems to allow a ‘face-saving’ way out for Almásy, as it dismisses his disagree-
ment on a national cultural basis, rather than on a professional basis, while at
the same time shifting the serious tone of the conversation into a humorous
frame. In this way, then, we can see that stereotyping can be invoked in dif-
ferent ways in relation to politeness, and thus it is obvious that culture is often
something that is attributed to participants rather than being a normative force
that ‘controls’ participants when it comes to politeness.
11.3 Key studies

The paper ‘Politeness and culture’ by Mills and Kádár (2011) provides a
general overview of culture and politeness. Mills and Kádár problematise the
relationship between politeness and culture, arguing that homogenising views –
such as ‘the Australians prefer camaraderie’ – are problematic because different
social groups within a ‘culture’ have different interpretations of ‘politeness’.
A complex account of culture, identity and politeness can be found in Mills’
(2003) monograph Gender and Politeness. This volume as whole, and Chapter
5 in particular, provides insight into the complexity of culturally situating
11.4 Summary 247
politeness by revisiting politeness stereotypes associated with gender, with the

aid of a discursive framework. As Mills argues, traditional views that distinguish
male and female politeness ‘cultures’, and which generally argue that females
are more polite than males, must be regarded somewhat more critically. Gender,
just as any other form of identity, is a complex one, and thus politeness can be
perceived differently by members of the same gender.
A noteworthy description of the diversity of culturally situated politeness
can be found in Okamoto (1999). In this paper, Okamoto revisits Japanese
politeness, which is often described as homogeneous and highly regulated, by
arguing that there are significant regional and social differences in the usage
of politeness forms in Japan, just as in any other culture. Thus, this study
de-exoticises claims about Japanese culture, which is often contrasted with
Western cultures as being homogeneous.
Kádár and Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini (2010) address the problematic
nature of culture, as well as the challenges posed by cross-cultural and inter-
cultural research. As Kádár and Bargiela-Chiappini argue, ‘culture’ needs to be
approached from innovative perspectives, in order for the field to depart from
orthodoxic representations of culturally situated politeness.
Another interesting approach to culturally situated politeness is offered by
Holmes, Marra and Schnurr (2008). This paper decontextualises culture by
looking at workplace culture instead of other, more traditional, cultural contexts
such as national culture. Furthermore, Holmes et al. examine the impact of
ethnicity on ‘cultural’ differences in practices of politeness.
Haugh (2010c) offers a useful overview of intercultural politeness research
to date. It also includes a critical consideration of methodological issues facing
those wishing to undertake studies of intercultural politeness, and a proposal
that intercultural research offers a potentially productive window in expanding
our theorisation of politeness more generally.
Finally, the way in which multiple understandings of politeness can arise in
intercultural settings is addressed in a thoughtful chapter by Noriko Inagaki
(2011). She draws from Gadamer’s work on understanding (what is called
‘hermeneutical phenomenology’) to argue that evaluations of politeness are
always contingent because the basis of such evaluations is constantly in a state
of flux. She illustrates these theoretical claims with an analysis of follow-
up discussions after an intercultural dinner party where one of the participants
asked a seemingly ‘rude’ question, arguing that these evaluations were mediated
through their own personal and social histories.
11.4 Summary
Although culture can be approached from an essentialist viewpoint, this chapter
has argued that culture and cultural identity are discursive phenomena. More
specifically, as identity is locally situated and intepreted, it is difficult to make

conclusive statement about culturally situated politeness. Furthermore, the bor-
derline between certain ‘cultures’ can also become rather blurred at the level of
social group. However, the construction of culturally positioned identity can be
captured through the practices of association and dissociation, which position
the individual within a given network.
The analysis of culture and politeness poses various challenges. Importantly,
it is quite difficult to remain objective when it comes to discussing politeness
vis-à-vis culture. Perhaps the most obvious way to address this problem is
to conduct a self-reflexive analysis. This means that the researcher should
reflect on her or his own folk theory of culture and politeness in a critical way,
acknowledging that any theory is likely to reflect a worldview that is rooted
in the researcher’s specific understanding of politeness, and which is inherited
from the ideologies of the relational networks to which the researcher belongs.
11.5 Exercises
1. Can you identify any stereotypical politeness practices in your nation?
Is there any difference between these practices and other ones that are
associated with your gender, ethnicity, age and other groups?
2. Can you recall cases when the media or any other sources stereotyped
usages of politeness?
3. Have you experienced instances of feeling offended in intercultural sit-
uations? If so, do you think this is the norm in intercultural interaction?
(a) Jonathan: I’m a vegetarian.
Alex: You’re a what?
Jonathan: I don’t eat meat.
Alex: Pork?
Jonathan: No . . .
Alex: Chickens!
Jonathan: No . . .
Alex: And what about the sausage?
Jonathan: No, no sausage, no meat!
Alex: What is wrong with you?
(Everything is Illuminated, 2005)
(b) ‘Still, you did get here, didn’t you, Duke?’ said Miss Putnam, smiling in
a roguish sort of way. ‘And how nice it will be for you, having somebody
11.5 Exercises 249
to talk to in your own language. I was saying to the Vicomte only just
now that, however well you speak a foreign language, it is never quite
the same.’
A somewhat strained pause followed the delivery of this dictum. For the
space of perhaps a quarter of a minute the French aristocrats stared at
one another dumbly. Here, you would have said, watching them, were
two strong, silent Frenchmen.
Mr Carlisle was the first to rally from the shock.
‘Parfaitement,’ he said.
‘Alors,’ said Packy.
‘Parbleu!’
‘Nom d’une pipe!’
There was another pause. It was as if some theme of deep interest has
been exhausted.
Packy indicated the sky, as something to which he felt the visitor’s
attention should be directed.
‘Le soleil!’
‘Mas oui!’
‘Beau!’
‘Parbleu!’ said Mr Carlisle, rather meanly falling back on old stuff.
They paused again. Packy, except for ‘O là là’ which he did not quite
know how to bring in, had now shot his bolt.
But Mr Carlisle was made of a sterner stuff. If there is much to be said
from a moral standpoint against Confidence Trickery as a profession,
there is this to be urged in its favour, looking at it from a purely
utilitarian point of view – that it undoubtedly breeds in its initiates
a certain enviable coolheadedness and enables them to behave with an
easy grace in circumstances where the layman would have been the
first to confess a bad two minutes, he was his resourceful self once
more.
‘But really, my dear fellow,’ he said, with a light laugh, ‘all this is vairy
delightful, but you must not tempt me, no. My English it is not good,
and I promise my instructeur that always I would speak it only. You
understand?’
Example (a) involves an interaction between a rather straight-laced Amer-
ican, Jonathan, and Alex, a native of the Ukraine where they are located
over dinner. Here, Alex expresses disbelief about Jonathan’s identity as
a vegetarian, which results at the end of the exchange in an impolite –
from Jonathan’s perspective – negative assessment. The scene invokes a
particular stereotype (from an American perspective), namely, that Ukraini-
ans are (1) always meat-eaters and (2) always blunt when expressing their
opinions to others. Such stereotyping is a common feature of representations

of politeness in intercultural settings.
Example (b) represents a humorous case of constructing identity through
identification. The interactants, Mr Carlisle and Packy, are in an unpleasant
situation: both of them pretended that they are native speakers of French,
and Miss Putnam, who suspects that they are lying, makes them interact in
French. First they speak to each other by using conventional phrases, but
when they run out of vocabulary, and this section is the most interesting
from an analytic perspective, the coolheaded Mr Carlisle switches to a
somewhat ‘broken’ English style, which he associates with ‘Frenchness’.
Furthermore, he, just as Hercule Poirot in example (4), intermixes English
and French lexical items, by referring to his imaginary English language
teacher as instructeur.
12 Conclusion
12.1 Politeness as social practice

If we were to ask someone what they think politeness is, they might mention
things such as remembering to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ (e.g. in many
varieties of English), using honorifics (e.g. in Japanese), or calling people
by familial titles when greeting them (e.g. in Chinese). However, it is now
widely accepted that politeness does not reside in particular linguistic forms
or behaviours, but rather in evaluations of those forms and behaviours. In
this volume, we have taken this idea a step further and proposed that polite-
ness arises through evaluations of social actions and meanings. Social actions
and meanings are recognisable to us because they draw on practices, regu-
lar or recurrent ways of formulating talk and conduct that are understood by
participants as doing and meaning certain things. These regular ways of accom-
plishing social actions and meanings in interaction are constituted as part of
what we take for granted in interacting with others. What is particular about
these sets of expectancies is that because they are the means by which we
constitute the familiar scenes of everyday life as familiar and everyday, they
are inherently moral in nature. In other words, they are open to evaluation as
good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, and, of course, polite, overpolite, not
polite, mock polite, impolite, not impolite, mock impolite and so on. Evalua-
tions of politeness are thus not idiosyncratic but rooted in a moral order. It is
in this sense that politeness can ultimately be understood as a form of social
practice.
In characterising politeness as social practice, as not only constituted through
a moral order but also as constitutive of that very same moral order, we have
presumed that evaluations of politeness implicitly invoke a host of other poten-
tial evaluations. In other words, it is difficult to analyse politeness without
considering other related evaluations with which it is inevitably interwined.
Consider, for instance, example (1), which is from the film Trains, Planes
and Automobiles (1987). The two main characters, Neal and Del, are waiting
for their plane to depart. Del has been making conversation with Neal after
realising he mistakenly stole Neal’s taxi cab earlier that day.
251
252 Conclusion
(1) Neal: Eh, look, I don’t want to be rude, but I’m not much of a
conversationalist, and I really want to finish this article, a
friend of mine wrote it, so . . .
Del: Don’t let me stand in your way, please don’t let me stand
in your way. The last thing I want to be remembered as
is an annoying blabbermouth. You know, nothing grinds
my gears worse than some chowderhead that doesn’t know
when to keep his big trap shut. If you catch me running off
with my mouth, just give me a poke on the chubbs.
(Planes, Trains and Automobiles, 1987)
Neal is attempting here, rather unsuccessfully as it turns out, to break off the
conversation with Del and get back to reading an article. This action of closing
the conversation is accomplished through proposing two possible accounts or
reasons for closing the conversation (i.e. ‘I’m not much of a conversationalist’
and ‘I really want to finish this article [that] a friend of mine wrote’) followed by
a turn-final ‘so’, which not only explicitly marks the prior assertions as reasons,
but projects that some upshot has been left unsaid. As the conversation analyst
Geoffrey Raymond (2004) points out, in projecting an ‘unstated upshot’ the
speaker is thereby anticipating some kind of response from the recipient. The
upshot here, of course, is that Del will stop trying to make conversation with
Neal. What is most interesting to note here though is that Neal, in attempting to
break off the conversation with Del, makes explicit reference to the possibility of
this action and the unstated upshot (i.e. a pragmatic meaning) being perceived
as ‘rude’ (i.e. ‘Eh, look, I don’t want to be rude’). His turn is formulated,
of course, to occasion the opposite evaluation, namely, that he is attempting
to be ‘polite’ given he is drawing from recognisable practices for doing so
(in English). Not only does this illustrate rather nicely how understandings
of politeness are tied to evaluations of social actions (i.e. the closing of a
conversation) and pragmatic meanings (i.e. the unstated upshot), but that any
evaluation of politeness inevitably invokes the possibility of other evaluations
(i.e. being rude).
The idea that politeness involves evaluations of social actions and meanings
may seem counter-intuitive for languages where there are grammaticalised mor-
phosyntactic forms that are regularly associated with politeness. In Japanese,
for instance, it is claimed that there are so-called ‘polite’ forms (such as the
desu/masu addressee honorific) that are ‘socio-pragmatically obligatory’ in par-
ticular circumstances (Ide 1989). However, more recent work examining the
use of such honorifics in interaction has painted a much more nuanced picture.
Okamoto (1999) and Cook (2006), for instance, have argued that such honorific
forms do not invariably index politeness even in prototypical situations (e.g.
conversations between teachers and students), where one might expect them to
be used. Instead, they demonstrate how the use of addressee honorifics is mixed
with so-called ‘plain’ forms (i.e. non-honorific) in order to accomplish differ-
ent actions (e.g. questioning, asserting, co-constructing an idea, backgrounding
information) and interpersonal meanings (e.g. deference, social distance, soli-
darity, personal conviction). It is these different social actions and interpersonal
meanings that are open to evaluation as polite, impolite and so forth by par-
ticipants, not the forms per se. However, it is clear that particular forms and
expressions can be regularly associated with evaluations of politeness. It is for
this reason we have characterised them as discursive resources that participants
can draw upon in interaction.
In conceptualising politeness as social practice we have suggested that some
of the key questions we need to start to consider include:
r For whom are these social actions or meanings polite?
r On what grounds are these social actions or meanings evaluated as polite?
r What discursive resources are drawn upon in recognising and evaluating
these social actions or meanings?
In first-wave approaches to politeness the answers to such questions were
relatively straightforward. It was assumed that what was identified as polite
(or not) by the analyst, according to the underlying theoretical model and with
reference to a set of particular forms and strategies, was polite. However, such
views have been subsequently challenged, initially on cross-cultural grounds,
but more recently on theoretical and methodological grounds. Throughout this
book we thus have emphasised that politeness invariably involves multiple
understandings.
In the first instance we have argued that we must make a distinction between
the understandings of users and observers. This is the basis of the distinction
between first-order and second-order understandings of politeness. However,
we have taken this further in suggesting that the way in which this distinction
is generally understood, namely, as a distinction between ‘ordinary’ and ‘sci-
entific’ understandings of politeness, masks different loci that are important
in examining user (first-order) and observer (second-order) understandings of
politeness. In the case of first-order understandings of politeness, it is vital in
many cases to make a distinction between participant versus metaparticipant
and emic versus etic understandings of politeness. The former relates to the
question of ‘for whom’ something is regarded as polite, while the latter relates
to the question of ‘on what grounds’ something is regarded as polite. In the
case of second-order understandings of politeness, we have argued that we
need to distinguish between the perspectives of analysts versus lay observers
and understandings generated through theoretical versus folk-theoretic perspec-
tives. Once again, the former relates to the question of ‘for whom’ something is
regarded as polite, while the latter relates to the question of ‘on what grounds’
something is regarded as polite. Since the questions of ‘for whom’ and ‘on
254 Conclusion
what grounds’ something is regarded as polite can be answered from the per-
spective of both users and observers, it then becomes clear that first-order and
second-order understandings are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, it has been
our contention throughout this book that a comprehensive account of polite-
ness necessarily draws on both first-order and second-order understandings.
Approaching politeness as social practice thus means appreciating there are
inevitably multiple understandings of politeness at play.
Another critical dimension of theorising politeness as social practice is that
the understandings of users and observers are inextricably grounded with ref-
erence to time and space. As we have suggested, there are multiple senses
of time relative to which understandings of politeness can be situated. Not
only can such understandings be grounded with reference to the localised
here-and-now, but also in the inevitable intertwining of understandings in the
here-and-now with those in the there-and-then, as well as understandings in the
there-and-then in their own right. We have further suggested that social space
encompasses these multiple senses of time within a ‘field’ (ba), a dynamic
relational network, which is not only imbued with its own historicity, given
that there is no space without time, but is also imbued with ongoing inter-
action and emerging relationships. Critically, while these relational networks,
and the social practices that constitute them, exist through the ongoing, net-
worked interactions of individuals, they constitute at the same time the dis-
cursive means by which individuals (and groups of individuals) define and
understand evaluative moments of politeness as social practice in the first
place.
Consider for a moment example (2), which is from the comedy Seinfeld.
Kramer is asking Jerry whether he thanked an acquaintance, Alec Berg, for
giving them tickets to the ice hockey game they all went to the previous night.
(2) Kramer: Did you call Alec Berg and thank him for the hockey
tickets?
Jerry: No.
Kramer: Oh, Jerry, what are you waiting for?
Jerry: What do I gotta call him for? I thanked him five times
when he gave them to me, how many times do I gotta
thank him?
Kramer: Oh, no no no, you gotta call him the next day, it’s com-
mon courtesy.
Jerry: No, I don’t believe in it. I’m taking a stand against all
this over thanking.
Kramer: Jerry, good manners are the glue of society.
Jerry: Hey, if I knew I had to give him eight million ‘thank
you’s, I wouldn’t have taken the tickets in the first place.
Kramer: Alright, you know what this is gonna do? He’s gonna be
upset because you didn’t call him and we’re not gonna
get those tickets for Friday night.
Jerry: Ah, you’re out of your mind.
(‘The face painter’, Seinfeld, Season 6, Episode 23, 1995)
This excerpt focuses on the question of whether Jerry should call up Alec to
thank him for the tickets the day after watching the game. Jerry’s position is that
he already thanked Alec multiple times in their interaction when Alec made the
initial offer of the tickets. He claims that to thank Alec yet again would be ‘over
thanking’. Kramer’s stance, however, is that a ‘day-after thank you’ would be
expected by Alec, and thus he is likely to be ‘upset’ if he does not get this call
from Jerry. He explicitly invokes the moral order in claiming that making such
a call constitutes ‘common courtesy’ or ‘good manners’, and casting these as
‘the glue of society’. In other words, according to Kramer it is ‘polite’ to make
‘day-after thank you’ call to express appreciation, and thus Alec is likely to
take offence or think it is ‘not polite’ or even ‘impolite’ if he does not receive
the call, while Jerry considers making this call ‘over polite’.
It is worth noting, however, that while Jerry was a participant in the prior
interaction where he expressed strong, perhaps even deferential, appreciation
for the tickets by thanking Alec multiple times (‘Gee thanks! Thanks a lot!’,
‘thanks again’, ‘Really, thank you’) and through positive assessments (‘I’d love
to’), Kramer was not present, and only received a second-hand report about the
interaction from Jerry. The way in which a ‘day-after thank you’ is evaluated as
‘polite’ (by Kramer) or ‘over polite’ (by Jerry) thus arguably depends, in part,
on their distinct relational histories with Alec. In other words, an evaluative
moment of politeness in the here-and-now is interlinked with evaluations in the
there-and-then of prior interactions. Evaluations of politeness must therefore
be situated relative to both time and relational histories.
Kramer, on the other hand, invokes the moral order, as we have mentioned,
thereby situating this evaluation in the broader ‘field’ through which this moral
order is constituted by those who identify themselves as members. In example
(3), a subsequent scene, Kramer finds out that Alec is indeed quite likely upset
as he ‘blanked’ Jerry when they next met, and has not offered any more tickets.
Kramer berates Jerry for this, and then demands that Jerry make the ‘day-after
thank you’ call.
(3) Kramer: I want you to get on this phone and give him his ‘thank
you’!
Jerry: No. No, I can’t!
Kramer: Jerry, this is the way society functions. Aren’t you a part
of society? Because if you don’t want to be a part of
256 Conclusion
society, Jerry, why don’t you just get in your car and
move to the East Side!
(‘The face painter’, Seinfeld, Season 6, Episode 23, 1995)
When Jerry refuses to do so, he is cast as an outsider by Kramer, someone who

is not ‘part of society’. Kramer is also claiming that society itself is created
through such ‘common courtesies’ or ‘good manners.’ In other words, it is
through the ‘unseen but noticed’ sets of expectancies that constitute the moral
order that we can claim an emic or insider understanding of politeness. It is
thus our contention that to unpack the multiple possible understandings that
can arise in interaction, they must be situated with reference to both time and
social space.
In situating understandings of politeness in time and social space, we have
attempted in the course of this book to show the multiple temporal and spatial
loci in which these understandings can be positioned. From the perspective of
time, we have proposed that politeness can involve localised participant under-
standings that emerge within interaction, recurrent participant understandings
that arise across interactions, or representations of participant understandings
imbued with historicity interlinking the here-and-now with the there-and-then,
as well as the there-and-then in its own right. In relation to social space,
we have suggested that politeness can involve emic/etic understandings dis-
tributed across social networks, subjective/intersubjective understandings dis-
tributed across individuals, and understandings situated relative to identities
and cultures. We have linked these understandings to particular disciplines and
methodologies in order to show concrete ways in which such understandings
might be analysed. However, we hope it has also become clear that we see all
of these understandings as inextricably interlinked within the broader ‘field’
(ba) within which politeness as social practice is reflexively constituted, but of
which politeness as social practice is also reflexively constitutive.
12.2 Looking forward

Our aim in this book has been not only to overview politeness research to date,
but also to map new developments in politeness research, in order to enable
readers to navigate an increasingly complex theoretical landscape. We have thus
focused on concepts rather than promoting or discussing merits of particular
theories. In doing so we have highlighted the many conceptual interconnections,
which are not always well recognised, between different areas of the field
of politeness research. We have proposed a framework in which to locate
these various conceptualisations that allows us to see how different approaches
compare with others, and thus to see how one’s research relates to other parts of
the field. Our aim has thus ultimately not been to prescribe a particular theory,
12.2 Looking forward 257
given the obviously multifaceted and complex nature of politeness, but to

enable those undertaking work in politeness to make informed decisions about
choosing theories, data types, methodologies and analytical approaches that are
congruent with the research questions one has. What we are suggesting, then,
is that politeness researchers embrace multiple loci of understanding, multiple
methodologies and multiple data types in order to move the field forward.
Of course we are not claiming to be completely unbiased in our presentation.
In large part we have been emphasising a discursive-interactional approach
to the analysis of politeness here. A discursive-interactional approach, as you
will have seen, highlights the variable and contested, yet simultaneously taken-
for-granted and unseen-unless-noticed qualities of politeness. We take as our
founding assumption in theorising that there are inevitably multiple understand-
ings of politeness. Yet we acknowledge without reservation that a discursive-
interactional approach leaves open important questions in the field. It remains
to be seen, for instance, how such an approach might impact on the natural
tendency in the social sciences to aim to generalise and quantify, particularly
given such an undertaking is much more complex than is often recognised.
Our claim, of course, is that a convincing theory of politeness, whatever shape
it might ultimately take, must take into account multiple perspectives. Our
suggestion is that these understandings be clearly rooted in the various first-
order and second-order loci of understanding we have outlined here, as well
as rooted in multiple methodologies and approaches that investigating these
multiple understandings inevitably entails. In this way, we can reach clearly
positioned findings that build towards a more comprehensive whole, rather than
generating scattered and unrelated findings that leave the field in an endless
cycle of proposal and critique, although we acknowledge the latter still has
an important role to play. In a sense, then, what we are calling for are self-
reflexive analysts in politeness research, no matter what approach or theory
they ultimately employ.
There is clearly much more to be done in politeness research. Given the
scope of the field we have only been able to introduce small parts of it, and
we must admit that there is much we have not able to give full justice to in
our discussion here. However, the point here has been not to summarise all
the findings in the field, but rather to develop a roadmap by which we might
more successfully navigate, and thereby more clearly identify those areas which
have been neglected or are in need of further research. In the course of this book
we have alluded to just some of these, including the ongoing problem of how we
can quantify something as complex as politeness without generating analytical
artifacts that make little sense to participants themselves; how we can address
the relative neglect of emotivity and multimodal dimensions of politeness given
the apparent overemphasis on rationality and linguistic dimensions of politeness
to date; and how we might shift politeness research away from its over-reliance
258 Conclusion
on face as an explanatory metaphor to consider other alternative metaphors

that could potentially enrich the field. Ultimately, then, we are suggesting
that the field move forward in ways that avoid the ongoing bleaching out of
emic perspectives that has plagued the field to date, yet nevertheless retains
a coherent overall focus that does not splinter into disparate perspectives that
cannot be reconciled. The framework developed here offers, we hope, a way
forward in pursuit of an ever more comprehensive and nuanced understanding
of politeness.
Notes
2 T H E RO OT S O F P O L I T E N E S S R E S E A R C H
1 It was, in fact, initially published in a shorter form in 1978 as part of an edited
book, but most references to Brown and Levinson’s theory are generally to the book
published in 1987.
2 Notably, the ‘socially bound’ application of honorifics and formal forms, which
Ide defined as ‘discernment,’ is not limited to Japanese and other ‘honorific-rich’
languages such as Korean. For example, discernment is likely to step on the stage in
hierarchical settings with strong power inequalities. It is enough only to think of a
courtroom where it is likely that a defendant uses predetermined forms of politeness
when interacting with the judge. However, what makes languages such as Japanese
special is that honorific inflection is part of the grammar. That is, errors in the use of
honorifics do not just have interpersonal implications but also grammatical ones. For
this reason it is claimed that communal values are ‘codified’ both pragmatically and
grammatically by Ide (1989).
3 See Walkers (1979).
4 Of course this is a potential advantage if one’s explicit aim is to elicit perceptions of
normative usage.
5 ‘Anglo-English’ is a technical term borrowed from Wierzbicka (2006: 5) who, cit-
ing from Kachru’s (1985, 1992) and Crystal’s (2003) works notes that ‘While there
are many ‘Englishes’ around the world . . . there is also an ‘Anglo’ English – an
English of the ‘inner circle’ . . . including ‘the traditional bases of English, where
it is the primary language: . . . the USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand.’ We argue that certain conventional relational phenomena such as indirect
requests are typical Anglo-English phenomena, in the sense that they do not repre-
sent normative relational practices in certain non-Anglo-English countries such as
Singapore.
3 RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN POLITENESS RESEARCH

1 A detailed analysis of this example can be found in Mills and Kádár (2011).
4 P O L I T E N E S S A S S O C I A L P R AC T I C E
1 As Chapter 9 will illustrate, this manifests itself in different social ‘standards’ of
politeness.
259
260 Notes to pages 60–119
2 Haugh (2013c) discusses in more detail how the approach to politeness as social
practice outlined in this chapter both builds on previous work by Eelen (2001) and
Watts (2003), but also differs from it in critical ways.
3 We will introduce various different analogous terms for politeness in other languages
in Chapter 9.
4 A simplified form of transcription is employed here where the square brackets repre-
sent overlapping speech, while the numbers on the left refer to the turn of talk in the
overall recording. We will introduce more detailed forms of transcribing interaction
in Chapter 6. This example is used with permission from Toby Richards.
5 I-wonder-prefacing is not restricted to requests, however, as it can also be used
in displaying contingency and low entitlement in issuing invitations. For exam-
ple, ‘I was wondering if you fancy going to Ming’s tomorrow evening’ (BNC:
PS05X).
5 U N D E R S TA N D I N G S O F P O L I T E N E S S
1 Cf. an earlier version of this framework in Haugh (2012a).
2 Source: www.zmemusic.com/feature/wednesday-smilejerker/wednesday-smilejerker-
bonos-an-evil-bastard/.
3 Our point here is that the importance of a given evaluation is determined partly by
the participation status of the evaluator. For example, let us suppose that Pamsplace7
in example (5) was in fact uttering ‘your so cruel’ during the concert itself. While
she could say this to her friend in the crowd, this evaluation would not count as
an influential one in terms of the broader relational network because very likely
nobody else would hear it. A posting, however, is different, as it is open to anyone
via the Web, and so Pamsplace7’s evaluation could become a relatively influential
one.
4 Cf. the ‘analysis of interaction in terms of conceptual schemes and categories regarded
as meaningful and appropriate by native members of the “culture” being studied’ (Lett
1990: 130).
5 Both the Australian and Taiwanese lay observers rated the apology using the
same descriptors in English given the interaction they were rating was in English
and the aim was to tap into intercultural rather than cross-cultural ratings of im/
politeness.
6 A full copy of the conversation can be found in Chang and Haugh (2011a).
7 See also Krippendorff (1989: 11–36).
6 P O L I T E N E S S I N I N T E R AC T I O N
1 The treatment of politeness as ‘the velvet glove on the iron fist’ can be traced to work
on politeness in eighteenth-century Britain by Sell (1992) and Watts (1992).
2 The conventions, following standard Conversation Analytic practice, are listed in the
order they appear in the transcript: ‘?’ rising intonation; ‘[]’ overlapping talk; ‘,’
continuing intonation; ‘-’ cutoff speech; ‘> <’ markedly faster pace; ‘()’ unintel-
ligible talk; ‘.’ utterance final intonation; ‘(())’ descriptions of action; ‘underlined’
emphasis/stress; ‘::’ elongated sound; ‘=’ latched talk.
Notes to pages 143–225 261
7 P O L I T E N E S S , C O N V E N T I O N A N D R I T UA L I T Y
1 As far as we are aware, no historical pragmatic research has been conducted on the
history of this form, and the claim here is based on some interviews with Hungarian
language users. This form occurs briefly in a recent study by Bodor and Barcza
(2011).
2 In French there are masculine and feminine inflections, and it is considered gram-
matically incorrect for males to use female inflection, and vice-versa.
3 Such rituals are formed by an individual, and they primarily serve the function of
relating the individual to an imaginary entity. Thus, these rituals are codified in the
closed and sacred individual world, and so they are covert ones, which means that they
tend to be invisible for, and often intentionally hidden from, the external observer.
While there are cases when covert rituals are revealed to the public, even in such
cases they tend to be regarded as the ‘property’ of the individual. But usually they
remain covert because they evoke shame, due to which the individual is likely to hide
them.
8 P O L I T E N E S S A N D H I S T O RY
1 In historical China, students became officials by passing examinations of different
degrees.
2 Importantly, however, the self-focused display of one’s rank does not necessarily
imply that it cannot express politeness towards the other. For example, if two high-
ranking persons interact in a self-displaying way, the display of ranks can imply that
they acknowledge each other’s social status.
3 See: www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20120813/14074420011/people-
who-pay-service-are-lot-nicer-than-those-who-dont.shtml
9 P O L I T E N E S S A N D M E TA P R AG M AT I C S
1 The term discourse is thus being used here in a technical sense rather than the ordinary
sense of written or spoken communication.
2 See Haugh (2004, 2007b) for a more detailed explanation of emic understandings of
‘politeness’ evaluators in Japanese.
3 It is worth noting that the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) developed by
Wierzbicka (2003) and Goddard (2006) may prove useful in representing these dif-
ferent emic understandings. However, given work in this direction has only just begun
(Waters 2012; Ye 2004), further consideration of this possibility lies outside the scope
of this book.
4 However, it is worth noting that because impolite is a low frequency term associated
with formal contexts, any attempt to construct an analytical distinction based on these
two terms is fraught with ontological difficulties (Bousfield 2010; Terkourafi 2008).
1 0 P O L I T E N E S S , C O G N I T I O N A N D E M OT I O N
1 In the present transcription @ denotes laughter, ↑ describes high pitch, (.) a turn
taking point, and > increased speed.
262 Notes to pages 142–4
1 1 C U LT U R E , I D E N T I T Y A N D P O L I T E N E S S
1 See Miller (2004) for more details.
2 It is worth noting that the two terms ‘cross-cultural’ and ‘intercultural’ are sometimes
used interchangeably. We are maintaining this distinction, however, consistent with
Spencer-Oatey (2008[2000]) and Kecskés (2004).
Glossary
Accountability: The way in which a person (or group of persons) is taken to

be committed to or (to varying degrees) responsible for the real-world
consequences of social actions and meanings that are attributed to them.
Anticipating: Presumptive forms of reasoning whereby inferences are
grounded in experiential and associative links.
Association: Aligning with or taking on a certain identity (or set of identities)
in situated interaction. Realised through what Bucholtz (1999) terms
‘positive identity practices’ (cf. ‘dissociation’).
Attention: Attention or attending involves selectively focusing on particular
elements of a situated context (including physical objects, persons, rela-
tionships, intentional mental state-processes and so on) out of the poten-
tially infinite number of things we could be directing our attention towards.
The degree of focus ranges from foregrounding through to backgrounding
particular objects or elements of the situated context.
Beliefs: A specific kind of directed mental state-process which encompasses
a person’s (firmly held) assumptions or convictions about what is true.
Beliefs relevant to evaluations of (im)politeness include beliefs about what
behaviour is expected in particular contexts (see also ‘intentionality’).
Categorisation: The casting of persons and relationships into commonsense or
ordinary knowledge classes or groups, based on which we make inferences
about those persons and how we expect them to behave in context of those
relationships.
Communicative intention: An intention to communicate certain content to the
audience that is fulfilled by its very recognition. It is generally associated
with the interpretation of a particular utterance.
Community of practice: A group of people that develops its own set of norms
and practices through joint engagement in an activity or task. It is regarded
as a key unit of analysis in discursive politeness research (see ‘units of
analysis’).
Comparability: Degree to which sets of data or analyses can be regarded as
equivalent. Examination of historical politeness phenomena indicates that
it is often difficult to compare contemporary and historical data.
263
264 Glossary
Computer-mediated communication (CMC): Interaction or discourse that is

mediated through various forms of technology, such as email, SMS, social
networking and blogs.
Conformance: Adapting to or meeting the expectations of the members of a
particular relational network.
Contested: Refers to the way in which a particular understanding of politeness
may be disputed or challenged by other participants in that interaction or
by those observing it. Also referred to as ‘argumentativity’.
Continuity: The degree to which the development of politeness practices in a
particular society or relational group occurs more gradually, or in a more
punctuated or radical manner.
Convention: Routinised social practice which specifically regulates social
interaction; those forms of recurrent schematic behaviour which follow
patterns associated with understandings of politeness, as well as humour,
sarcasm and so on, are defined as conventional.
Conventionalisation: The process through which a form recurs until what it
is taken to mean becomes accepted as its default meaning (i.e. what it is
taken to mean unless otherwise indicated).
Cooperative Principle (CP): The claim that speakers can make available what
they are meaning, although not necessarily saying, in a principled way, by
breaching ‘normative’ expectations about communication.
Creativity: Creativity is a fundamental characteristic of politeness, which is
present even in ritual in spite of its schematic nature.
Cross-cultural politeness: Where researchers compare culture-specific under-
standings of politeness by examining interactions or other forms of data
from one cultural group that are obtained independently of another cultural
group (cf. ‘intercultural politeness’).
Culture-specificity: The degree to which an understanding or conceptualisa-
tion of a particular social or interpersonal phenomenon can be regarded
as limited to a particular cultural group. In politeness research it refers
to those scholars who have an interest in emic concepts and ‘insider’
perceptions of linguistic politeness, who have generally refuted claims to
universality in first-wave approaches to politeness (see ‘emic’ and ‘first-
wave approaches’).
Discourse completion task/test (DCT): A method of data gathering where
normative responses are elicited through a one-sided situational role play
designed by the researcher (see ‘elicited data’).
Discursive resource: A linguistic form or practice (or set of forms and prac-
tices) that can be drawn upon in indexing a particular interpersonal stance
or evaluation, and which is often associated with the accomplishment of
a particular goal or agenda in interaction.
Glossary 265
Discursive turn: The methodological shift towards examining politeness situ-

ated in discourse and interaction, which is generally associated with the
post-2000 turn in politeness theorisation.
Dissociation: Distancing from or rejecting a certain identity (or set of identi-
ties) in situated interaction. Realised through what Bucholtz (1999) terms
‘negative identity practices’ (cf. ‘association’).
Elicited data: Discourse or interaction that is prompted through the interven-
tion of the researcher.
Emergent: Refers to an understanding that cannot be traced back to a single
participant without remainder because it is mutually interdependent on
the interlinked understandings of two or more participants.
Emic: An understanding of a member or cultural insider (cf. ‘etic’).
Emotive actions and reactions: Where an understanding or usage of polite-
ness is (at least partly) influenced by one’s emotion rather than rational
reasoning.
Emotive value: The degree to which an evaluation of politeness evokes an
emotive action or reaction.
Emotively invested: Refers to the way in which politeness practices tend to be
inherently emotive rather than purely rational or strategic in nature.
Epistemology. The word epistemology comes from the Greek ἐπιστήμη
(epistēmē) and λόγος (logos), and literally means ‘the study of know-
ing’. An epistemological perspective on politeness involves the question
of how we look at the world and make sense of it.
Essentialism: The claim that politeness operates in set ways in a particular cul-
ture. It most often leads to binaries, i.e. in one culture politeness operates
in form x, and in another culture it operates in form y.
Ethos: The set of moral beliefs and values of a particular relational or social
network. The ethos of social networks is what grounds the emotive value
of politeness (see ‘emotive value’).
Etic: An understanding of a non-member or cultural outsider (cf. ‘emic’).
Evaluators: Descriptive metalanguage used by members to conceptualise their
social world (see ‘metalanguage’).
Expectations: What is anticipated or taken for granted by members of a rela-
tional or social network in interpreting the behaviour of participants.
Face: Interpretations of persons-in-relationships as well as relationships-in-
interaction by participants for which those participants can be held
accountable. According to Brown and Levinson (1987, the most influen-
tial first-wave theory of linguistic politeness), the notion of face consists
of two specific kinds of desires (‘face-wants’) attributed by interactants
to one another: the desire to be unimpeded in one’s actions (negative
face), and the desire to be approved of (positive face) (see also ‘negative
266 Glossary
politeness’ and ‘positive politeness’). First-wave approaches claimed that

politeness is realised through facework, but this notion has been challenged
in post-2000 politeness research.
Facework: The actions taken by a person to make whatever he is doing consis-
tent with face (see also ‘face’). In Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model,
facework is treated as essentially synonymous with politeness.
Field: A dynamic relational network, which is not only imbued with its own
historicity, given that there is no space without time, but is also imbued with
ongoing interaction and emerging relationships. It is a concept adopted
from the term ba in Japanese (or chang in Chinese).
First-order politeness: An understanding of politeness that is grounded in
the interpretations (participant versus metaparticipant) and conceptuali-
sations (emic versus etic) of users (cf. ‘second-order politeness’).
First-wave approaches: A collective term for theories of politeness, which
were developed before the post-2000 discursive turn and which attempt
to model politeness at an abstract, theoretical level.
Folk-theoretic: Cultural accounts of interpersonal phenomena that are devel-
oped and shared amongst ordinary users of a language.
Footing: The four distinct sets of roles and responsibilities that can be occu-
pied by a speaker according to Goffman: animator (the person producing
the talk), author (the person designing the talk), principal (the person
responsible for the talk) and figure (the person portrayed in the talk).
Speaker footings are complemented by recipient footings: (meta)recipient
(the person or persons hearing or observing the talk), interpreter (the per-
son or persons interpreting and evaluating the talk), accounter (the person
or persons holding the principal accountable for that talk), and target (a
co-present person or set of persons portrayed in the talk).
Form: A meaningful unit of language, such as a morpheme, word, phrase or
sentence. A focus on politeness forms entails an analysis of the linguistic
structures by which politeness is conventionally accomplished.
Here-and-now: Refers to the way in which particular social actions and mean-
ings are evaluated vis-à-vis politeness by participants in the very moment
in which they arise.
Higher order intentions: The prospective or future-directed goals of partici-
pants, including the accomplishment of particular social actions, activity
types and the like, which are generally, although not always, associated
with longer stretches of discourse.
Historical politeness: Where politeness researchers examine politeness situ-
ated in the there-and-then in its own right. Historical politeness research
has stirred interest in post-2000 politeness research due its explanatory
nature: the examination of diachronically situated politeness can explain
certain peculiarities of contemporary politeness usage, and as such it helps
Glossary 267
researchers to critically revisit certain prescriptive assumptions which are

constrained by contemporary understandings of linguistic politeness.
Historicity: Refers to the way in which all actions (and things) in the world
have their own place and time, and so every action is part of history; the
way in which we see the world, also in terms of politeness, is thus in this
sense always historically situated.
Identification practices: Processes by which identities are projected and
attributed, negotiated and contested in interaction.
Identity: Where a person or group of persons is cast into a category with asso-
ciated characteristics or features. Identities can be personal, relationship
or group-related.
Indexicality: Refers to the way in which linguistic forms and practices can
point to a state of affairs, in particular, to indicate particular stances or
worldviews.
Incrementality: Refers to the way in which speakers adjust or modify their
talk in the light of how the progressive uttering of units of talk is received
by other participants.
Indirectness: As an analyst’s category, indirectness refers to the relationship
between two or more forms and functions. In speech act theory, it points
to instances where a particular speech act is not achieved through its
‘base’ sentence type (e.g. a request achieved through an interrogative or
declarative rather than an imperative form). As a participant’s category,
indirectness refers to instances where it is not entirely clear which speech
act the speaker is projecting (i.e. illocutionary opacity), or the content of
that speech act is not made entirely clear (i.e. propositional opacity), or to
whom the speech act is directed is not made entirely clear (i.e. opacity of
target) (see also ‘speech act’).
Inference: Refers either to some kind of conclusion or understanding reached
on the basis of evidence and reasoning, or to the process of reaching such
a conclusion.
Institutional discourse: Talk or interaction that is subject to particular func-
tional or context-specific influences and specific practices and conven-
tions. It includes interaction and discourse that arises in business work-
places, courtrooms, and classrooms through to broadcast interviews and
parliamentary debates. It is generally contrasted with mundane or non-
institutional discourse (e.g. conversations amongst family and friends). In
politeness research, it is often associated with the study of the relationship
between politeness and power.
Intention: A specific kind of directed mental-state process which encompasses
a person’s plans or goals.
Intentionality: The assumed property of social actions and meanings that are
occasioned through linguistic forms and practices: that they have an object
268 Glossary
(i.e. they are directed at something). Intentionality is also a property of

mental state-processes such as beliefs, intentions and desires.
Interactional multimodality: The way in which multiple modes can be drawn
upon in forming understandings of politeness in interaction. A mode refers
to the different ways in which interaction can be accomplished, including
what is said (linguistic or verbal mode), how it is said (paralinguistic
mode), facial expressions, gaze, gesture, body orientation and movement
and so on. Multimodality in CMC research also refers to the various
modes drawn upon in technology-mediated interactions, including the
spoken mode, text-based mode, graphical mode and so on.
Intercultural politeness: Where researchers focus on examining understand-
ings of politeness in interactions in which the participants have different
(socio)cultural backgrounds claimed by or attributed to them.
Intersubjectivity: The way in which we interpret or understand the percep-
tions, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, desires of others, and in some cases
reach agreement or a common understanding about them.
Interview: A method of data collection, by means of which the analyst can
elicit metapragmatic information from the informant by requesting that
the informant comment on a certain politeness-related topic (see also
‘elicited data’).
Languaculture: A term for a language and the attendant patterns of usage and
associated behaviour and habits, as well as the underlying worldviews and
values of its users.
Meaning representation: A reflexively intentional mental state-process (e.g.
a belief, intention, desire, attitude) that is occasioned by talk or conduct
on the part of a participant.
Member: A person who is recognised as affiliated with a particular social
or relational network by other persons in that network. In relation to
politeness, this refers to those persons who discursively maintain, change
and challenge the moral order that underpins evaluative moments of
politeness.
Metacognitive awareness: Involves reflexive presentations of cognitively
grounded states, such as attitudes, expectations and so on, through dis-
course or pragmatic markers. In other words, linguistic forms through
which participants index a particular cognitive state.
Metacommunication: Involves communication by participants about commu-
nicative events in which they themselves have been involved.
Metacommunicative awareness: Refers to reflexive interpretations and eval-
uations of social actions and meanings by participants. In other words,
linguistic forms and expressions through which participants index a par-
ticular interpretation or evaluation of a social action or meaning.
Glossary 269
Metadiscourse: Refers to talk by lay observers about how people should behave
more generally, rather than in reference to particular situated, local inter-
actions. These are also sometimes called ‘social discourses’.
Metadiscursive awareness: Metadiscursive awareness refers to reflexive
social discourses on politeness that are constituted (and contested) at a
societal or cultural level.
Metalanguage: Language which focuses on language itself.
Metalinguistic awareness: Involves reflexive representations of evaluations
of politeness, impoliteness and so on that are either tied to particular
interactions, or behaviours more generally.
Metaparticipants: People whose evaluations of politeness arise through vicar-
iously taking part in the interaction by viewing it on television or on the
internet, for instance.
Metapragmatic awareness: A reflexive form of awareness about how lan-
guage is used and what particular usages can index, which is drawn upon
by both participants and observers in interpreting and evaluating social
actions and meanings.
Metapragmatics: The study of awareness on the part of ordinary or lay parti-
cipants and observers about the ways in which they use language to interact
and communicate with others.
Mimesis: A term from the anthropological literature which refers to the way in
which a person who engages in a ritual is undertaking a performance.
Moral order: The set of expected, background features of everyday scenes that
members of a sociocultural group or relational network ‘take for granted’.
These seen but unnoticed features are imbued with morality (i.e. they are
open to evaluation as appropriate/inappropriate, good/bad, polite/impolite)
because they are familiar to those members through being sustained (and
over time changed) by the practices of those members.
Multimodality: A collective name for the different modalities by means of
which politeness is communicated (see also ‘interactional multimodality’).
Naturally occurring data: Language data that arises through spontaneous
interaction amongst participants.
Negative politeness: An analyst’s category used to refer to strategies that are
directed at the hearer’s negative face-wants, for instance, when the speaker
avoids presuming, coercing and personalising, and emphasises the hearer’s
status (see ‘face’).
Normative frame of reference: The assumption on the part of members that
others from the same (perceived) social group would evaluate a person or
relationship in the same way.
Observer: A person who notices and thinks about evaluative moments through
which politeness arises. Observers include both lay observers and analysts.
270 Glossary
Observer coding: An approach to analysis where a system for categorising is

established in advance on the basis of theory or research, and the analyst
decides which category applies to each utterance or behaviour.
Ontology: The word ontology comes from the Greek words ὄντος (óntos) and
λόγος (logos) and literally means ‘the study of that which is’. An onto-
logical perspective involves one’s stance on whether there is such a thing
as politeness in the first place in the sense of it forming part of our social
reality, or being simply a reification of the perceptions of lay observers.
Orders of indexicality: This refers to the idea that sets of expectancies in the
moral order are reflexively layered. In other words, the set of expectations
invoked in a particular interaction is more often than not dependent on
expectations assumed to hold across interactions over time in a particular
social or relational network.
Paralinguistic features: Refers more broadly to non-lexical elements of
speech, including laughter, breathing, cries and so on (cf. interactional
multimodality).
Participant: A person who takes part in interaction. In relation to politeness,
this refers to those persons who are themselves involved in the evaluative
moments through which politeness arises.
Person: A person is an individual as conceptualised by other members in a
social environment, and is thus an inherently socially constructed notion.
What makes interpersonal evaluations interpersonal in the first instance is
that they are directed at persons (see also ‘relationships’).
Positive politeness: An analyst’s category used to refer to strategies that are
directed at the hearer’s positive face wants, for instance, when the speaker
claims common ground with the hearer, conveys that they are co-operators,
and when he fulfils a want of the hearer and so on (see ‘face’).
Possible understandings: Where participants hold to multiple incipient lines
of understanding of social action and meaning in a particular interaction
until such time that one or more of these incipient lines of understanding
are confirmed or disconfirmed in subsequent talk.
Post-recording interviews: The method of conducting interviews with the par-
ticipants in an interaction after that given interaction, in order to tap into
their states of mind and claimed interpretations and evaluations during
those interactions.
Pragmatic meaning: A meaning representation (encompassing both what is
said and what is implied) that is recognised by participants and thus
for which participants are routinely held accountable (see also ‘meaning
representation’; cf. ‘social action’).
Preference: A technical term from the field of conversation analysis, which
refers to the non-equivalent ordering of actions in interaction. Next turns
Glossary 271
can be marked as preferred or dispreferred relative to prior turns in sys-

tematic ways by participants.
Prosody: Refers to aspects of the delivery of talk, including timing, loudness,
accent, pitch and voice quality.
Punctuated: A view of politeness as involving a discrete, independent evalua-
tive moment on the part of either the speaker or the hearer.
Questionnaires/surveys: A method of data collection where responses or eval-
uations are aggregated across a group of informants. It can be used to
tap into evaluations by lay observers of a particular interaction vis-à-vis
politeness (see ‘elicited data’).
Ratify: To confirm or support the stance or identity claim of another participant.
Rationality: Refers to decision-making based on logical reasoning rather than
being influenced by emotion. In the Brown and Levinson (1987) frame-
work, it is claimed that whenever a certain form of politeness is chosen to
address the hearer’s face needs (see ‘face’), the speaker makes a rational
choice as he observes the ‘face-wants’ of the hearer.
Recurrence: Where a certain linguistic form or behaviour becomes readily
recognisable for a group of people as it is used again and again over time
and across interactions within that relational network, and thereby forms
a kind of social practice.
Recursive: Where an interpretation or evaluation reoccurs or is repeated in a
self-similar way over time and across social spaces.
Reflexivity: Where one level of interpretation or analysis is interdependently
related to another.
Reified: Where a social phenomenon noted by lay observers is treated as if it
has an objective reality in and of itself.
Relational history: The history between and across members of a given rela-
tional network. In the case of conventions, this term refers to the way in
which members of the given network recurrently, and then, through con-
ventionalisation, interact with each other in ways that are both constrained
and afforded by those schemata.
Relational network: Refers to sets of social links between persons that form
the basis of an identifiable group to those persons who constitute that
network. Relational networks range from a group of families and friends,
to a localised community of practice, through to a larger much more diffuse
societal or cultural group.
Relational shift: The increasing focus on interpersonal relationships in post-
2000 politeness research.
Relationship: Refers to the establishment and maintenance of social connec-
tion between two or more otherwise separate individuals. What makes
interpersonal evaluations interpersonal in the first instance is that they are
directed at relationships (see also ‘persons’).
272 Glossary
Relativity: The claim that norms of politeness are always dependent on both
time and space. Relativity is particularly salient in historical settings (see
‘time’ and ‘space’).
Representation: Refers to the way in which a social or interpersonal phe-
nomenon is described and presented to others. Historical texts are often
prone to representing politeness in a biased way.
Ritual: A formalised/schematic, conventionalised and recurrent act, which is
relationship forcing, i.e. by operating it reinforces/transforms in-group
relationships. Ritual is realised as an embedded (mini-)performance
(mimesis), and this performance is bound to relational history (and related
ethos), or historicity in general (and related social ethos).
Ritual moment: Where the enactment of a ritual creates a temporary destruc-
tion of awareness of the wider meaningful relations of one’s individuality
and the reduction of the self to the immediate physical experience of the
here-and-now.
Ritualisation: Where a convention becomes a ritual because it is recognisibly
performed.
Routine: Refers to the way in which a great deal of our everyday activities
is recurrent, and so these activities, including certain polite actions and
reactions, are held to occur as a matter of course in interaction.
Schemata: Pre-existing patterns of thought or behaviour that are used in recur-
rent ways, and which are readily recognisable to members.
Second-order politeness: An understanding of politeness grounded in the
interpretations (lay versus analyst) and conceptualisations (folk-theoretic
versus theoretical) of observers (cf. ‘first-order politeness’).
Self-reflexive: Where the researcher reflects on his or her own folk theory of
culture and politeness in a critical way, acknowledging that any theory
is likely to reflect a worldview that is rooted in the researcher’s specific
understanding of politeness, and which is inherited from the ideologies of
the relational networks to which the researcher belongs.
Semantic field: A set of related words that denote a way of representing an
aspect of a presumed social reality.
Sequentiality: Refers to the way in which current turns or utterances are always
understood relative to prior and subsequent talk, particularly talk that is
contiguous (i.e. immediately prior to or subsequent to the current utterance
or turn).
Social action: Where talk or conduct is recognised by participants as doing
something that is real-world consequential for those participants, and
thus something for which participants are routinely held accountable (cf.
‘pragmatic meaning’).
Social practice: A recurrent way of occasioning a particular set of inter-related
social actions, pragmatic meanings and interpersonal evaluations that is
Glossary 273
both imbued with historicity and is situated within a particular social or

relational network (see also ‘time’ and ‘space’).
Space: Social space refers to the relationship between the individual and the
society in which he or she lives. It encompasses a dynamic relational
network, which is imbued not only with historicity but also with ongoing
interaction and emerging relationships. Social space ranges from the sub-
jective understandings of the individuals that comprise a social space (e.g.
social cognition) through to the intersubjective understandings that form
across individuals in that social space (e.g. culture).
Speech act: Refers to the performative function of language – the way in
which language is used to do things like requesting, offering, and inviting,
rather than simply being a means of delivering information (cf. ‘social
action’).
Stereotypical contrasting: When a certain cultural identity is positioned
against other cultural identities in terms of politeness in order to rein-
force relationships within a network.
Strategy: A plan or series of moves for obtaining a specific goal or result. In
Brown and Levinson’s (1987) approach, a focus on politeness strategies
presumes that speakers have particular goals in mind, and employ rationale
means-to-ends reasoning to formulate a series of moves in order to achieve
that goal in a way that is considered ‘polite’, and that hearers must employ
ends-to-means reasoning in order to figure out what that goal might be, as
well as recognising the speaker’s polite intention.
Subjectivity: The perceptions, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, desires and so on of
an individual person.
Symbolic: Rituals are actions that symbolically ‘encode’ the social order of the
community, as well as the community’s values.
Theoretical: An explicitly defined and formalised account of a social phe-
nomenon such as politeness that can be shared amongst scientific
observers.
There-and-then: Refers to the way in which particular social actions and mean-
ings are evaluated vis-à-vis politeness through ongoing linking with eval-
uations situated in other times and places. In other words, the way in
which evaluations of politeness in the here-and-now are inevitably inter-
linked with evaluations in the there-and-then (i.e. over time), as well as
the there-and-then in its own right (see also ‘here-and-now’).
Time: The claim that any understanding of politeness always arises relative to
time, and so politeness in ongoing and historical interactions are neces-
sarily interlinked.
Transformation: Where norms, social practices and the like are always in
some degree of flux, or at least they are inevitably open to change with
the passing of time, even if flux might be imperceptible in practice.
274 Glossary
Understandings: The claim that politeness can arise through multiple ways of
perceiving, interpreting or evaluating the very same moment.
Units of analysis: The scope of the analytical focus of politeness researchers.
First-wave approaches have tended to use units of analysis focused at the
level of languages, societies and cultures, instead of analysing politeness
behaviour at the level of localised individuals and smaller groupings (see
‘first-wave approaches’).
Universality: The claim that linguistic politeness can be systematically
described across languages and cultures using the same underlying theo-
retical framework.
User: A person who somehow contributes to evaluative moments of politeness
either through being involved in those evaluations themselves, or by being
implicated in them through their affiliation with the moral order that
underpins those evaluations.
Utterance: A functionally meaningful unit of communication. Unlike units in
descriptive linguistics, which traditionally span morpheme to sentence, an
utterance is not defined by its size but rather with respect to its function:
it is a communicative unit mostly produced by a single speaker.
Valency: Refers to the way in which scales vis-à-vis which persons and rela-
tionships are evaluated can range from good to bad, appropriate to inap-
propriate, like through to dislike and so on. Interpersonal evaluations thus
involve not just any kind of categorisation, but rather categorisations that
are valenced (see ‘categorisation’).
Variability: Refers to differences in the ways in which members from the same
group may evaluate the very same event vis-à-vis politeness.
Visibility: Refers to the degree of hiddenness or opacity of a particular conven-
tion or ritual. This depends on the size and type of the network in which
it is situated.
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Index
60 Minutes 223 attending 210

attention (see attending)
A Critique of Politeness Theories 36 attitude 8, 61, 208, 211–12
A Fish Called Wanda 33 attitudinal cognitorium 212
accountability 94, 119–25 attributing (cultural properties to others) 246
moral 119 Augoustinos, Martha 211
normative 119 Austin, John L. 22
accounter 127, 128, 129 Australia/n 99, 119, 213, 215, 223
addressee (see also footing) 88, 89, 92, 128, author (see footing) 125, 126, 127, 128
129, 148 awareness (see also metapragmatics) 6, 41, 65,
adjacency 112 88, 181, 208
agency 21, 22, 210
ambiguity 115, 137, 138 bald on-record (positive) 25
analytical artifacts 96 Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca 51, 247
Anglo-English 33, 92, 142, 144 Barron, Anne 244
animating the voice of others 148, 163 Bassili, John N. 212
animator (see footing) 125, 126, 127 Bax, Marcel 152, 156
anthropology 16, 18, 138, 231 Baxter, Judith 237
anticipating 211, 217–19 Bayraktağlou, Arin 111
apology 1, 14, 30, 33, 58–9, 62, 92, 122–4, beliefs (and im/politeness) 80, 93–4, 102,
188–9, 202, 221, 243 207
collective 50 Bell, Catherine 149
forms of 34 black American 241
intercultural 97, 99–101, 215–16 Blaikie, Thomas 147
political 228 Blair, Tony 201
research on 23 Blitvich, Pilar 48, 56
social action of 243 Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 23, 24, 26, 30,
speech act of 23, 31, 33 243
strategy 34 Bolı́var, Adriana 193
argumentative (politeness) 43, 57, 59 Boneffon, Jean-François 218
art (and politeness) 174 Bono 88
Arundale, Robert B. 32, 50, 62, 78, 98, 99, Borat 181
103, 133, 219 boundary of language (in theorisation) 2, 3,
association/dissociation (see identification) 80, 104
assumptions Bourne, Carolyn 166, 171
cultural 243 Bousfield, Derek 219
historically situated 160, 162 Boxer, Diana 71
methodological 29 Bridget Jones II: The Edge of Reason 157
pragmatic 17 Britain/British 20, 46, 55, 63–4, 160, 167, 169,
theoretical 13, 14, 17, 18, 34, 42, 43, 54, 190, 201, 218, 232, 239
56, 129, 158, 191, 194, 219 Brody, Elaine M. 143
288
Index 289
Brown, Penelope 2, 15–35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 45, conventionalisation 77, 142
51, 56, 102, 103, 117, 134, 154, 161, 176, conversation analysis 2, 54, 56, 113, 133, 252
190, 219, 223, 228 conversational maxims (see flouting))
Brown, Rick D. 212 Cook, Haruko 133, 252
Brown, Roger 26 Cooperative Principle (CP) 13–15, 19, 23
Bucholtz, Mary 238 Copestake, Anne 140
Butler, Judith 240 corpus linguistics 2, 105, 192, 203
bystander(s) 88, 90, 91, 199, 241, 242 corpus method 163
cost–benefit 17
Canterbury Tales 170 Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth 131
categorisation (dimension of evaluation) 62–4 Coupland, Nikolas 194
Chang, Melody W. 48, 97, 99, 122, 131, 215 creativity 151
China/Chinese 21–2, 48–50, 102, 122, 142, criticising others 65
151, 160, 161, 162, 171–2, 189, 201, 232, cross-cultural 20, 22, 33, 43–5, 159, 253
241, 245, 251 politeness research 43, 243
Chomsky, Noam 16, 29 versus intercultural 242–5
civility 41, 147, 204, 231 Culpeper, Jonathan 5, 9, 13, 35, 54, 93, 130,
Clift, Rebecca 126, 216 142, 147, 159, 162, 163, 164, 176, 190,
co-construction of interaction 7, 37, 111, 126, 192, 194, 199, 203, 212, 222, 224, 228,
149, 151, 155, 233 243
cognition 4, 8, 207–23 culture/s/al 4, 8, 18, 95, 142
cognitive science and psychology 2, 193 American 59, 236
cognitive states 209 as a unit of analysis 45–7, 238
collocation 192 Asian 17
communality 21 Australian 17
communicative intentions 220 discursively constructed 234
community of practice 46–7, 86, 123, 144, essential approach to 46
198 Jewish American 82
comparability 159–63 national 238
complaint 69–71, 110, 121 relativity of 235–7
compliment 92, 182 -specificity 20–2
complexity (of politeness studied in stance 239, 240
interaction) 37–9 cumulative 112, 118, 212
computer-mediated communication (CMC) 3, Curl, Traci 71
9, 53, 198
conceptualisation (and/versus participation) databases (and politeness research) 31
86, 183 Davies, Bethan 199, 228
analogous 191 de Berg, Henk 166
conformance 148 defeasibility 217
consciousness 41, 186, 224 deliberate misinterpretation 89
contestedness 2, 43–5, 111, 171, 172, 187, Demmen, Jane 142
202, 207, 217, 222, 236, 237 deontic 214
context 4, 7, 9, 19, 21, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 34, desire 18, 193, 207, 208, 210, 214
37, 38, 44, 45, 48, 50, 68, 126, 138, 144, Desperate Housewives 116
149, 153, 159, 161, 162, 171, 182, 217 detached observer 126
ual situatedness 48–50, 60, 66, 76, 93, diachronic (see also historical) 4, 80, 152, 160,
137, 186, 194, 210, 214 164
continuity issue 171–3 change (see also transformation) 157
convention 7, 59, 76, 110, 140–8, 185, 218, discernment (see wakimae)
236 discourse (versus utterance) 1, 6, 9, 100, 134
and forms 140 discourse completion test/task (DCT) 30, 52,
and in/directness 24 243
al greeting 40 discursive/postmodern approaches to
al manner 126 politeness 5–6, 39, 41, 46, 47, 52, 53, 54,
degree of ality 76 55, 56
290 Index
discursive resource 8, 72, 138, 235, 253 face 18–19

discursive turn 36, 39 and relationships 50–2
diversity 2, 6, 9, 27, 237, 247 mianzi 22
Donaghue, Ngaire 211 -threatening act 18, 27
dramatisation 165 -wants 18
Drew, Paul 69, 71, 158 work 18
Durkheim, Émile 148 face-to-face interaction 3, 9, 53, 84, 133
Dury, Richard 174 facial expressions 59, 131
Dutch 156 feelings 1, 53, 61, 124, 207, 224
Dynel, Marta 91 felicity conditions 22, 23, 72
field (ba/chang) 77–9, 84, 85, 256
Early Modern English 168, 171 Fienemann, Jutta 244
education (of politeness) 1 figure (see footing) 125, 127, 129
Eelen, Gino 5, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 52, first-wave approaches (to politeness) 5, 13, 15,
60, 112 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32,
egalitarianism 165, 171 33, 34–5, 36, 37, 39, 50, 52, 53, 169, 207,
Ehlich, Konrad 36, 41 219, 223, 243, 253
elicited data 29–31 flouting (of conversational maxims) 14, 15, 19,
emotion/al 8, 150 21, 23
categorisation of 227 flyting 168
and evaluation 63, 199 focused encounter 88
flux 225 Foley, William 41
reactions 227 footing(s) 125–9, 144, 174, 199, 220
emotive value 150 forms (associated with politeness) 4, 21, 26–8,
emotively invested actions 225 30, 176
emotivity 222, 223–7 forms of address 1, 15, 26–7, 138, 149–50,
emotive actions and reactions 223 178, 208, 232
empirical norms 147 formulation (of messages) 66
English 23, 33–4, 63, 66, 69, 72, 94, 96, 102, Foucault, Michel 79, 158, 162
160, 168, 186, 188, 189, 193, 234, 235, Four Weddings and a Funeral 125
239, 251 frame-based approach 218
entitlement 72, 87, 116, 117, 136 Fraser, Bruce 35
epistemology 84, 85, 102, 214 French 55, 145, 169, 234, 241
epistemological perspectives 84, 104 frequency 192
essentialist view (on culture) 8, 46, 231, 233, friendliness 92, 97, 101
234, 247 Fukushima, Saeko 190
etiquette 1, 142, 143, 181, 193, 202 fully committed participant 126
ethnicity 241, 244
ethnology 231 Galasiński, Dariusz 194
ethnomethodology 2, 3, 56 Garfinkel, Harold 67, 68, 69, 74, 119, 140, 145
ethos 150 gaze 125
evaluation/evaluative 212–14, 251 gender 42, 60, 202, 231, 232–3
and idiosyncracy 69 Generative Grammar 16, 27, 29
and recognition 185 genre 34, 44, 48–50, 56, 57, 164, 173, 174, 175
conceptualisation of 37, 53, 57–80 German 160
interpersonal 60–4 gestures 60, 131, 227
moment 76–7, 84, 96, 98, 101, 167, 196, Geyer, Naomi 46
210, 233 Gilman, Albert 26
moral 94, 184 Goffman, Erving 18, 19, 87, 88, 125, 126, 127,
scope of 61–4 204
evaluators 63, 64, 94, 96, 188, 189, 191 Goleman, Daniel 224
Everybody Hates Chris 51 Good, David 219
expectancy (see also moral order) 6, 7, 13, 14, Graham, Sage Lambert 198
85, 93, 94, 111, 124, 137, 147, 256 Grainger, Karen 53
reflexively layered 94, 184 grammatical mood 23, 24
Index 291
grammaticalisation 172, 252 individualism 20, 21, 22, 79, 80

Gran Torino 194 inference/inferring 8, 210, 216–17
graphic (politeness) 141 institutional discourse 54
Greek 20 intention/ality 8, 209–10, 219–23
Grice, Herbert Paul 13, 14, 15, 19, 23, 219, 220 types of 220
group harmony 22 interaction 4, 7, 28, 29, 31, 36, 37, 39, 43, 44,
Gu, Yueguo 21–2 47, 109–34
intercultural
Harris, Sandra 54 assumptions 44
Haugh, Michael 3, 6, 9, 42, 48, 51, 56, 65, 71, communication 2, 96
96, 97, 99, 122, 127, 131, 133, 147, 190, politeness research 244
199, 200, 201, 203, 204, 209, 215, 217, research 99
220, 222, 243, 244, 247 variation 100
He, Yun 238 interpreter (see also footing) 129
hearer (as subject of study) 36–7 intersubjectivity 207
Heritage, John 112, 119 invitation 3, 101, 113–15, 124, 142, 174,
hedging 23, 114, 218 217
Heidegger, Martin 158 Israeli 26
hierarchy 15, 21, 162, 208
higher order intention 220 Jacobs, Andreas 158, 176
historical linguistics 2 Japan/ese 21, 27, 33, 43, 49, 160, 186, 189,
historical pragmatics 2, 161, 163 190, 193, 200, 202, 217, 240, 242, 251,
historical texts 3, 54, 158, 159, 162, 163, 174 252
historicity 7, 76, 77, 78, 84, 158, 159 Jaszczcolt, Kasia M. 209
Holmes, Janet 50, 196, 247 Jaworski, Adam 194
Holtgraves, Thomas 218, 228 Jeepers Creepers 2 207
honorific(s) 21, 26, 27, 44, 161, 171, 200, 251, Jucker, Andreas 158, 168, 169, 176
252
House, Gregory 222 Kádár, Dániel Z. 3, 46, 48, 54, 55–6, 77, 102,
House, Juliane 30, 244 122, 142, 146, 150, 152, 159, 161, 163,
Hungarian 40, 143, 145, 160, 226, 235, 241, 171, 174, 176, 201, 202, 204, 225, 226,
246 235, 236, 239, 241, 245, 246, 247
Hutchby, Ian 133 Kasper, Gebriele 30, 35, 133, 134
Kienpointner, Manfred 150
Ide, Sachiko 20–1, 27, 36, 41, 161, 193, 252 Kohnen, Thomas 168
identification 238–42 Kopytko, Roman 160
identity 8, 46, 50, 56, 122, 146 Koster, Jan 150
ideology 79, 165, 171, 172, 194, 203, 231, Krippendorff, Klaus 98
237, 245, 248 Kuno, Susumu 27
Iggers, Georg G. 163 Kytö, Merja 163, 164
illocutionary act(s) 22, 25
implication (of social action) 65, 75 Lakoff, Robin T. 16–17, 29, 202, 236–7
implicatures 217 Langlotz, Andreas 224, 227, 228
impoliteness 5, 35, 46, 54, 69, 70, 92, 97, 110, languaculture 242
111, 125, 127, 129, 188, 214, 215, 219, Leech, Geoffrey N. 17, 126, 219
222, 228, 230, 244 Lett, James 102, 103
Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause letter writing 174–5
Offence 228 Levinson, Stephen C. 2, 3, 15–28, 36, 37, 39,
Inagaki, Noriko 247 40, 45, 51, 56, 102, 103, 117, 134, 154,
incrementality 112–19 161, 176, 190, 219, 223, 228
indexicality 114, 115, 119, 123, 161, 193, 208, Linguistic Politeness Research Group
234, 240, 252 234
indirectness 15, 23–6, 169 Locher, Miriam 6, 50, 52, 53, 56, 133, 219,
British 15, 142 224, 228
individual (as unit of analysis) 47 locutionary act 22
292 Index
Mao, LuMing 21 normative

Marra, Meredith 50, 196, 247 expectations (see expectancy)
Matsui, Tomoko 217 frame of reference (dimension of
Matsumoto, Yoshiko 27 evaluation) 64
mediated forms of communication 84, 90, 160 normativity 21
medieval Europe 157
member’s behaviour 85 Obama, Yasuko 200
Merrison, Andrew John 199 observer coding 31–3, 53
metacomments 113, 159, 199 occasioning 66
metapragmatic/s 8, 165, 181–204 O’Driscoll, Jim 204
awareness 8, 186–8 off record 25
debates 49 offence 58, 65, 97, 121, 123, 128, 183, 185,
interviews 193 206, 222, 244
metacognition and metacognitive awareness Okamoto, Shigeko 240, 247, 252
187, 214–16 Okura Gagné, Nana 193
metacommunication and Old English 168
metacommunicative awareness 186, Ong, Walter 174
194–200 online discussion forum 122–4
metadiscourse and metadiscursive ontology 83
awareness 187, 200–3 orders of indexicality 94
metalanguage and metalinguistic awareness overgeneralisation 2, 4, 6, 236, 240, 243
186, 188–94 overhearers (see also footing) 88, 91, 92, 129,
Middle English 168, 169–70 136, 175
Milroy, James 47 Oxford English Corpus 192
Milroy, Lesley 47
Mills, Sara 2, 3, 6, 42, 43, 46, 55–6, 60, 188, Pan, Yuling 171, 176, 202
194, 201, 204, 233, 236, 245, 246 participant loci 129
mimesis 149 participation (in the evaluative moment) 84
mock im/politeness 5, 63, 89, 90, 126, 127, participation status 87, 104, 125, 182
219 Paternoster, Annick 198
modular verbs 71 pathos 150
moral Peanuts 65
accountability 87 perceptions/s (of politeness) (see
issues 15 understanding/s)
norms 147 performance 149, 227
moral order 6, 8, 67–73, 85, 93, 94, 95, 102, performative function (of language) 22
109, 111, 119, 121, 122, 124, 183, 196, perlocutionary act(s) 22
199, 251 persons and relationships (dimension of
Mulan 165 evaluation) 61–2, 79
Mullany, Louise 233 pervasiveness (of politeness) 2
multidisciplinary approach/thinking 2, 80 phonetics and phonology 2
multimodality 3, 60, 104, 129–33, 173–5 Pike, Kenneth 85, 95, 96, 103
Munakata, Kotaro 44 Pizziconi, Barbara 193, 200
place (tachiba) 193, 201
naturally occurring data 29, 43, 52–3, 55 Planchenault, Gäelle 145
negative politeness 18, 25, 38 Poirot, Hercule 234, 241
netiquette 53, 157 ‘politeness’ (as a word; see also
Nevelainen, Terttu 174 metalanguage) 160
New Zealand English 196 Politeness as a Discursive Phenomenon 133
Niedzielski, Nancy 186 Politeness in Chinese and Japanese 204
Nishida, Kitaro 78 Politeness in Historical and Contemporary
non-verbal (modes) 25, 131, 133, 184 Chinese 176
Norris, Neal 131 Politeness: Some Universals in Language
North America/n (see US) Usage 15–28
North Korea 172 politic behaviour 42
Index 293
political discourse 7, 49 relational shift 50

Pomerantz, Anita 114 relational work 50
positioning 87 relational network 47, 94, 143, 236, 237, 254
positive politeness 18, 25 emergent 47
post-recording interviews 54, 198 latent 47
Potter, Jonathan 212, 213 and field 78, 84
power (contextually situated) 37, 38, 43, 54, Relational Rituals and Communication 152
162, 172, 231, 236 relative power 19, 34
power and solidarity (concept) 27 repetition (as a strategy) 29
practice (versus conceptualisation, in terms of representation 162–7
politeness) 41–2, 251 request 18, 23, 24, 25, 71–3
pragma-philology 158, 198 retrospect(ive)/prospect(ive) 115, 145
pragmatic transfer 244 ritual/ity 7, 157, 225, 226, 261
pragmatics 2, 5, 9, 16, 28, 31, 40, 105, 194 and symbolic behaviour 148
interactional 133 moment 150
pre-existing patterns (see schemata) ritualisation 77, 149
preference 113 Rosenberg, Milton J. 212
Preston, Dennis 186 routine 140
principal (see also footing) 125, 126 routinised use (of language, in first-wave
producer (see also footing) 87, 89, 90, 92, theories) 29
175 rudeness 55, 59, 65, 69, 80, 136, 145, 150,
propositional content 14 172, 192, 198, 199, 247, 252
prosody and paralinguistic features 54, 58, 60, Ruhi, Şükriye 224, 225, 227
130–1, 141 Ruiz de Zarobe, Leyre 243
proxemics 131 Ruiz de Zarobe, Yolanda 243
psychology 224 Rush Hour 3 240
posture 131
Purdy, Charles 143, 144 Sacks, Harvey 54, 62, 119
salience 186
questionnaires/surveys 30–1 Schegloff, Emanuel 62, 115, 119, 243
schemata/schematic 7, 137–9, 157, 158
racism 208 interpretative 138
ranking of imposition 19 Schermerhorn, John R. 224
rapport management 42, 50 Schneider, Klaus B. 244
theory 50 Schnurr, Stephanie 247
Rasmussen, Susan J. 138 Searle, John 22, 23, 140
ratified/ungratified (participants) 87–8, 242 Seinfield 81, 91, 254
rationality 8, 18–19 selective treatment of data 40–1
Raymond, Geoffrey 252 self-denigration/other-elevation 22, 26, 44,
recipient (see also footing) 87, 88, 91, 92 142, 151, 161
recognition 121, 184, 204 self-display 21, 162, 165, 168
reconstructing interaction from memory 53 self-reflexive (conceptualisation) 3, 36, 39, 47,
recurrence 59, 76, 140 56, 80, 237–8
recursive 185 Selting, Margaret 131, 242
reflexive/reflexivity 189 semantic field 189
thinking 183 semantics 2
occasioning 66 senses 3
regional norms 46, 239 sequentiality 112–19
register 27, 55 service encounter 109–11, 131–3
Rehbein, Jochen 244 Shimizu, Hiroshi 78
reification 200 side participant (see also footing) 88, 91, 92,
relating 50 129, 210
relational Sifianou, Maria 20, 77, 111
history 77, 111, 144, 150, 167, 171, 234 Silvers, Tanya 129
practice 50 Silverstein, Michael 94, 161, 184
294 Index
sincerity/insincerity 68, 101, 123, 182 There is Something about Mary 113
situatedness 7, 78, 109, 111 Thornborrow, Joanna 72, 138, 235
Situating Politeness 199 time 1, 4, 7, 8, 60, 73–7, 109, 254
social action/practice 2, 3, 4, 6, 60, 65–73, emergence 74, 75, 112, 115, 137
105, 109, 140, 183, 251 here-and-now and 4, 7, 8, 74, 109, 118,
and meanings 60, 112, 118, 125, 251 185, 196, 254
social punctuated 74, 112, 118, 137
class 43, 46, 64, 102, 139, 164, 167, 176, relativity to 4, 156–9
200, 218, 236, 239, 244 there-and-then historically situated in its
cognition 210 own right and 7–8, 76, 159, 254
distance 19 there-and-then projected into here-and-now
emotions 224 and 7, 76, 109, 111, 137–53, 196, 254
psychology 211 Trains, Planes and Automobiles 109, 251
relationship 15, 72 trajectory (of social actions) 7, 111, 114, 234
social constructivism 84, 233 transformation (of politeness) 167–71
social realist ontological position (see transparency 146
ontology) Truss, Lynne 55
socialisation 19, 144 T/V distinction 26, 170
socially constructive act 79
sociolinguistics 2, 48 understanding/s and perspectives (of/on
sociology 2, 16, 18, 231 politeness) 1, 5, 6, 81–105, 252
Spanish 189 analyst’s 3, 32, 98–101, 253
space (social) 1, 4, 8, 60, 77–80, 185, as social practice (see social practice)
254 emic (‘insider’) 3, 20, 21, 22, 32, 85,
speaker (as an analytic concept) 28 93–7, 121, 145, 160, 169, 170, 172, 183,
speech acts 22–6 186, 187, 188, 191, 196, 199, 215, 216
Spencer-Oatey, Helen 42, 50, 54, 198, 199, etic (‘outsider’) 3, 20, 22, 85, 93–7, 122,
224, 227, 243, 244 145, 146, 152, 160, 170, 183, 187, 188,
statistical techniques 32 189, 199
stereotypical contrasting 245–6 first-order (language user) 2, 3, 39–42,
strategies (associated with politeness) 26–8, 43, 59, 81, 86, 152, 160, 253
30 folk-theoretic 3, 86, 102–3, 253
style 44–5, 145 generational 238
subjectivity 207 holistic 3
Sugimoto, Naomi 202 lay observer’s 3, 98–101, 199, 201, 253
synchronic 4 member’s 85
systematic approach (to politeness) 2–3, 4, 5 metaparticipant 3, 84, 87–93, 194, 253
observer’s (lay and analyst) 84, 86, 196,
Taavitsainen, Irma 176 199, 253
taboo 111, 202 participant 2, 3, 32, 81, 84, 85, 87–93,
talk-in-interaction 118 196, 253
Taiwan/ese 48, 99, 103, 131, 146, 215 possible 119
Tannen, Deborah 232 pre-existing 77
Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa 174 protoscientific 102
target 127 second-order (language observer) 2, 3,
Taylor, Stephanie 138 39–42, 43, 44, 59, 81, 253
Telegraph 147 technical/theoretical 2, 3, 81, 86, 102–3,
Terkourafi, Marina 53, 140, 217, 218, 220 253
terms of address (see forms of address) unspoken 140
text types 48–50, 160 unit of analysis 45
‘the iron fist in a velvet glove’ 111 universality 16–20, 21, 22, 28
The Daily Mail 167 Urban Etiquette 143
The Simpsons 14 US 43, 111, 182, 202, 208
The Social Network 57 Usami, Mayumi 134
The Three Musketeers 165 utterance (as unit of analysis) 28–9
Index 295
valency (dimension of evaluation) 62–3, 210, Wallace, Mari I. 149

212 Wang, Yiwu 44
validity 31 Watts, Richard J. 2, 6, 35, 36, 41, 42, 47, 50,
van Gennep, Arnold 148 51, 52, 56, 152, 171, 176, 193, 212, 219
variability 19, 42–3, 53, 55, 57, 59, 204, 207, Wenger, Etienne 46, 144
238 Wetzel, Patricia 193
intracultural 243 Wierzbicka, Anna 142
variational pragmatics 244 Wikipedia 2–5
Verschueren, Jef 183 Wilson, Thomas P. 32
vicarious participation 90 Wodehouse, P. G. 15
Victorian 142 Woods, John 216
Villejoubert, Gäelle 218
Vine, Bernadette 50, 196 Ye, Zhengdao 245
visibility issue 147 Yorkshire 239
bluntness 46
wakimae 21
Walker, Iain 211 Zeng, Guofan 175

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Understanding Politeness

Politeness is key to all of our relationships and plays a fundamental part in

d ániel z. k ád ár is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

List of figures page viii

3 Recent developments in politeness research 36

4 Politeness as social practice 57

II Politeness and time

7 Politeness, convention and rituality 137

8 Politeness and history 156

III Politeness and social space: from mind to society

10 Politeness, cognition and emotion 207

11 Culture, identity and politeness 231

2.1 Types of politeness strategy (Brown and Levinson 1987) page 25

13:59:04 GMT 2014.

2.1 Sentence types and speech acts page 24

‘What is it you are researching?? Politeness?!? You teach ‘politeness’? You

and interaction; indeed it is probably a precondition for human cooperation in

We would like to express our gratitude to Andrew Winnard for inviting us

1.1 Why this book?

question without falling into the trap of overgeneralising. Politeness research

through interdisciplinary analyses by reflexively aware researchers (Haugh,

encompass. In accordance with our claim that politeness is a social practice

influential monograph, and subsequently grounded in important monographs

as we had at the time of their occurrence). An analysis which is based on this

Chapter 12, ‘Conclusion’, briefly summarises the contents of the previous

(1) Homer: I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Dad.

The idea of hypothetical models based on datasets limited to utterances was

Face and rationality

Universality versus culture-specificity

universalistic model primarily because it relies on the idea that politeness

Speech acts and indirectness

Table 2.1 Sentence types and speech acts.

Sentence type Example Speech act

Imperative Pass me the salt. Direct request

grammatical mood is employed. We can see how this works in relation to

on record 2. positive politeness

Do the FTA with redressive

5. Don’t do the FTA

However, it has become clear that the relationship between politeness

Forms and strategies

(5) A: I had a flat tyre on the way home.

‘Well-formed’ politeness data can either be naturally occurring, which

Changing the details of a given question pattern helps researchers to examine

the analyst decides which category applies to each utterance/behaviour’ (Arun-

valid) analyses when applied to the examination of politeness in Anglo-English

2.4 A sample analysis

2.6 Key readings

hearers, it becomes necessary to examine the discursive effect of an utterance.

Although this view will be challenged to some extent in Chapter 4, since it

In Chapter 2 we argued, following the key principles of first-wave approaches

(2) A great deal of Senator Opal’s effervescence evaporated. An

Medway remained quiescent.

First-order versus second-order politeness

forms that contradicts their normative perception as traditional lexical repre-

Second-order politeness, on the other hand, is a theoretical construct, a term

Variability and contestedness

claim in first-wave approaches where Japan is characterised as a ‘negative

Variability has two-fold implications: apart from questioning the absolute

(4) ddd ddd dd :