Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-p2v8j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-08T14:29:50.294Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

16 - (Im)politeness and Sociopragmatics

from Part II - Topics and Settings in Sociopragmatics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2021

By
Jonathan Culpeper  and
Michael Haugh
Edited by
Michael Haugh ,
Dániel Z. Kádár  and
Marina Terkourafi
Michael Haugh
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Dániel Z. Kádár
Affiliation:
Hungarian Research Institute for Linguistics, and Dalian University of Foreign Languages
Marina Terkourafi
Affiliation:
Leiden University
Get access

Summary

Politeness and sociopragmatics have long been aligned since they were first proposed as areas for serious scholarly research but have since also grown into large, diffuse areas of research in their own right. The aim of this chapter is to consider synergies between these two areas of research. The chapter begins by reviewing the roots of connections between sociopragmatics and (im)politeness before briefly overviewing (im)politeness theories and the role that the first/second-order distinction can play in distinguishing between different approaches in the field. We then discuss some key sociopragmatic concepts that have come to play an important role in (im)politeness research, including context, strategies, indirectness and norms. This leads into a case study of offence-taking that illustrates how sociopragmatics and (im)politeness research now have a much broader scope, both methodological and theoretically, than earlier analyses that tended to focus on the politeness values of single utterances. We conclude by considering some of the key issues that will likely shape ongoing development of (im)politeness research, including the role of interdisciplinarity, the use of a greater range of data types and methods and the increasing need for systematic meta-theorization in the field.

Keywords

(im)politenesscontextstrategiesnormsindirectnessoffence
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics , pp. 315 - 339
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aijmer, K. (1996). Conversational Routines in English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Allen, K. (2016). A benchmark of politeness. In Capone, A. and Mey, J., eds., Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society. Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 397–420.Google Scholar
Bousfield, D. (2008). Impoliteness in Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bousfield, D. and Culpeper, J. (eds.). (2008). Impoliteness: Eclecticism and Diaspora. Special Issue. Journal of Politeness Research, 4(2).Google Scholar
Bousfield, D. and Locher, M. (eds.). (2008). Impoliteness in Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Brown, P. (2017). Politeness and impoliteness. In Huang, Y., ed., Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 383–99.Google Scholar
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cialdini, R., Reno, R. and Kallgren, C. (1990). A focus theory of normative conduct: recycling the concept of norms to reduce littering in public places. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(6), 1015–26.Google Scholar
Coulmas, F. (1981). Conversational Routine. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. (1996). Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics, 25, 349–67.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. (2008). Reflections on impoliteness, relational work and power. In Bousfield, D. and Locher, M., eds., Impoliteness in Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 17–44.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, J. and Haugh, M. (2014). Pragmatics and the English Language. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, J. and Haugh, M. (forthcoming). The metalinguistics of offence in (British) English: A corpus-based metapragmatic approach. Journal of Language, Aggression and Conflict.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. and Terkourafi, M. (2017). Pragmatics and (im)politeness. In Culpeper, J., Haugh, M. and Kádár, D. Z., eds., Palgrave Handbook of (Im)politeness. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, pp. 11–39.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J., Haugh, M. and Kádár, D. (eds.). (2017). Palgrave Handbook of (Im)politeness. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deutsch, M. and Gerard, H. (1955). A study of normative and informational social influences upon individual judgment. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51(3), 629–36.Google Scholar
Eelen, G. (2001). A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome.Google Scholar
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Firth, J. (1957). A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930–1955. In Firth, J. R., ed., Studies in Linguistic Analysis. Oxford: Philological Society, pp. 1–32.Google Scholar
Freedman, D. (2001). Ecological inference and the ecological fallacy. In Smelser, N. J. and Baltes, P. B., eds., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 6. New York: Elsevier, pp. 4027–30.Google Scholar
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. and Sifianou, M. (2019). Im/politeness and discursive pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics, 145, 91–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2010). A genre approach to the study of im-politeness. International Review of Pragmatics, 2(1), 46–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grainger, K. (2011). ‘First order’ and ‘second order’ politeness: Institutional and intercultural contexts. In Linguistic Politeness Research Group, eds., Discursive Approaches to Politeness. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 167–88.Google Scholar
Grainger, K. (2013). Of babies and bath water: Is there any place for Austin and Grice in interpersonal pragmatics? Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 27–38.Google Scholar
Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. and Morgan, J., eds., Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, pp. 41–58.Google Scholar
Gumperz, J. (1982). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Haakana, M. (2007). Reported thought in complaint stories. In Holt, E. and Clift, R., eds., Reporting Talk: Reported Speech in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 150–78.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. (2012). Epilogue: The first-second order distinction in face and politeness research. Journal of Politeness Research, 8(1), 111–34.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. (2013). Im/politeness, social practice and the participation order. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 52–72.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. (2015). Im/politeness Implicatures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haugh, M. (2017). Implicature and the inferential substrate. In Cap, P. and Dynel, M., eds., Implicitness: From Lexis to Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 281–304.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. (2018). Afterword: Theorising (im)politeness. Journal of Politeness Research, 14(1), 153-65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haugh, M. and Culpeper, J. (2018). Integrative pragmatics and (im)politeness theory. In Ilie, C. and Norrick, N. R., eds., Pragmatics and Its Interfaces. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 213–39.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. and Watanabe, Y. (2017). (Im)politeness theory. In Vine, B., ed., Handbook of Language in the Workplace. London: Routledge, pp. 65–76.Google Scholar
Holmes, J. (1996). Women’s role in language change: A place for quantification. In Warner, N., Ahlers, J., Bilmes, L., Oliver, M., Wertheim, S. and Chen, M., eds., Gender and Belief Systems. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley Women and Language Group, pp. 313–30.Google Scholar
Holmes, J. and Schnurr, S. (2005). Politeness, humor and gender in the workplace: Negotiating norms and identifying contestation. Journal of Politeness Research, 1(1), 121–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, J., Marra, M. and Vine, B. (2011). Leadership, Discourse and Ethnicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Holt, E. (2012). Using laugh responses to defuse complaints. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45(4), 430–48.Google Scholar
Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In Lerner, G., ed., Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 13–23.Google Scholar
Jucker, A. (2020). Politeness in the History of English: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kádár, D. and Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kádár, D. (2017). Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, R. (1973). The logic of politeness; or, minding your p’s and q’s’. Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 292–305.Google Scholar
Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Leech, G. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Leech, G. (2014). The Pragmatics of Politeness. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levinson, S. (1979). Activity types and language. Linguistics, 17(5–6), 365–99.Google Scholar
Levinson, S. (2013). Action formation and ascription. In Sidnell, J. and Stivers, T., eds., Handbook of Conversation Analysis. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 103–30.Google Scholar
Locher, M. (2015). Interpersonal pragmatics and its link to (im)politeness research. Journal of Pragmatics, 86, 5–10.Google Scholar
Locher, M. and Bolander, B. (2019). Ethics in pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics, 145, 83–90.Google Scholar
Locher, M. and Larina, T. (2019). Introduction to politeness and impoliteness research in global contexts. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 23(4), 873–903.Google Scholar
Locher, M. and Watts, R. (2005). Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research, 1(1), 9–33.Google Scholar
Mills, S. (2003). Gender and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mills, S. (2011). Communities of practice and politeness. In Davis, B., Haugh, M. and Merrison, A., eds., Situated Politeness. London: Continuum, pp. 73–87.Google Scholar
Mills, S. (2017). English Politeness and Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Minsky, M. (1975). A framework for representing knowledge. In Winston, P. H., ed., The Psychology of Computer Vision. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 211–77.Google Scholar
Mitchell, N. and Haugh, M. (2015). Agency, accountability and evaluations of impoliteness.” Journal of Politeness Research, 11(2), 207–38.Google Scholar
Mulder, J. and Thompson, S. (2008). The grammaticalization of but as a final particle in English conversation. In Laury, R., ed., Crosslinguistic Studies of Clause Combining: The Multifunctionality of Conjunctions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 179–204.Google Scholar
Ogiermann, E. and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2019). Im/politeness between the analyst and participant perspective: An overview of the field. In Ogiermann, E. and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., eds., From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness: Multilingual and Multicultural Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–24.Google Scholar
Pike, K. (1967). Etic and emic standpoints for the description of behavior. In Hildum, D. C., ed., Language and Thought: An Enduring Problem in Psychology. Princeton, NJ: Van Norstrand, pp. 32–39.Google Scholar
Pomerantz, A. (1978). Compliment responses: Notes on the cooperation of multiple constraints. In Schenkein, J., ed., Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction. New York: Academic Press, pp. 79–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In Atkinson, J. and Heritage, J., eds., Structures of Social Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 57–101.Google Scholar
Robinson, W. (1950). Ecological correlations and the behaviour of individuals. American Sociological Review, 15(3), 351–7.Google Scholar
Schank, R. and Abelson, R. (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Schegloff, E. (2000). On granularity. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 715–20.Google Scholar
Searle, J. (1975). Indirect speech acts. In Cole, P. and Morgan, J., eds., Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, pp. 59–82.Google Scholar
Sifianou, M. and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2017). (Im)politeness and cultural variation. In Culpeper, J., Haugh, M. and Kádár, D., eds., Palgrave Handbook of (Im)politeness. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, pp. 571–99.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2005). (Im)politeness, face and perceptions of rapport: Unpackaging their bases and interrelationships. Journal of Politeness Research, 1(1), 95–119.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H. and Kádár, D. (2016). The bases of (im)politeness evaluations: Culture, the moral order and the East-West debate. East Asian Pragmatics, 1(1), 73–106.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. ([1986] 1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Tayebi, T. (2018). Implying an impolite belief: A case of tikkeh in Persian. Intercultural Pragmatics, 15(1), 89–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2001). Politeness in Cypriot Greek: A frame-based approach. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2005a). Beyond the micro-level in politeness research. Journal of Politeness Research, 1(2), 237–62.Google Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2005b). Pragmatic correlates of frequency of use: The case for a notion of ‘minimal context’. In Marmaridou, S., Nikiforidou, K. and Antonopoulou, E., eds., Reviewing Linguistic Thought: Converging Trends for the 21st Century. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 209–33.Google Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2011). From politeness1 to politeness2: Tracking norms of im/politeness across time and space. Journal of Politeness Research, 7(2), 159–85.Google Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2019a). Im/politeness: a twenty-first century appraisal. Foreign Language and Foreign Language Teaching [外语与外语教学] (Dalian University of Foreign Languages), 2019(6), 1–17.Google Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2019b). Coming to grips with variation in sociocultural interpretations: methodological considerations. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 50(10), 1198–1215.Google Scholar
Thomas, J. (1981). Pragmatic failure, unpublished MA dissertation, University of Lancaster.Google Scholar
Thomas, J. (1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 4(2), 91–112.Google Scholar
Watts, R. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Watts, R., Ide, S. and Ehlich, K. (1992). Introduction. In Watts, R., Ide, S. and Ehlich, K., eds., Politeness in Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watts, R., Ide, S. and Ehlich, K. (eds.). (1992). Politeness in Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Wilkinson, S. and Kitzinger, C. (2006). Surprise as an interactional achievement: Reaction tokens in conversation. Social Psychology Quarterly, 69(2), 150–82.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×