Date: 27-Jun-2006
From: Michael Haugh <m.haughgriffith.edu.au>
Subject: Politeness in Language (Revised and expanded second edition)
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2942.html
EDITORS: Watts, Richard; Ide, Sachiko; Ehlich, KonradTITLE: Politeness in Language (Revised and expanded second edition)SUBTITLE: Studies in its History, Theory and PracticePUBLISHER: Mouton de GruyterYEAR: 2005
Michael Haugh, School of Languages and Linguistics, Griffith University
INTRODUCTIONThis edited volume is a re-publication of a collection of papers onpoliteness originally published in 1992, with the addition of a newintroductory chapter written by one of the original editors, Richard Watts,and an expanded bibliography, which also includes selected (and presumablysignificant) works on politeness published since 1992. The original impetusfor this volume lay in a workshop on linguistic politeness held in 1988,and this date is a crucial in that this collection is in many respects acritical reaction to the rationalist, modernist approach to politenessrepresented in Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness (which itself wasre-published in 1987). Watts argues in the new introductory chapter thatthis collection also marked the beginnings of the postmodern or discursiveapproach to politeness (p.xiii), and the major concerns raised in thevarious chapters in the book are indeed ones that could be construed asfalling into the postmodernist programme. While the move towards discursiveapproaches to politeness has really only gained momentum in the past fiveyears, with Eelen's (2001) penetrating critique of politeness theory oftenbeing credited for this kick-starting this movement, Watts is perhapsjustified in claiming the roots of this movement really lie in thiscollection of papers published more than ten years ago. For this reason,among others, the republication of this collection is indeed a welcome move.
The contents of the original edition have been published in this editionwithout any significant changes apart from the addition of a newintroductory chapter written by one of the original editors, Richard Watts,entitled ''Linguistic politeness research: Quo vadis?'' In this chapter,Watts argues why a second edition of ''Politeness in Language'' is necessary,and summarises some of the main tenets of the discursive or postmodernapproach to politeness, carefully showing how these principles can berelated to various papers in the original collection. However, as Jucker(1994) pointed out in his review of the first edition of ''Politeness inLanguage'', despite the emergence of common themes that hint at a postmodernapproach to politeness, this is really quite a heterogeneous book where''there is very little agreement as to what politeness is'' (p.329). Thismakes a step-by-step summary of this book rather unwieldy. Moreover, havingalready been reviewed and digested by the academic community over the pastten years or so, one might question whether it is really necessary foranother review to be written, at least for the original articles. For thesereasons, the summary of the chapters in this book will be somewhat brief.There is a need, however, for a considered evaluation of the place of thiscollection in relation to current trends in politeness research, and so thepresent review of this second edition seems warranted.
SUMMARYPoliteness in Language consists of thirteen chapters divided in to threesections, theoretical and historical perspectives, empirical studies, andstudies of politeness in non-Western settings. These chapters are precededby the original introduction written by Watts, Ide and Ehlich, and a newintroduction written by Watts specifically for this second edition.
Each of these three sections reflects a number of different concerns of thepostmodern approach to politeness. A number of key themes emerge from thefirst section which has six papers focusing on theoretical and historicaldimensions of linguistic politeness. These themes are nicely summarized byWatts when he claims that ''politeness will always be a slippery, ultimatelyindefinable quality of interaction which is subject to change through timeand across cultural space'' (p.xiii). The historical relativity ofpoliteness is emphasized by Ehlich ('On the historicity of politeness') andSell ('Literary texts and diachronic aspects of politeness'), while theproblems we have in satisfactorily defining politeness are related back tothe fact that evaluations of politeness are hearer-based and thussubjective in Watts ('Linguistic politeness and politic verbal behaviour:reconsidering claims for universality') and Held ('Politeness in linguisticresearch'). The distinction between unmarked behaviour, which isappropriate to the extent it is not impolite, and marked behaviour, wherethe speaker's behaviour is perceived as achieving some ends beyond themaintenance of the social equilibrium (Jucker 1994: 330), also emerges invarious guises (although unfortunately with different terminology) in anumber of papers in this section including Werkhofer ('Traditional andmodern views: the social constitution and power of politeness'), Janney andArndt ('Intracultural tact versus intercultural tact') as well as in thechapters mentioned above. The fact that there are no objective criteriawith which to make this distinction, since politeness arises from thehearer's subjective evaluations in particular contexts (or what Watts, Ideand Ehlich (p.3) label ''first-order politeness'') is what makes politeness a''slippery, ultimately indefinable quality of interaction'' (p.xiii).
In the second part, one of the key principles of the discursive approach,that empirical studies of politeness should be grounded in analyses ofactual interactional data, is apparent. Two of the chapters, Knapp-Potthoff('Secondhand politeness') and Stalpers ('Between matter-of-factness andpoliteness') rely on the analysis of recorded spoken data, which is takento be crucial to a discursive approach, while the other chapter, Walper andValtin ('Children's understanding of white lies'), relies on an analysis ofinterviews with subjects investigating their reactions to what are commonlytermed 'white lies'.
The third part gathers together four papers investigating politeness innon-Western languages, including Hebrew (Blum-Kulka: 'The metapragmatics ofpoliteness in Israeli society'), Japanese (Ide et al: 'The concept ofpoliteness: an empirical study of American English and Japanese'; Coulmas:'Linguistic etiquette in Japanese society'), and Thai (Kummer: 'Politenessin Thai'). The key theme here is that politeness cannot be defined in thesame way across ''cultural spaces.'' This poses a challenge to the claim ofuniversality made by Brown and Levinson (1987), although the issue ofuniversality seems to have become of less importance in the field atpresent, as the difficulties - or perhaps even impossibility- ofconstructing a grand theory of politeness that can adequately encompasspoliteness phenomena across all cultures still remain unresolved to a largeextent (although see Leech (2005) for some recent work on a universaltheory of politeness). It also raises the issue of whether ''politeness''itself is often evaluated positively (as in the Japanese context, forexample) or negatively (as in the Israeli and British English context, forexample), another concern of the discursive approach to politeness.
EVALUATIONIt is difficult to do real justice to the breadth and depth of theindividual contributions in this collection within the space of a reviewsuch as this. There can be no doubting that these chapters, particularlythose in parts one and three, first brought to light important notions thatforeshadowed many of the issues currently being contested in the field ofpoliteness research today. But there are also many subtleties in the waysthese ideas were originally presented that need further teasing out, as itis fairly apparent that while Watts links all these papers to the emergenceof a postmodern approach to politeness, not all of the contributors wouldconsider themselves postmodernists. In particular, Ide's later work onpoliteness is predicated on a decidedly ''modernist'' stance, as can bewitnessed in her latest collection of papers on politeness, co-edited withRobin Lakoff, which was also published recently (Lakoff and Ide 2005; for afull review see: http://linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-1235.html). However,since such an endeavour would require considerably more space thanavailable here, this evaluation will focus primarily on the discursiveapproach to politeness outlined by Watts in the new introduction, and thevalue of the republication of this collection to current debates inpoliteness theory.
The 2005 introduction to ''Politeness in Language'' draws out the majorthemes of the postmodern approach to politeness with the aim, it wouldappear from the title of this introduction, of establishing a program forfuture politeness research. It is therefore worth considering what thesethemes entail for politeness researchers today. One highly controversialtheme that has emerged from the postmodern approach, as represented byWatts (2003; cf. Locher and Watts 2005) at least, is a shift away from thenotion of politeness to other terms such as ''politic'' or ''relational work.''This shift is perhaps a natural consequence of an approach that regardspoliteness as ''a slippery, ultimately indefinable quality of interaction''(p.xiii), and leads to a fairly clear hint of the ultimate consequence ofadopting a postmodern approach to politeness, namely ''giving up the idea ofa Theory of Politeness altogether'' (p.xlii). One could interpret thisstatement in a number of different ways, but in light of what Watts haspreviously written, particularly in his 2003 book ''Politeness'' (for a fullreview see: http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-2153.html), it appearsthat Watts is claiming that in relation to politeness neither a predictivenor descriptive theory is possible (p.xix; cf. Watts 2003: 142). In otherwords, a postmodern approach to politeness abandons the pursuit of both ana priori predictive theory of politeness (''used to predict when politebehaviour can be expected'', p.xix) and a post-facto descriptive theory ofpoliteness (''used to explain post-factum why [politeness] has beenproduced'', p.xix). Instead, he argues that analysts need to ''pay closerattention to how participants in social interaction perceive politeness''(p.xix). But if one follows this train of thought what is left forpoliteness researchers to do? Inevitably, the postmodern approach leads tothe analysis of politeness only being possible within the framework of awider theory of interpersonal interaction or communication that is notpredicated on rationalistic or objectivist assumptions about language andcommunication. This is indeed an important, and necessary, move inpoliteness research, to which closer examination of many of the papers inthis collection lends significant support. It is perhaps here that thevalue of republishing this collection really lies: in developing a truealternative to the objectivist (or modernist) approach to politenessrepresented most famously in Brown and Levinson's (1987) theory ofpoliteness. It is perhaps reflective of the lack of progress in politenessresearch during the 1990s, at least before the publication of anothersignificant work, the special issue on politeness published in ''Pragmatics''(Kienpointner1999), and the emergence of the discursive approach in thepast five years (in particular, Eelen 2001; Mills 2003), that a collectionof papers originally published in 1992 can still have so much to offerpoliteness researchers today.
However, while the discursive approach as outlined by Watts in the newintroduction, and foreshadowed in this collection of papers, hascontributed immeasurably to real progress being made in the field ofpoliteness research, there remains much to be resolved within the field.One continuing dilemma as to just how we should define politeness, or leastdelimit the range of allowable phenomena analysts should study, which hasresulted in incoherence in the field of politeness research to some extent,as Jucker (1994: 334) pointed out more than ten years ago. Another issuethat is far from being resolved either is within which more general theoryof interpersonal/social interaction or communication politeness might bebest analysed. A number of alternatives exist at present, includingArundale's (1999, 2006) Face Constituting Theory which is framed within anemergent and interactive view of communication (Arundale 2004),Terkourafi's (2005a, b) frame-based approach, which is framed within aneo-Gricean view of communication, and Watts' (2003) own discursiveapproach to politeness, which has been framed within a Relevance theoreticview of communication to date (although there is perhaps some doubt as tojust how consistent the discursive approach is with Relevance Theory asTerkourafi (2006) has recently pointed out). Moreover, since the discursiveapproach is focused on how interactants themselves perceive politeness ininteractions, the implications of more ethnographically-focused studiesshould not be neglected. Nevertheless, while it remains to be seen whichalternative might finally emerge as dominant within the field, if indeedsuch an approach will emerge, in the meantime there is much to be gainedfrom revisiting this founding work of the discursive approach to politenessin pursuit of a more coherent approach in the field of politeness research.
REFERENCESArundale, Robert (1999). An alternative model and ideology of communicationfor an alternative to politeness theory. Pragmatics 9, 1: 119-153.Arundale, Robert (2004). Co-constituting face in conversation: Analternative to Brown & Levinson's politeness theory. Paper presented to theNational Communication Association, Chicago, IL.Arundale, Robert (2006). Face as relational and interactional: Acommunication framework for research on face, facework, and politeness.Journal of Politeness Research 2, 2.Brown, Penelope & Stephen Levinson (1987). Politeness. Some Universals inLanguage Usage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Eelen, Gino (2001). A Critique of Politeness Theories. St. Jerome, Manchester.Jucker, Andreas (1994). Review of Richard J. Watts, Sachiko Ide and KonradEhlich (eds.), Politeness in Language. Multilingua 13, 3: 329-334.Keinpointner (1999). Special issue on Ideologies of Politeness. Pragmatics9, 1.Leech, Geoffrey (2005). Politeness: Is there an East-West divide? Journalof Foreign Languages (Shanghai International Studies University) 6: 3-30.Lakoff, Robin & Sachiko Ide, eds. (2005). Broadening the Horizons ofLinguistic Politeness. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.Locher, Miriam & Richard Watts (2005). Politeness theory and relationalwork. Journal of Politeness Research 1, 1: 9-33.Mills, Sara (2003). Politeness and Gender. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge.Terkourafi, Marina (2005a). An argument for a frame-based approach topoliteness: Evidence from the use of the imperative in Cypriot Greek. InLakoff & Ide (eds.), 99-116.Terkourafi, Marina (2005b). Beyond the micro-level in politeness research.Journal of Politeness Research 1, 2: 237-262.Terkourafi, Marina (2006). Review of Politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 38:418-428.
Michael Haugh is a lecturer teaching English as an International Languageas well as Linguistics in the School of Languages and Linguistics atGriffith University. His main research interests include pragmatics,sociolinguistics, intercultural communication, and the relationship betweenlanguage and identity. He has published work on politeness and implicaturein a number of journals including the Journal of Pragmatics, Multilingua,Pragmatics and Intercultural Pragmatics, as well as a chapter on face inthe recently edited volume "Asian Business Discourse(s)." His most recentwork is an article on "The co-constitution of politeness implicature inconversation" to be published in the Journal of Pragmatics.
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