Outline of the chapter

Social interaction relies on language not just as a means of communicating information, but also for establishing rapport between speakers. To this end societies have developed various conventions for the linguistic expression of politeness. This chapter first explains the difference between every-day and technical notions of politeness and then introduces theoretical concepts for its analysis. It shows that the necessity to differentiate speech behaviour in terms of politeness arises from the need to cooperate under conditions of inequality. The Cooperative Principle of conversation serves as a point of departure, and the concept of ‘face’ is adduced as an analytic tool for distinguishing two kinds of politeness strategies, positive face and negative face. Further, it is demonstrated how the markedness theory can explain speakers’ choices of more or less polite expressions. The question of whether politeness is a feature that characterizes language or speech behaviour is discussed, and it is argued that, while languages differ in regards to how strongly they encode politeness distinctions, the politeness level of every speech act depends on speakers’ choices from the grammatical, lexical and stylistic means afforded by the language. Examples from many different languages illustrate the complexity and variety of linguistic politeness.