This book is written primarily for academics who already have some background in the field of linguistic politeness research. This Preface, on the contrary, is aimed at those educated readers – including graduate students and readers with intellectual interest in the theme of the book – who do not have such a background and who nevertheless wish to read Politeness, Impoliteness, and Ritual. In this longer-than-usual Preface, perhaps in a way that some may find unconventional, I attempt to provide an overview of the field of politeness research and the role that ritual, in my view, plays in it, to position the model presented in the book in a relatively simple way. Experts in the area may want to skip the Preface and start reading the book from Chapter 1, even though the Foreword's Sections II and III may be relevant to academics who are involved in politeness research but not in ritual studies.

Linguistic politeness research is a field (primarily) within pragmatics – the study of language use – which aims to study the (predominantly linguistic) ways through which people manage to get along with one another. Politeness, therefore, means something more to a researcher than what the lexeme ‘politeness’ popularly indicates: along with manifestations of what is regarded as ‘good manners’, it includes all types of interpersonal behaviour by means of which interpersonal relationships are built up and maintained, and through which people indicate that they take others’ feelings of how they should be treated into account. Politeness is also an ideologically loaded notion, which people use (and abuse) as a reference point as they think and talk about language use.

Politeness research has become a field of high impact following the success of the seminal monograph of Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson: Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (1987). Brown and Levinson's work has drawn attention to the fact that politeness (as understood in the technical sense) is a fundamental interactional phenomenon, which binds human beings together across languages and cultures. Brown and Levinson, and subsequent researchers, have revealed that the study of politeness and impoliteness raises many academic questions, such as whether or not one can describe similarities of these phenomena across languages and cultures in a systematic way, and whether or not it is possible to rationalise politeness and impoliteness behaviour through a particular universal pattern.