In his review of Power and politeness in action: Disagreements in
oral communication (2004), Douglas J. Glick raises two important
points: (i) the issue of identifying politeness in language, and (ii) the
ideological framework employed in language analysis. Before explicating my
understanding of politeness, I need to clarify that in chap. 5 on
disagreements, as Glick has noted, I do indeed focus on linguistic
strategies to express different points of view without discussing
politeness. For example, I deliberately refrain from labeling strategies
such as boosting or hedging as more or less polite. In other words, I do
not wish to imply that I have already witnessed manifestations of
politeness by simply identifying hedged utterances (or indirectness), nor
that I have witnessed impoliteness by identifying unmitigated linguistic
strategies (or directness). In this way, my approach to politeness differs
significantly from the more classical view, initiated by Brown &
Levinson 1987 and followed by many others, which
equates mitigation with politeness and directness with impoliteness.
Conversely, in my understanding, I use “mitigation” as a
purely technical term, and I make no claim that any given linguistic form
is inherently polite or impolite.