This opening chapter first discusses the important position politeness research holds in pragmatics. Four areas of research are selected for the purpose: speech acts, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and interaction on the Internet, with the overarching aim to show that politeness offers insights for how meaning is made and transmitted in each of these areas. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the discussion on the important role Chinese politeness plays in politeness research in general. Since the notion of Chinese face is a pillar of Brown and Levinson’s notion of face, an in-depth understanding of Chinese face and, subsequently, Chinese politeness, stands to benefit the understanding of Brown and Levinson’s thinking in their theory. In addition, research on Chinese face has been drawing an increasing amount of attention from scholars of politeness in recent decades, accumulating a literature the size of which few other languages can parallel and offering insights to the understanding of politeness that are unique and significant, a thorough exploration of Chinese politeness can inform the field about politeness theorizing.

In this book, Rong Chen provides a thorough discussion of Chinese politeness and argues for universality in politeness theorizing. Based on in-depth analyses, the author dichotomizes Chinese face into Face1 and Face2 – the former referring to the person and the latter to the persona of the speaker – and proposes a model of Chinese politeness (MCP), with the notion of harmony at the center. Chinese politeness thusly conceived – the author argues – should be seen as a cultural-specification of a universal theory of politeness dubbed Brown and Levinson Extended (B&L-E), a model that anchors with Brown and Levinson’s theory but with the incorporation of the notions of self-politeness and impoliteness. The author then applies MCP and B&L-E to the analyses of Chinese politeness, both diachronically and synchronically, and to comparisons of politeness between Chinese and other languages. The results demonstrate that B&L-E is capable of accounting for variation as well as consistency across time and space, differences as well as similarity between linguacultures, and fluidity as well as stability in meaning making in authentic interaction. The monograph hence presents a rare challenge to politeness research and pragmatics, which have emphasized particularism at the expense of universalism.

The Coda returns to the example with which the book begins: the story about the gentleman caller and the naked lady in the bathroom told by the character Fabienne in Truffaut’s film Stolen Kisses (1968). The aim of the Coda is to revisit key aspects of the theory and history of tact developed in the course of the book, and to draw its findings to a close.

Existing theories of human interaction tend to focus on tact as a marker of social distinction (Sartre, Bourdieu), and a tool for the cementation of bourgeois power (Foucault). The introduction sets the arena for a new account of tact that not only considers tact’s discriminating effects but also, and primarily, gives room to its equalizing dynamic and democratic potential. Using a story from Truffaut’s film Stolen Kisses (1968) about a gentleman and a naked lady in a bathroom as an example to unpack some of the key aspects of tact, I engage in critical dialogue with a wide range of scholars from different disciplines (including Wollheim, Kohut, Coplan, Luhmann, Derrida, Goffman, Žižek, Sartre, and Sennett). The aim is to address the following questions: What is tact? What is the relation between empathy, widely associated with proximity, and tact as a generator of distance? How can we distinguish tact from politeness and what are the implications of this distinction? How does social tact, as the spontaneous and individual art of mitigating social encounter, relate to hermeneutical tact as a particular mode of reading faces, images, texts?

The Conclusion to Part III follows William Hickey during his visit to Jamaica in 1775. His activities confirm the arrival of the consumer revolution on the island. This made Jamaica, in Trevor Burnard’s terms, “the jewel in the British imperial crown,” and introduced an array of consumer goods and cultural amenities such as cafes and theaters. This is the world in which Jamaicans had as much access to published materials as they desired whether through purchase from local merchants or metropolitan booksellers, orders through factors in England, or borrowing from friends. Analyses of Robert Long’s and Thomas Thistlewood’s notes focused on the themes of slavery, race, and religion, revealing a dynamic reading process in which they were anything but passive receptacles for Enlightenment ideas. Indeed, even when they read the same work, they came to very different conclusions about it. While the conclusions they drew cannot be generalized to all Jamaicans, they demonstrate the potential variety of viewpoints on issues importance to all of them. Like colonial and metropolitan readers, through reading they determined what “Enlightenment” meant to them and took possession of it.

This chapter focuses on grammatical resources for enacting social relations – mood. A basic distinction is drawn between the systems of formal mood and addressee deference on the one hand and the systems of informal mood, stance and politeness on the other. Subsequently the systems of polarity, modality, participant deference, highlight, comment and expletion are outlined. For each system the relevant choices for meaning are consolidated in system networks and their realisation in structure at clause, group/phrase and word ranks is specified.

This stage of the journey moves to ‘things speakers do with language’ in communication, covering a broad area from the literal-non-literal distinction and approaches to metaphor, through speech acts, ending with the ‘crossroads’ with ethical and social debates, such as those to do with negotiation and joint construction of meaning, questions of accountability and commitment (also in the case of lying and misleading), as well as politeness and appropriateness, including the use of taboo and offensive language. It offers a glimpse of how these topics benefit from an interdisciplinary manner of research and pauses with ample ‘food for thought’ questions on the way.

In this chapter we turn our attention to the role that pragmatics plays in the study of social interaction. When we communicate, we do not simply exchange information. We also manage relationships. As speakers, we can choose to be more or less direct, more or less formal, and more or less attentive to our hearers. The decisions that speakers make are often motivated by concern for how their hearers will react to the utterance, and by the effect that this might then have on the relationship. Perhaps the most influential work in this area of pragmatics is Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness. The first half of this chapter provides an overview of their framework and the politeness strategies that they propose. In the second half of the chapter, we discuss some recent developments that have arisen in response to Brown and Levinson’s work. These include analyses of impoliteness, consideration of how cultural variation might be incorporated into the pragmatics of interaction, and a shift to focus less on politeness and more on a broader notion of the relational work that speakers perform.

Sociopragmatics encompasses the study of social, interactional, and normative dimensions of language use, while intercultural pragmatics examines how language is used in social interactions between people who have different first languages and are usually considered to represent different cultures. While there are some points of overlap between them, the main aim of intercultural pragmatics is to analyze and theorize how language is used when participants have limited common ground and do not necessarily adhere to L1 preferred ways of speaking. It is thus argued in intercultural pragmatics not only that intercultural encounters are deserving of theorization in their own right, but that theorization in intercultural pragmatics can usefully inform pragmatics more broadly. The aim of this chapter is to consider how research in intercultural pragmatics can inform work in sociopragmatics, and vice versa. Following discussion of the main theoretical foundations of sociopragmatics, a case study examining the openings of first conversations in intercultural settings is used as a springboard to consider the place of sociopragmatics vis-à-vis intercultural pragmatics, and what insights each can bring to the other. The conclusion is that sociopragmatics would benefit from building more explicitly on the important empirical and theoretical insights offered by intercultural pragmatics.

This chapter reviews work on politeness and rapport management from an intercultural pragmatics perspective. After an initial introduction, the first main section considers conceptual and methodological challenges and explores three key issues: the various ways in which culture has been conceptualized within politeness theory, the challenge of integrating micro and macro perspectives on intercultural interaction, and first-order and second-order perspectives on politeness and culture. The second main section of the chapter turns to the performance of intercultural politeness. It starts by reporting on the many intercultural studies that have analyzed the impact of different speech and behavioral practices on interpersonal relations. It then reviews the much smaller number of intercultural politeness studies that have examined interlocutors’ potentially different interpretations of the context. After this, it turns to the possible impact of differing cultural values on intercultural politeness. The third main section focuses on intercultural politeness from an evaluation perspective. It presents recent theorizing on the evaluation process and considers methodological challenges in obtaining and interpreting relevant data. The chapter ends by proposing some areas for future research.

Chapter 9 begins with a review of the contribution of talk to maintaining homeostasis through “small talk” and other forms of “grooming,” both as a response to complex social structure and in facilitating social cooperation. It discusses the role of talk in forward projection of group-level representations, and the role of forward projection of a conversation topic in sustaining and managing conversations. It discusses the role of both physical constraints and social constraints such as politeness norms and facework in shaping the structure of conversation practices. It discusses the fine structure of conversation, in which the interpretations of utterances are confirmed or revised by subsequent utterances and the macro-structure of conversation (beginnings, turn-taking, topics, and closure).

Chapter 7 provides a detailed discussion of cognitive context, communication context, and how they interact in conversation. It covers framing and relevance theory, and introduces politeness and facework.

The chapter sets out to query ancient scholars’ awareness of politeness phenomena as reflected in language and the metalinguistic tools they used to describe them. Particular attention is devoted to the terms charientismos and astimos, as well as to some specific acceptations of reticentia and expressions like grave or durum dictu.

Even if as a general rule ancient grammarians and commentators did not analyse the ordinary spoken language, since they mostly focused on poetry and the more exalted prose genres, it can be argued that all commentators of literary texts pay some considerable attention to ordinary language in interaction, and some attempt is made by them at identifying and labelling what they correctly see as speakers’ rhetorical strategies to reach a pragmatic goal while avoiding conflicts with an interlocutor or giving offence. These writers also make interesting deductions about the social and educational implications of the correct use of politeness etiquette and ritualization.

The author examines how commands and requests are expressed in a corpus of Greek and Latin literature, in order to show how the politeness systems of ancient Greek and Latin may have differed.

This chapter presents a quantitative analysis of directives and the variation in their syntactic forms as related to gender and power. Directives are defined as speech acts in which a speaker attempts to get the recipient to carry out or refrain from action. This chapter focuses on who gives and receives directives, and more specifically on the function of linguistic mitigation strategies and how they correlate with the gender of the speaker and addressee in Disney and Pixar films. The issuing of directives is very common in Disney and Pixar films; because they are an essential plot element, their frequency is unrelated to gender. However, the use of mitigation as a politeness strategy is strongly correlated with gender in both Disney and Pixar, independent of other important contextual variables such as urgency and institutional power (p < .01 for both data sets). In the films, male authority is shown as hierarchical, direct, and aggressive; female authority is shown as subtle, and based on persuasion, suggestion, and collaboration — a pattern which echoes research findings on real-life behavior across a number of contexts.

The chapter focuses on the pragmatic valence of the parenthetical clause ut mihi (quidem) uidetur, a formulation which, by underscoring the subjective value of a statement, often conveys important interactional functions. A close survey of the use of this expression in Latin authors from Cicero to Augustinus highlights the essentially redressive value of the formula, which mainly acts as a mitigating hedge in stance taking, aimed at avoiding the negative effects of potential face-threatening acts and at managing self-presentation. Special attention is paid to Cicero’s usage of the formula as a refined conversational marker, through which the speaker showing modesty and awareness of others’ value reveals his superior moral and social standing. Hence, the chapter explores the role of speaker-oriented strategies of politeness in Rome, as part of an interactional style aimed at indexing a precise social identity.

This chapter begins the sociolinguistic journey of the book, focusing on quantitative analysis of compliments alongside more detail-oriented qualitative analysis. Compliments, as a speech act, work to attribute ‘goods’ to others and thus naturally carries larger value judgments about what a society views as ‘good.’ Compliments in childrens’ movies likewise act as a lens to reveal what the filmmakers consider worthy of praise in their characters — and importantly, whether that varies by gender. In Disney and Pixar films, compliment giving is not presented as particularly gendered but receiving compliments skews towards female recipients. Qualitatively, female characters on-screen together are portrayed as using compliments as a routine politeness strategy and female villains use the guise of this practice to hide more nefarious purposes. This chapter also finds some tentative initial evidence linking femininity and politeness. While compliments are used by both male and female characters, the female characters use compliments as a routine politeness or rapport-building strategy, whereas male characters complimenting another outside task-based settings is less routine, and at times even framed as a climatically “big deal.” This suggests that although characters of either gender can compliment, compliments as a routine politeness strategy is still associated more closely with femininity.