Politeness

Abstract

Little progress has been made in modern politeness studies despite mountains of publications that have been bombarding the politeness market over the past three or so decades, rendering the latter in much a mess. It is argued in this paper that (1) politeness does not necessarily entail sincerity, and sincere politeness and insincere politeness should be distinguished; (2) there is no need to develop two different frameworks to account for politeness and impoliteness respectively; any framework that can be used to examine politeness phenomena should also aim for dealing with impoliteness phenomena;(3) polite language is not necessarily equated with politeness, and impolite language is not necessarily equated with impoliteness; and (4) though there is some need to differentiate between polite behaviour and politic behaviour, between politeness 1 and politeness 2 , Watts' (2003) work is problematic.

Divine impoliteness: How Arabs negotiate Islamic moral order on Twitter

“…A ritual, in particular, can trigger polite or impolite evaluations, as rituals maintain the order of things and tend to imply a moral stance (Kádár 2017a). Consequently, some scholars have retheorized impoliteness as a matter of morality (Haugh 2015(Haugh , 2018Kádár 2017a;Xie 2011Xie , 2018Xie et al 2005).…”

Gender and Politeness in a Foreign Language Academic Context

“…Moreover, according to Xie, He and Lin (2005), Brown and Levinson's (1987) model has been shown to be theoretically reductionistic, logically unsupportable and empirically dubious" (p. 432). Also, Spencer-Oatey (2008) argues that Brown and Levinson's (1987) notion of face has been underspecified and proposed a modified framework conceptualizing face and rapport suggesting that rapport management includes three major components: "the management of face, the management of sociality rights and obligations, and the management of interactional goals" (p. 13).…”

(Im)politeness

“…20 Recently, Eelen's (2001) critique of some mainstream politeness paradigms and call for radical reconceptualizations of the very notion of (im)politeness and related issues have led many researchers in this domain to begin to elaborate new approaches. This, to a certain degree, yields the emergence of a shift of focus, namely, from the speaker to the hearer, from how the speaker produces (im)polite language to how the hearer evaluates (im)polite language (see, e.g., Eelen 2001;Fukushima 2004;Haugh and Hinze 2003;Mills 2003;Spencer-Oatey 2005;Terkourafi, forthcoming;Watts 2003;Xie et al 2005;Xie and Li 2006a). However, there is still much work to be done, and there are still many questions that need to be answered, some of which may be formulated as follows: When does evaluation begin, and when does it stop?…”

“…For so many years, we have been talking about and in pursuit of universal phenomena, universal grammar, universal theories, or even universal universals, at the expense of refusing to acknowledge that 'universal' may turn out to be something that appears to be next to impossible, something that appears to reside in our mind only. 'Universal' seems to be something that appears to be more prescribed than described (see Xie 2006;Xie, 2007;Xie and He 2006;Xie et al 2005).…”