The historical understanding of historical (im)politeness

Abstract

If historians have an obligation to make sense of the past and to explain the origins of their world for the society in which they live, then the quest for coherence in their subject must be their primary goal.(Theodore K. Rabb, The Last Days of the Renaissance, 2006: xxii) Linguistic (im)politeness and the quest for cultural coherencesA central yet controversial concern for all studies of the past is the issue of periodisation, the question of the beginning and ending of historical periods. Although the temporal boundaries, and the geographical and/or cultural coordinates, of traditionally recognised eras such as Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance or Modernity are contested (and some historians even feel that attempts at periodisation are futile), the trivial point stands that from time immemorial "things have changed". As to the positively non-trivial question of what, then, are the "things" that are liable to change, and why, how or in what way have they developed over time, historian Theodore Rabb argues the relevance of the study of the cultural coherences "that bind periods together" and "are essential if one wishes to define and comprehend the shape of the past" (2006: xxi). Opposing postmodern relativism, and siding with philosopher Robin Collingwood for whom "what we call history is neither invented nor found […] but the outcome of a constructive dialogue between the individual historian and the materials left to us by the past" (2006: xxi), Rabb advocates the necessity of concentrating "on the substance that underlies the changes we explore" in order "to identify a succession of fundamental shifts in historical periods" (2006: xxii). Regarding the recognition of historically distinct coherent patterns, especially the determination of the unifying features of past periods, Rabb stresses that

Introduction

“…A number of scholars working on both synchronic and diachronic politeness (e.g. Kádár and Culpeper 2010;Jucker 2011;Bax and Kádár 2011;Kádár and Haugh 2013) have pointed out that historical (im)politeness may as well have a key applicability beyond this scope: it can both operate as a testing ground for modern (im)politeness frameworks and bring innovative analytic concepts into synchronic research (see Section 2). As Bax and Kádár argue, perhaps no politeness theory can be complete without 'the establishment of diachronic trends in (im)politeness, including cross-cultural historical developments in (im)polite language behaviour and its evolutionary antecedents'.…”