Politeness (review)

Richard Watts starts his preface by stating that ‘writing an introduction to politeness is like being in mortal combat with a many-headed hydra. You’ve barely severed one head when a few more grow in its place’ (xi). The same applies to reviewing this book, which is authored by one of the most prolific writers, editors, and reviewers in the area of politeness.

Research on politeness has had an incredible expansion, especially since Brown and Levinson’s (1978) monograph, and continues burgeoning at a fast pace (see e.g. Holmes & Stubbe 2003, Mills 2003, Caffi 2007, Hickey & Stewart 2005, not to mention a number of related recent articles and even the new Journal of Politeness Research). This proliferation indicates, on the one hand, the researchers’ enthusiasm for the issue and, on the other, their apparent conviction that there is still something missing from this extensive body of literature. For W, an important missing aspect is an account of the social, historical, and political conditions that shape the formation and use of language (Eelen 2001:257).

In Ch. 1, W sets the scene and argues that participants in interactions are constantly involved in a discursive struggle over the value of the term politeness. This struggle should be ‘the central focus of a theory of politeness’ rather than social scientists’ theoretical construct (9). He thus endorses an earlier distinction between first- and second-order politeness (Watts et al. 1992:3) and argues that ‘investigating first-order politeness is the only valid means of developing a social theory of politeness’ (9). Noting the difficulty of distinguishing between the two, he adopts his earlier notion of ‘politic behaviour’ (Watts 1989). This is behavior that, although sometimes in excess of what is needed (like politeness), is not salient (unlike politeness), being entailed by the institutionalized discursive format of the specific interaction (19). He then explores the terms polite and politeness to show that not only is the lay understanding of these terms culturally varied but also their meanings are constantly renegotiated in social interactions throughout history. For W (20), all social interactions are enactments and reproductions of previous similar ones but are also open to discursive negotiation, which may provoke the reconstruction of the institutionalized format.

In Ch. 2, W reprises the distinction between lay notions of politeness and theoretical constructs of it, highlighting the unjustified omission of impoliteness from most accounts. He defines ‘politic behaviour’ as ‘mutually shared forms of consideration for others’, ‘polite behaviour’ as ‘an observable “addition”’ to the first, and ‘impoliteness’ as ‘an observable violation of politic behaviour’ (30; see Xie et al. 2005 for an appraisal of these concepts). He then probes the evolution of the lay concept of politeness from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century and traces the semantic transformation and the ideological underpinnings of the concepts used and the etymological connections of related terms. He shows the cultural and historical relativity of the conceptualization of politeness as mutual consideration for others and concludes with an interesting account of the links between the ideology of politeness in eighteenth-century Britain and the development of Standard English.

Ch. 3 reviews the best-known approaches to linguistic politeness and deals with criticisms expressed. W refutes the tendency of all these approaches to objectify the concept of politeness since doing so ignores the discursive nature of the concept along with the individual involved in interactions. He rightly notes that definitions of politeness are rare and prescriptive, constituting attempts at defining first- rather than second-order politeness.

Ch. 4 focuses on major criticisms of Brown and Levinson’s theory. The author argues that the strategies represented in this theory constitute facework rather than politeness (Bargiela-Chiappini 2003) and that their manifestations are not inherently polite but may acquire a politeness index in situated discourse. His main argument is that politeness phenomena should be embedded in a social theory which is largely missing from previous models (Robin Lakoff, Geoffrey Leech). Brown and Levinson are also criticized, despite having placed their model within the...