Language Between Bodies: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding Linguistic Politeness in American Sign Language

This article proposes an answer to the primary question of how the American Sign Language (ASL) community in the United States conceptualizes (im)politeness and its related notions. It begins with a review of evolving theoretical issues in research on (im)politeness and related methodological problems with studying (im)politeness in natural signed-language interaction. Because human conceptual systems of abstract notions such as (im)politeness employ cognitive metaphorical mappings and because ASL has strong iconic devices at its disposal, this article reports the results of applying the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987, 1993; Wilcox 2000; Taub 2001; see also Steen 2007 and Steen et al. 2010) to an analysis of ethnographically collected linguistic data. Because conceptualizations of (im)politeness are better understood as part of a broader system of conceptual domains, this article provides a survey of metaphorical (as well as metonymical and image schematic) mappings and their respective linguistic expressions, which constitute ASL's (im)politeness-related system of domains. Also included is a discussion of how this methodological and analytical approach may advance theoretical notions of (im)politeness.