The pragmatics of politeness by Geoffrey Leech (review)

In the past fifteen years, the field of politeness studies has experienced momentous growth both in the range of phenomena studied and in the number of venues dedicated to the relevant research. In terms of the former, impoliteness, aggression, and mock politeness as well as mock impoliteness are now among the topics regularly addressed; while the latter include no less than two dedicated journals (the Journal of Politeness Research, founded in 2005, and the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, founded in 2013), a lively series of annual conferences and workshops, and, in the past five years alone, numerous book-length publications including a dedicated Handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (Culpeper et al. 2016). It is in this climate of renewed interest in im/politeness research that Geoffrey Leech’s The pragmatics of politeness comes as a welcome addition to remind us of the linguistic roots of the field and, unwittingly, given the author’s passing within a month of its publication, to serve as his legacy into the future.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that L, alongside Robin Lakoff (1973) and Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1978, 1987), was one of the founders of the field. His interest in politeness dates to the 1970s, when he wrote Language and tact (Leech 1977), insights from which were later incorporated into his classic Principles of pragmatics (Leech 1983). Already in this early text, the seeds of his maxim-based view of politeness are evident: the mapping between (semantic) sense and (pragmatic) force, indirectness, and politeness as a scalar notion are all discussed. For L, politeness (or rather, tact) is about strategic conflict avoidance and showing regard for others. But it also serves a deeper purpose: it ensures the trust and goodwill necessary for enabling the spirit of cooperation that underlies Grice’s cooperative principle (CP) to take effect. This is quite a revolutionary view, since, unlike Lakoff (1973), he did not see politeness and cooperation as competing principles alternatingly taking precedence depending on the exigencies of the context; nor did he, like Brown and Levinson (1987:5), think of Grice’s CP as a ‘presumptive framework for communication’ grounded in reality through a set of politeness strategies. Rather, he viewed politeness as primary, as setting the scene for the CP to operate on. As he famously put it, ‘unless you are polite to your neighbour, the channel of communication between you will break down and you will no longer be able to borrow his mower’ (1983:82).

In this, as in much else of what he wrote, L was unashamedly British. His view of politeness as, first and foremost, showing regard for others’ feelings, qualities, and opinions, rings a familiar tone to those who knew him, leading one to suspect that what he aimed to account for theoretically was his own understanding of politeness—a first-order (or politeness1) definition of the term—despite his frequent insistence that his approach was resolutely a second-order (or politeness2) one (48).¹ And justifiably so. For he never was one to undertake the fieldwork that would be required for a true politeness1 analysis of the phenomenon. A more accurate characterization might therefore be to say that his politeness2 definition was rather close to his politeness1 one, the interdependence between the two being a point he was quick to recognize himself (48).

That should not be taken to mean, however, that his theory was founded solely on intuition. This is made abundantly clear in the book under review in the chapters discussing specific phenomena: Ch. 5 on apologies, Ch. 6 on requests, and Ch. 7, which briefly touches on numerous other ‘speech events’—a term he felt better captures the complexity of phenomena that involve several acts or moves (115)—including offers, invitations, compliments, criticisms, thanks, agreement and disagreement, advice, congratulations, and more. These chapters draw on corpus data, most notably from the British National Corpus, which he helped compile. Using corpora...