The Pragmatics of Politeness

Abstract

This book presents a general account of politeness, championing the thesis that politeness is communicative altruism. It gives an account of a wide range of politeness phenomena in English, illustrated by hundreds of examples of actual language use taken from authentic British and American sources. Leech takes a pragmatic approach based on his earlier work on politeness, going back to his well-known book Principles of Pragmatics (1983), but also taking on board more recent approaches. The 1983 book introduced the now widely accepted distinction between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of politeness, seeing politeness both from a linguistic angle, and from a social angle. This book gives more attention to the recently-neglected pragmalinguistic side, and, drawing on the work of Grice, Searle, and the Neo-Griceans, rejects the prevalent view that, since politeness is indefinitely variable according to context, it is impossible to apply the terms polite or impolite to linguistic phenomena. The book provides a broad survey of politeness in present-day English, covering all major speech acts that are either positively or negatively associated with politeness, such as requests, apologies, compliments, offers, agreement, and disagreement. There are also chapters dealing with impoliteness and the related phenomena of irony (mock politeness) and banter (mock impoliteness). Supplementary chapters deal with research methods, and the learning of English as a second language. A final chapter looks back over a thousand years on the history of politeness in the English language.