Discourse-Level Politeness and Implicature

Abstract

This paper considers politeness at the discourse level in terms of strategic choice. We begin with a discussion of the nature and levels of linguistic politeness from semantic and pragmatic perspectives, then turning to the way in which such strategies can be realized in natural language. A distinction is drawn between formal and polite linguistic behavior. We then provide a formal analysis in terms of the topological analysis of game strategies in an infinitely repeated game. This analysis extends that of [2]. It improves on that earlier work in three ways: (i) by considering a wider range of player ‘types’, (ii) by implementing the distinction between formality and politeness, and (iii) by analyzing a much wider range of kinds of politeness strategies, together with their positions in the Borel hierarchy [8].