An alternative model and ideology of communication for an alternative to politeness theory

Abstract

Brown & Levinson opened their 1987 commentary on their theory of politeness by reemphasizing not only that their framework presumed " that Grice's theory of conversational implicature and the framework of maxims that give rise to such implicatures is essentially correct " (p. 3), but also that their theory presupposed " the other great contribution by Grice, namely his account of the nature of communication as a special kind of intention designed to be recognized by the recipient " (p. 7; cf. Levinson 1983: 16-18; 1995: 227-232). Brown & Levinson also closed their 1987 commentary with a projection for future development of their theory: Social interaction is remarkable for its emergent properties which transcend the characteristics of the individuals that jointly produce it; this emergent character is not something for which our current theoretical models are well equipped. Workers in artificial intelligence have already detected a paradigm clash between 'cognitivism' and 'interactionism', and noted the failure of the former paradigm to account for interactional organization (see ... Suchman, [1987]); our own account suffers from the same dose of 'cognitivism'. Work on interaction as a system thus remains a fundamental research priority, and the area from which improved conceptualizations of politeness are most likely to emerge. (1987: 48) One straightforward implication of juxtaposing this opening reemphasis and this closing projection is that an improved conceptualization of politeness will require a theoretical model of interaction other than the Gricean account of communication presupposed in Brown & Levinson's theory. In this paper I identify three broad patterns in the accounts of communication constituted by scholars in talking about language use: accounts in terms of conduits, in terms of code-using, and in terms of interactional achievement. I associate each account with a theoretical model of interaction, identified respectively as the information transmission, the encoding/decoding, and the co-constituting models of communication. Grice accounted for communication in terms of encoding-decoding, and I indicate why such an account is ill equipped for conceptualizing the emergent properties of human interaction, and hence untenable as the basis for an improved conceptualization of politeness. I provide an outline of the co-constituting model as a distinct alternative model that arises from " work on interaction as a system, " and that addresses emergence in interaction. The co-constituting model of communication has implications for a number of issues in language pragmatics, but I employ it here as the basis for sketching an alternative conceptualization of politeness consistent with Brown & Levinson's projection.