Pragmatic Approaches (Im)politeness

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Abstract

This chapter elaborates on how concepts and theories from linguistic pragmatics (notably, speech act theory and conversational implicature) have shaped early politeness theories. It critically examines key politeness notions (e.g. face threatening acts; politeness principles, maxims and implicatures; politeness strategies; indirectness), highlighting how their linguistic pragmatic underpinnings led to specific problems, yet also how developments in pragmatics (e.g. Neo-Gricean pragmatics, Relevance theory) have promoted positive developments in politeness research (e.g. the frame-based approach to politeness; the various proposals for strengthening and extending Grice’s account of implicature in the context of politeness). The chapter concludes by noting how recent pragmatics researchers have taken a renewed interest in (Im)politeness phenomena because of what they can contribute to experimental and formal pragmatics research.

Keywords

Conversational Implicature Output Strategy Felicity Condition Indirect Speech Cooperative Principle 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Linguistics and English LanguageLancaster UniversityLancasterUK
  2. 2.Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL)LeidenThe Netherlands

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