Defining politeness: Universality in appropriateness (2022)

Despite featuring prominently in religions and legal frameworks, and being discussed by anthropologists and sociologists in relation to rights and obligations in society, reciprocity has not received the attention it deserves in the (im)politeness literature. This article proposes and defines the Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity, which concerns the (mis)matching of (im)politeness across participants in interaction – something which can be construed in terms of a debit-credit balance sheet. We claim that this principle, driven by morality, is a fundamental mechanism in shaping (im)politeness in interaction and triggering the search for (im)politeness implicatures. We show how it impacts on various kinds of (im)politeness and interacts with context, especially power. The latter part of the article, focusing on requestive exchanges, is more quantitative in orientation, involving studies based on informant testing and corpus analysis. These reveal, for example, that (im)politeness matching is by far the most common interaction, that mismatches are perceived as clear deviations, and that certain kinds of (mis)matching are associated with specific contexts (e.g. school classroom interaction is associated with downward shifts from polite to less polite). Finally, we briefly discuss future research avenues.

Chinese data have been frequently used as a testing ground of Western theories of (im)politeness. While making significant progress, most of the existing studies still concentrate on the dominant Confucianist social norms and analyze a limited number of variants of face-to-face and mediated interactional contexts. By adopting an emancipatory approach to (im)politeness research, we seek to broaden the scope of Chinese (im)politeness research. In this paper, we review the major studies of Chinese (im)politeness published in English and Chinese outlets from the emancipation of theories of (im)politeness, research methods, and contextual variations. The results show evidence for both the Same Position and the Different Position in the East-West debate at various levels of analysis. We argue that scholars should further examine underlying assumptions held by researchers and interlocutors, constructing generalized models for contrastive analysis and seeking for cross-fertilization between Chinese and Western politeness theories.

The principal motivation for this study is to (i) analyse the types of expectations underlying people's evaluation of an act or behaviour as offensive and (ii) explore the various social and cultural factors that inform these expectations. Drawing on a corpus of 150 diary report forms written by Persian-speaking informants, the study revealed seven different, yet interrelated, expectations the unrealisation of which had led to taking of offence. In order to identify how these expectations are shared across a speech community, from each category of expectations two examples were randomly given to 100 new participants. As the retrospective comments revealed, while the expectations identified do exist in the speech community under investigation, they are not equally shared across all members. The ongoing tension between heterogeneity and homogeneity of these expectations can be explained by referring to both cognitive and relational bases of expectations.

We forecast how HRM practice and HR research on fairness in the workplace will need to change in light of several specific global workplace trends, namely, increases in workplace diversity and globalization, technology mediated relationships, individualized psychological contracts, and service-related jobs. After describing these trends, we illustrate how the meaning of fairness and worker expectations regarding fairness may be changing in response. We further discuss how those changes will impact HR management.

Ranting is often conflated with flaming and hating, which are frequently interpreted as inappropriate forms of online interaction. Scholars have categorized rants, which contain emotional criticisms of something or someone, as “anti-social” (Vrooman, 2002). However, scholars are moving away from universal interpretations of inappropriateness, and now engage in contextual analyses of online behavior. The present study examines a random sample of 330 text comments (drawn from a pool of 13,609 comments) that were posted across 35 rant videos on YouTube. Ranters describe numerous technical and social problems with the video-sharing site. But how are rant videos received on YouTube? Do commenters characterize them as inappropriate? Do rants stimulate productive discussion or do most commenters prefer to express emotional support for the ranter? Rather than displaying personal offense, numerous commenters discussed how problems with YouTube were being publicly revealed in video rants. Such issues are particularly relevant, as expectations about communicative norms are being proposed and contested in new media sites (Markham, 2011). This study argues that under the right circumstances, ranting helps construct an emotional public sphere (Lunt and Stenner, 2005) that generates discussion among similarly concerned YouTube participants about their online communicative rights and privileges.

Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 53, 2013, pp. 112-130

Though, in recent years, impoliteness research has embraced a view of impoliteness as dynamically co-constructed in interaction, the role of impoliteness in polylogal discourse is still in need of further examination. Drawing from a corpus of naturally occurring classroom discourse, this paper uses a genre approach (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010a, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010b, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010c) to examine the role of face-threat witnesses in small-group discussion practices among adolescents. Our research shows that face-threat witnesses respond to impoliteness in complex and dynamic ways that are integral to the co-construction of impoliteness, and that would have been missed entirely if the focus of our analysis had been purely dyadic. In view of our findings, we propose a refinement of extant models of response options (Culpeper et al., 2003, Bousfield, 2007, Bousfield, 2008) that incorporates the response options available to face-threat witnesses, thus moving beyond the dyad. Accounting for the multifunctionality of impoliteness in polylogal interaction allows for an understanding of impoliteness as constitutive, not just disruptive, of social life. With further application, our proposed refinement of extant models can help expand research that examines manifestations of impoliteness in a wide range of (non)institutional, polylogal discourse.

Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 86, 2015, pp. 36-42

The notion of “offence” lies at the core of current models of impoliteness. Yet is also well acknowledged that being impolite is not necessarily the same thing as being offended. In this paper, it is suggested that previous work on causing offence (Culpeper, 2011) can be usefully complemented by an analysis of taking offence. It is proposed that taking offence can be productively examined with respect to a model of (im)politeness as interactional social practice (Haugh, 2015). On this view, taking offence is analysed in part as a social action in and of itself, which means those persons registering or sanctioning offence in an interaction, whether explicitly or implicitly, can themselves be held morally accountable for this taking of offence. It is further suggested that taking offence as a form of social action can be productively theorised as a pragmatic act which is invariably situated with respect to particular activity types and interactional projects therein (Culpeper and Haugh, 2014). This position is illustrated by drawing from analyses of initial interactions amongst speakers of (American and Australian) English who are not previously acquainted. It is suggested that ways in which taking offence are accomplished both afforded and constrained by the demonstrable orientation on the part of participants to agreeability in the course of getting acquainted.

Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 44, Issue 12, 2012, pp. 1549-1553

This collection of papers on disagreement adds new theoretical and methodological insights. It brings together interest in opposition in discourse with research on relational issues, traditionally discussed in work on identity construction and im/politeness research. We propose that the following observations in an attempt to systematically approach the understanding of disagreement: a) expressing opposing views is an everyday phenomenon; b) certain practices are prone to contain disagreement so that this speech act is expected rather than the exception; for example, they are in fact a sine qua non in decision making and problem solving talk in either ever day or professional contexts; other practices and contexts are less tolerant of the expression of disagreement; c) disagreeing cannot be seen as an a priori negative act; communities and groups of people have developed different norms over time which influence how disagreement is perceived and enacted; d) as in all language usage, the ways in which disagreement is expressed - and not only its occurrence per se - will have an impact on relational issues (face-aggravating, face-maintaining, face-enhancing); at the same time, expectations about how disagreement is valued in a particular practice will influence what forms participants choose. Against this backdrop, the aim of this special issue is to revisit the existing body of research on disagreement and to probe further in a variety of contexts in five papers and an epilogue to contribute to the debate of the impact of the context/medium on the interaction, the role of im/politeness in disagreements, the notion of ‘appropriateness’ in talk and the theorising of disagreement in general.

Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 85, 2015, pp. 81-91

Im/politeness has recently been conceptualized in terms of evaluations that not only arise in social practice but also form a social practice (Haugh, 2013, Kádár and Haugh, 2013). This necessitates the analysis of politeness to go beyond the analysis of language to the analysis of social actions and meanings. This paper examines the role of Persian honorifics (the language which is conventionally associated with politeness) in the im/politeness evaluations that arise in localized interactions. Conversation Analysis is used to analyze two cases of honorifics-included social interactions in Persian. The implications for im/politeness theory are discussed in conclusion.

Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 92, 2019, pp. 419-427

Higher mathematics is an obligatory subject for most students at technical universities and is especially difficult to understand. Many multimedia studies have shown that politeness in instructions and feedback can enhance learning outcomes. Thus, this study aimed to investigate if politeness could improve the learning performance of students in an online mathematics course that was presented within a year. In our experiment, 277 students were randomly assigned to a 2 (politeness in instructions; polite vs. direct) × 2 (politeness in feedback; polite vs. direct) factorial between-subjects design. The learning material consisted of four chapters of higher mathematics and four post-tests. Unexpectedly, politeness in instructions did not influence the results. Furthermore, groups receiving polite feedback spent more time on the exercises in the chapters and achieved higher scores in chapters and post-tests. In sum, politeness in feedback influenced learning positively, but politeness in instructions did not have any influence.

Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 185, 2021, pp. 118-130

What are the underlying mechanisms driving linguistic politeness? While opposing theoretical positions have argued for either strategic or socio-normative motivations for politeness, we propose to approach these as complementary components in an adaptive communicative process, in which individual strategic choices and collective requirements for social cohesion modulate each other. To substantiate these claims, we designed a laboratory experiment where pairs of human participants request objects from an ‘alien intelligence’ in an artificial laboratory language and compete for resources with simulated alien agents. Our findings suggest that both the functionality of politeness markers (i.e. the extent to which markers were associated with the probability of reward) and the relationships between agents (i.e. competitiveness between players) were predictive of participants' propensity to adapt to politeness markers in their linguistic environment and use them to win the game. While functionality was the stronger predictor of the two, the usage of politeness markers was found to increase in perfectly non-functional contexts, as long as participants were competing against each other. In addition, the experimental manipulations were found to affect participants' intuitions about the meaning of the alien politeness markers. We posit that this conceptual and experimental framework can inform fundamental discussions in politeness research.