Generally, recent work on politeness has usefully stressed that politeness is not inherent in linguistic forms but is a contextual judgement. More fundamentally, Eelen (2001) and Watts (e.g. 2003) argue vigorously that the classic pragmatic approaches articulate a pseudo-scientific theory of particular social behaviors and label it politeness (so-called politeness2), while ignoring the lay person’s conception of politeness (so-called politeness1) as revealed, for example, through the use of the terms polite and politeness to refer to particular social behaviors. The key issue here is who decides that some piece of language counts as polite? Is it the analyst applying a politeness theory to a recording of language or is it the actual user of the language making comments about it?

Discursive politeness approaches lean towards politeness1, and indeed share some of its characteristics (see, for example, the discussion of politeness1 in Eelen 2001: 32–43). For example, they share a dislike of universalizing generalizations. A key feature of discursive approaches is that they emphasize that the very definitions of politeness itself are subject to discursive struggle (what might be polite for one participant might be impolite for another). Discursive approaches typically have at least some of the following characteristics:

• the claim that there is no one meaning of the term “politeness” but that it is a point of discursive struggle;

• the centrality of the perspective of participants;

• an emphasis on situated and emergent meanings rather than pre-defined meanings;

• the claim that politeness is evaluative in character (that it is used in judgements of people’s behaviors);

• an emphasis on context;

• the claim that politeness is intimately connected with social norms, which offer a grasp on the notion of appropriateness (note here the connection with the socio-cultural view of politeness .

• the reduction of the role of intention in communication (it is rejected, or at least weakened or re-conceptualized);

• a focus on the micro, not the macro; and

• a preference for qualitative methods of analysis as opposed to quantitative.

Works that might claim to be discursive include: Eelen 2001; Locher and Watts 2005; Mills 2003; Watts 2003 (Locher 2006 is a very useful outline of the approach). In 2011 the volume Discursive Approaches to Politeness, edited by the Linguistic Politeness Research Group (LPRG), appeared.3 However, one problem for this approach is that the publications which cover it vary widely in what they take to be discursive, often mixing discursive elements with non-discursive elements (see Haugh 2007b). For example, work by Richard Watts and Miriam Locher incorporates the notion of “politic behavior”, which will be discussed. Politic behavior is not a label that is at all familiar to the lay person. Further, discursive analyses of data sometimes seem suspiciously reminiscent of the kinds of analyses undertaken by scholars who are considered non-discursive (e.g. because they deploy intuitions and interpretations flowing from the analyst rather than the lay person).

The discursive approach is concerned with “developing a theory of social politeness” (Watts 2003: 9, et passim; our emphasis), though creating a “theory” of politeness seems not to be the objective for the discursive politeness approach (cf. Watts 2005: xlii). A consequence of focusing on the dynamic and situated characteristics of politeness is that politeness is declared not to be a predictive theory (Watts 2003: 25), or, apparently, even a post-hoc descriptive one (ibid.: 142). This is unlike classic politeness theories, especially Brown and Levinson (1987), which predict the choice of pragmatic strategies in the light of the degree of face threat as determined by sociological variables. A pragmatic approach has a different agenda:

The starting point of pragmatics is primarily in language: explaining communicative behavior. By studying this we keep our feet firmly on the ground, and avoid getting lost too easily in abstractions such as “face” or “culture”. The basic question is: what did s mean [to convey] by saying X? It is useful to postulate the Politeness Principle (PP), I claim, not because it explains what we mean by the word “politeness” (an English word which in any case doesn’t quite match similar words in other languages), but because it explains certain pragmatic phenomena. (Leech 2003: 104–105).

Bearing in mind, one can see that the discursive approach is more sympathetic to the prescriptive social norm view (etiquette manuals, for example, provide insight into what the lay person would label polite). In contrast, the pragmatic approach is more sympathetic to the experiential social norm view, given that it often focuses on regular usages (cf. strategies) in context – usages which have usually become regular because they are expedient.

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