Interpersonal Pragmatics Introduction

We briefly mentioned Leech’s (1983) usage of the term “interpersonal rhetoric”, which in turn draws on Halliday’s (e.g. 1973) use of “interpersonal” for one of his three semantic or functional components of language (the others being “ideational” and “textual”). Halliday ([1970] 2002: 175) writes that the interpersonal function “serves to establish and maintain social relations”. Leech (1983: 56) interprets the interpersonal function as “language functioning as an expression of one’s attitudes and an influence upon the attitudes and behavior of the hearer”. Together, these quotations capture the two important areas of concern for interpersonal pragmatics, namely, interpersonal relations (mutual social connections amongst people that are mediated by interaction, including power, intimacy, roles, rights and obligations) and interpersonal attitudes (perspectives, usually value-laden and emotionally charged, on others that are mediated by interaction, including generosity, sympathy, like/dislike, disgust, fear and anger). These areas are strongly linked. Love, for example, involves both. Consider that the expression lovers refers to two or more people who are connected with each other, whereas the expression in love refers to a perspective on someone else. Both relations and attitudes shape, and in turn are shaped, by language in interaction. To give a simple example, being in love may give rise to loving talk, and in turn that loving talk may result in the target falling in love and reciprocating the loving talk, which may establish their connection as lovers, and so on. It is worth briefly noting that the area of interpersonal attitudes is linked to (1) interpersonal emotions, which encompass embodied feelings or states of mind often characterized by participants as “irrational and subjective, unconscious rather than deliberate [and] genuine rather than artificial” (Edwards 1999: 273), and (2) interpersonal evaluations, which involve “appraisals or assessment of persons, or our relationships with those persons, which influence the way we think and feel about those persons and relationships, and consequently sometimes what we do” (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 61) (for the nature of those links, see the work of Teun van Dijk, e.g. 1987: 188–193).

The main area which Leech (1983) discusses under the heading of interpersonal rhetoric is politeness, and we will do likewise. Both politeness and impoliteness can be seen as interpersonal attitudes. We should note at this early stage Leech’s (1983: 62) point that interpersonal pragmatics plays a greater role in strongly situated uses of language (e.g. face-to-face interaction with an assistant in a coffee shop) as opposed to “unsituated” uses (e.g. encyclopedia articles). The notion of situated can be understood with reference to Goffman’s ([1964] 1972: 63) definition of a social situation as “an environment of mutual monitoring possibilities, anywhere within which an individual will find himself accessible to the naked senses of all others who are ‘present’, and similarly find them accessible to him”.

What exactly is politeness? Need the question be asked? We all know what politeness is, don’t we? Imagine you are ensconced at a dinner table in England: politeness might include remembering to use please when you want something passed, saying something nice about the food and definitely not burping. Actually, all of these particular things are somewhat more complex – even problematic – than they first appear. The word please is the “magic word” that British parents impress upon their children to use with all requests, and it looms large in the British psyche. But how is it actually used? Aijmer (1996: 166–168) provides some evidence. It matters how the rest of the request is worded: please is most likely to be used in conjunction with an imperative (e.g. “please make me a cup of tea”) or with could you (e.g. “could you please make me a cup of tea”), but much less likely to be used with can you or will you. You will note that we failed to specify whether you were ensconced at a family meal or had been invited to dinner. Differences in situation would influence whether you use the word please. Please tends to be used in relatively formal situations, and in business letters and written notices. It is particularly frequent in service encounters, notably via the telephone (all too often we hear “can you hold the line please!”). So, if the dinner were a formal invitation, please would be more likely to be used. Complimenting the cook on the food may also seem a straightforwardly nice thing to do, but it is not straightforward: you place the recipient of the compliment in a rather tricky position. If they simply accept the compliment, they may sound rather immodest, but if they simply reject it, they may offend the person who made it. Consequently, responses to compliments in Britain tend to weave a path between these two positions. A response such as “it’s kind of you to say that” suggests that the compliment is (at least in part) a product of the complimenter’s kindness and not necessarily a true reflection of the value of the food. Finally, even burping cannot always with certainty be seen as the antithesis of politeness. Cultural considerations come into play. In some cultures, burping may be acceptable, or even a sign of appreciation of the food – a compliment! Needless to say, culture keenly influences politeness. The use of the word please is more typical of British culture than North American, being used about twice as frequently (Biber et al. 1999: 1098). This is not to say that American culture is less polite. There are other ways of doing politeness, and those other ways might be evaluated as polite by North Americans, just as using please in certain contexts might be evaluated as polite by speakers of British English. Politeness, or impoliteness for that matter, is in the eyes and ears of the beholder. It is a particular attitude towards behavior, and one that is especially sensitive to the relational aspects of context. The fact that politeness involves both the interpretation of a behavior in context and working out its attitudinal implications (rather than the straightforward decoding of a sign of politeness) is what makes it a pragmatic and interpersonal matter.

Politeness, then, involves a polite attitude towards behaviors in a particular context. In fact, that attitude is often extended towards the people who do politeness: they are considered polite people. What those behaviors, linguistic and non-linguistic, consist of, how they vary in context, and why they are deemed polite are some of the key areas of politeness study. The first part here introduces two different approaches to politeness. The middle and largest part here focuses on the most popular politeness framework, namely, that of Brown and Levinson ([1978] 1987) (hereafter Brown and Levinson). We briefly considers a new, rapidly developing area, closely related to politeness, namely, impoliteness. Finally, we conclude by looking at relatively recent work which argues that the notion of politeness and its place within interpersonal pragmatics be reconsidered from an interactional perspective.