historical (im)politeness: an introduction - nytud link.pdf · historical (im)politeness an...

DÁNIEL Z. KÁDÁR / JONATHAN CULPEPER

Historical (Im)politeness: An Introduction 1. A new field The present volume charts the birth of a new field: historical (im)politeness research. In fact, for a number of years several scholars have been producing work in this research area. The role of this vol-ume is to act as a unifying force, providing a sense of definition to the field.

The study of what might be labelled linguistic ‘politeness’ and ‘impoliteness’ involves the social dynamics of human interaction. (This is also true for any other politeness-related term, such as ‘re-spect’, ‘courtesy’ and ‘deference’, and any other impoliteness-related terms, such as ‘rudeness’, ‘discourtesy’ and ‘verbal aggression’.) It relates in particular to how a person’s feelings and sense of self are supported or aggravated in conversation. For example, the social im-pact of a request or a criticism might be softened by a particular choice of words, and that choice of words might be influenced by the relationship between the participants and the sociocultural context of which they are a part.

The field of politeness is an interdisciplinary field of study, drawing scholars from linguistics, sociology, social psychology and anthropology. Traditionally, though, it is seen as a sub-field of prag-matics (the study of meanings in interaction), specifically a sub-field of sociopragmatics. It has developed rapidly over the last 30 years, and now has its own dedicated journal, the Journal of Politeness Re-search. The scientific examination of politeness largely began as re-search on ‘face’ and ‘facework’. After some early anthropological and ethnomethodological studies on ‘face’, such as Hu (1944), the first groundbreaking studies on interactional ‘facework’ were done by

Dániel Z. Kádár / Jonathan Culpeper 10

Goffman (see e.g., Goffman 1955 and 1967). Goffman (1967: 213) defined ‘face’ as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself [sic] by the line others assume he has taken during a par-ticular contact”, and ‘facework’ is communicative action that orien-tates to the speaker’s and/or the addressee’s face. The sociopragmatic enquiry into ‘politeness’ began in the 1970s, notably with Robin T. Lakoff’s groundbreaking papers (see Lakoff 1973, 1977). In the 1980s, two key works were published, one written by Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson (1978, 1987) and the other by Geoffrey Leech (1983). In particular, Brown and Levinson’s monograph proved to be highly influential, and the ‘Brown and Levinsonian’ concepts dominated politeness research for approximately two decades. Since 2001, notably after the publication of Gino Eelen’s (2001) A Critique of Politeness Theories, many of these concepts have been thoroughly criticised and a new ‘school’ has been formed within politeness re-search: the so-called ‘postmodern’ or ‘discursive’ approach (e.g. Eelen 2001; Locher/Watts 2005; Mills 2003; Watts 2003). Brown/Levin-son’s framework has not been rejected out of hand in today’s scholar-ship − indeed, to do so would ignore that fact that there is much of value in it − but it is increasingly difficult to adopt it uncritically, without acknowledgement of its limitations or an attempt to rectify them. For this, we have the postmodern/discursive approach to thank.

Along with the aforementioned research aiming to provide a model or approach for politeness, many studies have been devoted to the examination of politeness within intracultural and intercultural set-tings. The most important intracultural studies are those that test the validity of politeness theories on linguistic data that was understudied at their time of writing, such as Chinese (Gu 1990) and Japanese (Ide 1989). Intercultural studies usually examine differences in politeness behaviour across ‘cultures’, and have resulted in a large literature, in-cluding such focussed works as Sifianou (1992) on politeness in Eng-land and Greece, as well as Lakoff/Ide (2005) on a wider variety of cultures. Besides cultural studies, politeness research has also ap-peared in other related fields, such as gender research (e.g. Holmes 1995 and Mills 2003).

Despite the fact that politeness research is an alive and kicking research area, there is remarkably little research on historical

Historical (Im)politeness An Introduction 11

(im)politeness. As far as we are aware, apart from two monographs on politeness and impoliteness in historical Japan and China (Wetzel 2004 and Kádár 2007a, Wetzel’s study being partly synchronic though), no book-sized publication has been devoted to historical (im)politeness (as a scientific study). Even though some historical so-ciolinguistic ‘classics’ such as Hughes’ Swearing (1998) touch upon (im)politeness, these books are not engaged in theoretically-informed (im)politeness research. A similar lack can be observed in research journals: such publications are small in number, although there are a few papers devoted to this topic (see, for example, the papers of Watts 1999 and Held 1999, published in the Special Issue of Pragmatics, 9/1, the studies of Ehlich 2005 and Sell 2005, as well as Skewis 2003). Furthermore, none of the classic politeness frameworks devised by Lakoff, Brown and Levinson or Leech address historical issues, nor does the voluminous work on intercultural politeness research engage in historical enquiries. Within historical studies, even with the advent of historical pragmatics this tendency of neglect is only beginning to change to some extent, under the influence of works such as Brown/ Gilman (1989). Furthermore, none of the few works on historical po-liteness looks at the histories of politeness in geographically or cultur-ally different societies, as is done in this volume. In a nutshell, whilst there have been many studies of how different societies, or more pre-cisely social groups, realise and understand politeness in different ways, they are all synchronic – the diachronic dimension is ignored.

It is an oddity that so few studies have investigated diachronic changes in politeness practices, given that polite and impolite prac-tices change over time and that this fact is fundamentally linked to cultural-ideological variation at any one point in time. We believe that studying historical (im)politeness is of bi-directional importance: by examining the past, the usage of politeness language today can be placed in context; by examining the present, politeness language usage of the past can be placed in context. With this in mind, we aim to promote a new field, historical (im)politeness research, dedicated to the research of politeness and impoliteness from a historical perspec-tive. In our understanding, historical (im)politeness research should be the merging of language, historical and politeness investigation.


The present volume addresses a long overdue need to study histori-cal (im)politeness by providing high-quality analyses of (im)politeness phenomena in various languages, including English, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Chinese. Our book is a first step, our goal being to intro-duce some of the field’s basic concepts, research questions and method-ologies, rather than to discuss historical (im)politeness systematically across many languages and diachronic periods (this will be done in a forthcoming volume of the editors). Thus, the contributions in the pre-sent volume examine quite different texts and corpora and periods, and raise some of the main issues of the emerging field, such as the changes in the notion of ‘politeness’ (e.g. Jucker and Bax), the applicability of modern politeness frameworks to historical data (e.g. Fitzmaurice and Kádár), and the micro-functioning of historical ‘facework’ (e.g. Nevala).

The present work is primarily addressed to researchers involved in historical language work, particularly historical pragmatics/socio-linguistics, and/or politeness researchers. Nevertheless, this book is also relevant to advanced students of communication, as well as cul-tural and historical studies, and also a wider circle of scholars with in-terest in such issues. 2. Historical (Im)politeness Research Before giving an overview of the contents of the volume, we will briefly survey the basic objectives of historical (im)politeness research (in section 2.1). This will be useful both to the reader (to set our con-tributors’ argumentation into context) and to researchers who intend to venture into historical (im)politeness studies. After this, we point out some methodological issues of the field (in section 2.2). Finally, in section 2.3, we discuss some key terms specific to historical (im)politeness research.


2.1. Objectives The overlapping goals of historical (im)politeness research are (i) the description and comparative analysis of (im)politeness in historical contexts; (ii) accounting for changes in politeness; and (iii) the modi-fication or creation of theories and frameworks for historical polite-ness. These are summarised in sections 2.1.1 to 2.1.3. 2.1.1. Description and comparative analysis of (im)politeness in historical contexts

Since (im)politeness is largely unexplored in many historical societies – or at least has not been explored by means of modern linguistic stud-ies1 – an important objective for (im)politeness research is to explore (im)politeness in different societies in a systematic, non-anecdotal de-scriptive manner. In practice, this is the specialised application of “pragmaphilology” (cf. Jacobs/Jucker 1995) to politeness data. This exploration necessitates rather complex reconstruction work. We need to address multiple questions – such as what did one do in what con-texts to achieve politeness in a certain period – as far as imperfect his-torical data allows (see 1.2). We must brave a jungle of historical pe-riods with their varying ideologies, social orders, community norms, genres, settings, interactional practices, linguistic structures and re-sources, in order to gain insight into the complexity of ‘historical (im)politeness’. Importantly, we cannot assume that concepts devel-oped for modern politeness theories and frameworks can be applied straightforwardly to historical data. We need a relatively bottom-up approach. A lesson to be learnt from current synchronic research trends (see e.g. Mills/Kádár 2010) is that (im)polite practices vary across groups and sub-groups in ways that are more complex than the classical politeness theories have assumed. One danger of simplifica-tion is that we reconstruct the politeness ideology of select dominant social groups rather than the majority politeness behaviour (which is

1 In many historical societies there was a native ‘proto-scientific’ tradition of

research on politeness. For example, in medieval Japan experts of Kokugo-gaku 国語学 (lit. ‘national language learning’) created a voluminous research on honorific communication, see Pizziconi (2010, forthcoming).


not necessarily in itself an unfruitful endeavour). This does not mean that no general conclusions about historical (im)politeness in a certain society can be made, but that such conclusions must be carefully elic-ited from extensive micro-level analysis.

Ideally, this descriptive work should include a wide variety of languages. But at the time of writing the few existing studies in the field are rather biased: most of the studies focus on English (e.g. Fitz-maurice 2002, Jucker 2000 and 1995, Shields 1997, Kopytko 1995, Brown/Gilman 1989) and, somewhat less frequently, other major European languages. These include Dutch (Bax/Streekstra 2003), German (Beetz 1999), French and Italian (e.g. Held 1995, Burke 1987), Spanish (e.g. Moreno 2002), and Finnish (Seppänen 2003). The few ‘exotic’ descriptive studies deal mainly with Chinese (e.g. Peng 2000, Skewis 2003, Kádár 2007a, Pan/Kádár 2010), though an impor-tant historical monograph on post-Meiji Restoration (1867) Japanese politeness was written by Wetzel (2004).

Along with describing politeness and impoliteness in certain historical contexts, it is also necessary to analyse these findings in a comparative manner – synchronically as well as diachronically. The comparison of some diachronically distant languages, such as Latin or Old English, may be constrained by the lack of availability of a range of synchronic evidence (including, for example, the lack of various genres). However, there are certainly many periods for which there are sufficient quantities of historical material, including periods beyond living memory. Comparative analysis is an important task, because comparing politeness practices and their contexts should enable us to gain insight into the general mechanisms of the interactional functions of linguistic (im)politeness. This does not only mean the intracultural comparison of differences of (im)politeness practices across social groups, but also some inter-/cross-cultural comparison. A few studies such as Tiisala (2004) have already ventured into cross-linguistic/ cross-cultural historical politeness research, and this work should be continued by comparing the practices of culturally and spatially dif-ferent groups.


2.1.2. Accounting for changes in politeness

As in historical linguistics that aims to discover “more general, possi-bly universal, aspects of language change” (Schendl 2003: 9), the his-torical politeness researcher’s goal is not only providing explanation for change in politeness in one society, but also the exploration of the general mechanisms behind such changes. It could be argued that this is the “pragmalinguistic” (cf. Jacobs/Jucker 1995) analysis of polite-ness data. As a matter of course ‘local’ or ‘individual’ and ‘general’ should be studied together. The key questions are: why and how do understandings of (im)politeness, and the language involved in achieving (im)politeness, change over time? An early attempt to ad-dress these issues was made by Wheeler (1994), blending Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory with some aspects of (variation-ist) sociolinguistics. Wheeler argues that positive politeness is inher-ently unstable, being associated with the normal cycle of increasing intimacy and casualness, and thus it involves renewal. Negative po-liteness, on the other hand, is more conventional, more formal, and thus involves archaism and then renewal (fed by formerly casual vari-ants). A more recent paper in the area of linguistic politeness change is Beeching (2007). In a wide ranging discussion, Beeching examines various aspects of pragmatic-semantic change from a politeness per-spective. Beeching capitalises on two aspects of politeness theory: as-pects of ‘face’, particularly conflict avoidance, and social identity (particularly social indexing). The former she links to innovation in semantic change and the latter to propagation. 2.1.3. Modification/creation of theories and analytical frameworks for historical politeness

As was already discussed above, the validity of even the most recent politeness views can often be tested against historical data (see Bax, this volume). For example, the distinction proposed by Richard Watts (1989 and 2003) between ‘politic’ and ‘polite’ behaviour (i.e. between socially appropriate behaviour and the behaviour that goes beyond what would be merely appropriate in a given context), can be effec-tively applied in the analysis of at least some historical data (see Pa-ternoster, this volume). However, its applicability becomes somewhat


problematic as soon as we try to project it on to cultures and societies where appropriateness and politeness were not often separated in prac-tice (see Jucker, this volume). Whilst historical researchers may work on creating new frameworks designed for the analysis of historical data, it might be efficient and instructive to adopt and transform exist-ing (synchronic) frameworks to capture such problematic features. This can be done either by the modification of certain frameworks (e.g. Kádár, this volume) or the incorporation of new elements in cer-tain theories (see Nevala’s demonstration of a thus-far neglected ap-plication of ‘facework’, this volume). The objectives discussed above cannot be completely separated. For example, a descriptive investigation of politeness in a historical setting may raise the need either to create a new approach or to develop an existing framework. Furthermore, this section should not be taken to suggest any priority amongst these objectives. 2.2. Data and methodology Along with its own goals historical (im)politeness research has its own methodological problems, mostly being related to data. Here, we be-gin by highlighting the fact that historical (im)politeness researchers often struggle with an insufficiency of data (in section 2.2.1). In sec-tion 2.2.2 we go on to discuss appropriate ways of evaluating the data that is available. We look, for example, at the corpus method of inves-tigating historical texts. Finally, in section 2.2.3 we consider what should be the main object of historical (im)politeness research.

Dealing with historical texts and contexts inevitably poses par-ticular methodological problems for the researcher which are unavoid-able – we cannot interview historical interactants about, for example, their communicative goals or the sincerity of an utterance (on sincerity see Nevala, this volume). Describing these as ‘problems’ is perhaps overly negative: these are methodological challenges that must be met with ingenuity.


2.2.1. Scarcity of data and lack of written evidence

Culpeper’s remarks on historical sociopragmatics also apply to his-torical (im)politeness research: An important issue for historical sociopragmatics concerns the (re)con-

struction of contexts on the basis of written records. This is the sine qua non of the field. Whilst researchers do have recourse to research conducted by so-cial historians, it must be remembered that much of that research is (a) itself underpinned by written documents, and (b) often insuffciently detailed to as-sist in understanding the rich dynamics of particular situations. (Culpeper 2009: 182, original emphasis)

Not only is access to a range of contexts restricted, but the data that is available is always in written form. However, in some cultures there are no, or very few, written documents available to the researcher. For ex-ample, if we intend to explore the (im)politeness of North American Native cultures, we encounter an unavoidable lack of written sources. However, insofar as we want to extend our enquiry to different societies in accordance with the goal mentioned in section 1.1, we need also to study (im)politeness in historically illiterate cultures. This will certainly necessitate interdisciplinary – in particular anthropological and ethno-graphic – research instead of a strict-sense sociopragmatic approach. Such research needs to reconstruct historical facts by means of syn-chronic oral data, such as folk songs, oral narratives and so on.

An interesting and prospectively fruitful approach to analysing (im)politeness in originally illiterate cultures is to explore their inter-action with written cultures. For example, there are many historical accounts of the interaction between Creole language speakers and colonisers. A groundbreaking volume on this theme, which also touches upon historical issues, was edited by Muelheisen/Migge (2005). 2.2.2. Evaluation Clearly we can neither peep into the speakers’ minds, nor employ other elicitation techniques (e.g. questionnaires or role play). We can therefore only follow one of the following two approaches:


(i) Induce the politeness value of a certain utterance from the hearer’s evaluation;

(ii) Take up the evaluator’s role ourselves. Taking up the evaluator’s role is dangerous because in so doing the researcher can easily enforce her/his own normative view on historical data, as argued in-depth in several synchronic politeness research studies such as Eelen (2001). This is perhaps all the more relevant to diachronic studies: our (im)politeness interpretations need to be guided by the evidence in the text – that is, the hearer/recipient’s evaluation of certain utterances – and not by our intuitions, because those intuitions are likely to reflect our present-day assumptions. Also, we cannot simply rely on a particular reconstruction of historical norms; as Locher (2004: 85) notes, “norms are not to be understood as static rules, but as in a flux, altered and maintained by the […] mem-bers of society”. Similarly, manuals for writing correspondence or for etiquette in conversation and other codifications of ‘proper’ behaviour are more contextual touchstones rather than definitive sources for the historical (im)politeness researcher, since they reflect the dominant and prescriptive social norms in a considerably static way. Thus, a key focus of our research should be the hearer’s evaluation, which in-cludes, for example: meta-(im)politeness comments (e.g. ‘you’re so polite/rude/

etc.!’); follow-up (im)politeness behaviours (e.g. ‘thank you so much’

followed by ‘my pleasure’); and challenges to inappropriate talk signalled in the co-text (e.g.

‘no, wait a minute, take that back!’).

When exploring the hearer’s evaluation we also need to look thor-oughly into the personal interactional history between the interactants, as far as our data allows, and we will return to this point below.

However, the exploration of the hearer’s evaluation of certain utterances requires the presence of a co-text, and ideally one not sepa-rated in time. Here we encounter generic differences between dialogue and monologue. That is, genres that record spoken dialogue, such as


courtroom trial proceedings or dramas allow us to elicit information from the hearer’s reaction to certain utterances (cf. Jucker et al. 1999), and even many letters receive feedback and evaluation (see Woods’ noteworthy 2009 paper). However, some other ‘written’ genres such as histories, science writing, journals, newspapers and proclamations do not allow the direct exploration of this issue. The best we can do is to explore the perception of a given word or utterance beyond imme-diate co-textual and contextual factors (on ‘contextual factors’ see Marquez Reiter, 2000: 59). In other words, in order to be able to make some judgements on the potential (im)politeness value of utterances we can resort to:

(i) the norms of polite or ‘politic’ behaviour in the micro-level so-

cial setting (or ‘community of practice’, see more below) in which a particular document was meant to convey its (im)polite message,

and/or (ii) ‘marked’ discursive deviations from these norms (cf. Watts

2003 and Locher 2004). One possibility for this exploration is to look into the aforementioned personal interactional history of the interactants. However, it should be noted that such an exploration also has some generic limitations, because for many historical encounters we have only very limited ac-cess to that interactional history. Considering this problem, historical (im)politeness research ideally needs multiple sources of evidence. The corpus method

An alternative and useful way to explore (im)politeness in texts is the so-called ‘corpus method’, that is, the reconstruction of (im)politeness behaviour through the comparison of several corpora (see a detailed introduction to this methodology as applied to dialogues in Culpeper/ Kytö, in press). This method is particularly suited to texts without per-sonal interactional history and other sources of evidence.

In order to demonstrate the kind of issue to which this method might be applied (even if in a somewhat simplistic way) let us cite a


historical example: a famous diplomatic letter written by the Chinese Emperor Qianlong 乾隆 (r. 1736–1795) to King George the Third of England, in 1793. This letter was a refusal of the British request for open trade with China. It was evaluated somewhat negatively, result-ing in hostility between the two countries that led in the long run to the so-called Opium Wars. The letter was written in a rather authora-tive style, due to the fact that, historically, the Chinese treated other nations as their tributaries and interpreted the British request for open trade in this traditional way. Whilst the style of the letter defied the norms of international diplomacy in the European sense of the word, the politicians of the expanding British Empire at that time already had some experience in intercultural differences as demonstrated by several corpora; see e.g. Kaislaniemi’s (2009) thought-provoking study. Thus, it can at least be suspected that the authorative style of the response in itself might not have caused hostility. However, the letter contained some ‘marked’ sections that are meant to demonstrate explicitly the supremacy of China above the new, and menacing, for-eign power. An example occurs in the closing section of the letter: (1) If, after the receipt of this explicit decree, you lightly give ear to the represen-

tations of your subordinates and allow your barbarian merchants to proceed to Chekiang and Tientsin, with the object of landing and trading there, the ordi-nances of my Celestial Empire are strict in the extreme, and the local officials, both civil and military, are bound reverently to obey the law of the land. Should your vessels touch the shore, your merchants will assuredly never be permitted to land or to reside there, but will be subject to instant expulsion. In that event your barbarian merchants will have had a long journey for nothing. Do not say that you were not warned in due time! Tremblingly obey and show no negligence! (Translated by Schurmann/Schell 1977).

Whilst the Emperor’s style was definitely not interpreted as ‘impolite’ according to the Chinese social standards of the day (because the Em-peror of China was regarded as a spiritual being who stands highly above anyone else), it was at least marked by the Chinese sense of di-plomacy, if we compare this letter with other documents in the histori-cal Chinese corpus. An interesting example for comparison might be the letter that was written, sometime later than the one cited above, by


the Chinese politician Lin Zexu 林則徐 (1785–1850) to Queen Victo-ria of England, in 1839. This letter ends with the following words: (2) May you, O King, check your wicked and sift your wicked people before they

come to China, in order to guarantee the peace of your nation, to show further the sincerity of your politeness and submissiveness, and to let the two coun-tries enjoy together the blessings of peace. How fortunate, how fortunate in-deed! After receiving this dispatch will you immediately give us a prompt re-ply regarding the details and circumstances of your cutting off the opium traf-fic be sure not to put this off. The above is what has to be communicated. (Translated by Teng/Fairbank 1954.)

This letter is similarly haughty in style (e.g. referring to the British as “wicked people” and discussing the Queen’s “submissiveness”); from the Chinese perspective Lin, a high-official, had some authority over the queen of the ‘barbarians’, in a similar way to the Emperor. In ef-fect, both of them wrote their letters from the perspective of the ‘pow-erful’ (here it should be noted that both letters were written before China’s defeat by the British in the so-called ‘Opium Wars’). How-ever, it seems obvious that while in example (1) the Emperor is ex-plicitly menacing and challenging, in example (2) the author Lin is careful enough to address Queen Victoria in a deferential way. Lin also uses different politeness strategies such as reference to the mutual benefit of the two countries, and the application of indirectness instead of directness. Such differences demonstrate that the previous letter had some salient features, and so it is not a coincidence that the British politicians evaluated the Emperor Qianlong’s words as an open, and rather ‘barbaric’, challenge. (See more on this letter in Schurmann/ Schell 1977: 105-113.)

In sum, it can be argued that the ‘corpus method’ provides a feasible way of testing assumptions about (im)politeness discourse practices in texts. 2.2.3. The object of analysis Finally, an important issue to be addressed here is the object of his-torical (im)politeness analysis. Due to the imperfect nature of histori-cal data (at least from the perspective of the linguist), it is rather


tempting to make generalisations about politeness in a certain ‘cul-ture’. However, recent synchronic (im)politeness studies demonstrate the variability rather than the uniformity of (im)politeness, and it can be supposed that historical (im)politeness phenomena were no less varied than are their modern counterparts. Insofar as we meet uni-formity in historical (im)politeness data analysis, we can suspect that it reflects primarily the language use of the ruling groups, given that they generally produced it or controlled its production. Authors who recorded or imagined the language use of the poor were themselves almost always members of a higher social group, and thus ‘leakage’ from their politeness usage is always a possibility. Researchers need to be aware of the possible limits of the data and genres studied. This does not mean that researchers should neglect the collective label ‘cul-ture’, but we need to be aware of the limitations of our findings and pose the question: whose culture do we analyse? As studies on varia-tional pragmatics demonstrate (e.g. several in Schneider/Barron eds. 2008; Mills 2008 and forthcoming), the interpretation of the notion of ‘culture’, and consequently the dominant practice and interpretation of ‘politeness’, differ across social groups, geographical regions and gender. We have no reason to suspect that this was different in histori-cal times (cf. Fitzmaurice, in the present volume).

In practice there is an alternative, bottom-up approach for un-dertaking research into ‘cultural’ issues, which focuses on local lan-guage. This allows us to distance ourselves from the problematically simplistic conception of ‘politeness in broader culture’, and the de-scription of culture as a monolithic entity. (See Bargiela-Chiappini/ Kádár eds. 2010, forthcoming, a volume dedicated to the critical re-examination of the relationship between ‘culture’ and politeness.) By focusing on ‘local’ language use, we do not need to make simplistic comments on ‘culture’ and thus can avoid the risk of gross generalisa-tions. An accumulation of local analyses can lead to more general findings in the long run. As noted by Mills/Kádár (2010, forthcom-ing), in the course of our research we need to determine and isolate dominant ideologies, in order to avoid intermixing politeness practice with ideology. We can then examine and compare the language use across different groupings and ‘communities of practice’ (cf. Wenger 1998).


2.3. Key terms Along with methodology it is also necessary to look at some key terms. In fact, most of the key terms of (post-)modern politeness re-search can simply be adopted by scholars of historical politeness. These terms can be found in most of the major politeness-related pub-lications, and readers without previous learning on this terminology may consult Christie’s (2008) textbook. Here, therefore, we look at two terms that have particular meaning and relevance in the field: po-liteness and deference. 2.3.1. Politeness

The label ‘politeness’ is rather problematic because: (i) it can be argued that it gained its contemporary interpretation in

recent times (see Jucker, this volume); and (ii) in many historical cultures it does not have any direct counter-

part, or practice that would equate to what early modern or modern British etiquette manuals would describe as politeness.

Locher/Watts (2005) suggested that the label ‘politeness’ should de-scribe the emic/first-order interpretation of polite utterances (the lay person’s understandings of ‘politeness’, as revealed in particular through their use of lexical items such as polite). They argue that the etic/second-order perceptions of (im)politeness (those of the re-searcher) should be labelled in a different way, such as ‘relational work’, ‘facework’ (using Goffman’s terminology) or ‘rapport man-agement’ (using Spencer-Oatey’s 2000 term). However, ideally we should also avoid using ‘politeness’ to describe diachronic emic prac-tices, since it is a recently coined expression from a diachronic per-spective. The problem with an approach that emphasises lexical items associated with ‘politeness’ as a way into understanding the lay per-son’s conception of politeness is that those terms are culture-specific and, importantly for historical enquiries, period-specific. In the case of diachronic politeness studies, it is best to use ‘politeness’ to describe (im)polite phenomena from the researcher’s perspective, leaving ‘na-


tive’ expressions that were available in the period studied to illustrate lay perspectives. Another, simpler, alternative to resolve this termino-logical problem is to adopt the aforementioned terms (‘facework’, etc.) for etic perceptions and abandon ‘politeness’ in general.

2.3.2. Deference

Another issue in historical politeness studies is the relationship be-tween certain deferential (honorific) forms and strategies of humility and politeness. It is quite tempting to squeeze both aspects under the label ‘negative politeness’ as defined by Brown/Levinson. Many re-searchers use labels such as ‘polite pronoun’ (see e.g. Braun 1988 and Dickey’s 2002 historical study) in the case of honorific forms of ad-dress and personal pronouns. Both are key topics in historical prag-matic research, particularly since Brown/Gilman’s (1960) seminal work (see e.g. Nevala 2003 and 2004 and Taavitsainen/Jucker 2003). However, such an implicit connection between certain forms and lin-guistic patterns and politeness is problematic. In many historical so-cieties deference was expressed by elaborately used honorifics and discourse strategies of humility; the number of honorifics and self-humiliative strategies tended to decline to some extent in many mod-ern societies (see Mills/Kádár 2010). This tendency does not mean, however, that ‘negative politeness’ has less of a role in modern times than it would have had in the past. In claiming honorifics or self-humiliative strategies to be ‘polite’, we may fall into the trap of mak-ing ‘apocalyptic’ statements on the diachronic decrease of negative politeness in certain societies. In order to avoid this trap, it is neces-sary to make a distinction between deference and politeness, that is, to define honorifics and self-humility as ‘deferential devices’. It can be argued that these deferential devices can serve or perform politeness (see Kádár, this volume). However, they can also be strategically util-ised to attain a wide variety of different discursive goals (for example, the persuasion of the speech partner), as demonstrated by Agha’s (2007) recent monograph. In other words, ‘deferential devices’ do not have a direct relationship with politeness. Ironically, this difference between politeness and deference was already made clear by Brown/Levinson (1987: 182-183), who made a distinction between


“deference in generalized forms of address” and certain contextual (polite) applications of these forms when they are “strategically used to soften FTAs [i.e. ‘face-threatening acts’]”.

In relation to this issue we should also mention the problem of the ‘dichotomy’ of ‘volition’ and ‘discernment’, which was elaborated by Hill et al. (1986), Ide (1989), and Matsumoto (1989). The ‘dis-cernment’ aspect means that the use of polite discourse formu-lae/registers is not optional but socio-pragmatically obligatory (Ide 1989: 231). Whilst Ide – the most influential researcher of this issue – has perhaps never claimed ‘volition’ and ‘discernment’ to constitute a real dichotomy (see also Jucker, in this volume), she included deferen-tial language in the ‘discernment’ group. As a result, in (historical) po-liteness studies honorific and other deferential forms are often treated as ‘discernment politeness’ and their strategic or marked use as ‘voli-tion politeness’ (see e.g. Mazzon 2003: 228). This separation of dis-cernment and volitional language use can be quite useful in explaining certain social tendencies in the expression of ‘politeness’, as is clearly demonstrated by the contributions of Bax, Jucker and King in the pre-sent volume. However, we must be aware that this dichotomy has been thoroughly criticised in synchronic politeness studies (see O’Driscoll 1996, Okamoto 1999, Usami 2002 and, importantly, Pizziconi 2003), and also in a recent diachronic work (see Kádár 2007b). The important claim made by these studies is that in fact there is no provable difference between the ‘polite’ communicative applica-bility of honorifics/‘discernment’ forms and volitional strategies – both are capable of conveying not only politeness but also a wide va-riety of other discursive messages (see Agha 2007 above). This concludes our brief overview of the field, and we will now sum-marise the contents of the present volume.


3. Contents The present volume contains seven papers. These explore linguistic (im)politeness in different languages, including English, Dutch, Span-ish, Italian, and Chinese, and different corpora, including letters, nov-els, collections of stories, and dramas. Whilst the languages and cor-pora of these studies are rather different, a unifying thread runs through the chapters. Every author explores historical data by means of recent politeness frameworks, or, vice versa, critically reviews re-cent politeness frameworks by means of historical examples, hence providing solid contributions to the field. The chapters are arranged on the basis of their data: Chapters 2-5 explore letters, Chapter 6 and 7 stories and novels (though section 3 of Chapter 6 also cites letters), and Chapter 8 dramas. These studies are followed by an Epilogue written by JIM O’DRISCOLL, in which he provides both a critical reac-tion to, and a constructive summary of, the findings of the authors. Chapter 2 by MARCEL BAX re-examines the modern interpreta-tions and frameworks of politeness using examples drawn from early-modern Dutch letter writing. The focus of Bax’s enquiry is the ques-tion of rituality: it is often argued that a tendency for politeness strate-gies is ritualisation, that is, it is claimed that with the passing of time certain face-saving strategies become rituals. However, as Bax sug-gests

ritual display was originally the default format for linguistic relation manage-ment and that from the early modern period onwards, ritual politeness evolved into a more rationalised mode of relational work, consistent with the overall cultural-cognitive trend in Western society towards rationality.

Bax’s finding is noteworthy because it demonstrates the need to criti-cally use modern frameworks based on rationality when exploring diachronic data. Furthermore, it provides a thought-provoking dia-chronic re-interpretation of the (stereotyped) East vs. West ‘dichot-omy’ in politeness research. In fact, speakers of ‘Oriental’ languages are often represented as more ritual and deferential than the ‘rational Westerners’. However, as Bax demonstrates, the ‘Oriental’ polite


forms found throughout the Near, Middle, and Far East, “are closer to the generic standard approach (i.e. ritual self-display) than are the over time rationalised interaction rituals of the West.”

Chapter 3 by SUSAN FITZMAURICE analyses the meanings of ‘politeness’ in eighteenth century England by means of various meta-pragmatic commentaries, including a letter to a son advising him on politeness practices and a parody of politeness practices. As Fitzmau-rice demonstrates, “the meanings and uses of ‘politeness’ did in fact change through the course of the eighteenth century”; this is an impor-tant finding because it illuminates the fact that our object of analysis is subject to constant – and sometimes surprisingly large-scale – dia-chronic development even during brief periods. Along with demon-strating the fluid nature of ‘politeness’, Fitzmaurice draws attention to another, and often neglected, domain: impoliteness as a “form of radi-cal rebellion against politeness”. Fitzmaurice explores the neglected potentiality of ‘impoliteness’ in her data, something which differs from the presentation of impoliteness as the mere ‘negative’ of polite-ness (see the critique of this view in Eelen 2001). Furthermore, Fitz-maurice deploys Watts’ (2003) notion of ‘politic behaviour’, arguing that “politic behaviour is relevant to the analysis of eighteenth-century ideas of politeness and impoliteness”, given that “[t]he underside of politeness—the reaction against the palpable lack of sincerity—also involves politic behaviour at the same time because those actors need to have some regard for its effects in specific places and times.” Inter-estingly, Fitzmaurice notes an intriguing historical connection whereby unexpected and marked polite behaviours can become regu-lar and unmarked politic behaviours. In other words, yesterday’s po-liteness can become today’s politic behaviour.

In Chapter 4 DÁNIEL Z. KÁDÁR enquires into the historical Chinese denigration/elevation phenomenon by analysing a corpus of Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) letters. The denigration/elevation phe-nomenon is a ‘landmark’ of Chinese, and East Asian, politeness, which has gained fame through the publication of Yueguo Gu’s (1990) seminal work. Kádár’s study goes “beyond the scope of previ-ous studies that have explored [this phenomenon]” mainly on the level of honorifics, by demonstrating the complex and often unconventional ways in which elevation and denigration was expressed in the corpus


studied; these ways include, amongst other expressions, non-honorific words, several larger units of discourse, as well as certain unusual ex-pressions such as forms of ‘mock impoliteness’. Along with contribut-ing to the research of Chinese politeness phenomena, Kádár – in a similar way to Fitzmaurice – explores the historical applicability of Watts’ (2003) framework. Kádár defines conventional elevation/ denigration as ‘politic’ behaviour and explores the more ‘unconven-tional’ i.e. ‘polite’ aspects of this phenomenon in a Wattsian sense. However, unlike Watts, he claims that “‘deference’ and ‘politeness’ are not two independent ‘domains’, but rather that they are the ex-tremes of a single scale. The position of a given expression/utterance on this scale depends on the context as well as its evaluation by the addressee.” This notion is drawn from Geoffrey Leech’s framework, which argues that “[i]n practice, politeness is always a matter of de-gree” (Leech 2005: 18).

In Chapter 5 MINNA NEVALA analyses facework in self- and other-oriented nominal and pronominal reference. Nevala’s study ex-plores communicative patterns in the use of person reference in rela-tion to the concepts of power and distance, and also discusses some of the prominent social and contextual aspects governing their choice. A particularly noteworthy and previously unexplored factor influencing the use of self- and addressee-oriented reference in the third person is “perspective, which primarily concerns self-reference”, that is, cases when an author “anticipatingly speaks, one might say, on behalf of the recipient”. By exploring ‘perspective’, and its interaction with other aspects of reference, Nevala not only maps a complex phenomenon; from the perspective of historical politeness research, a great value of her work is that she connects this phenomenon with facework, hence demonstrating the complexity of historical facework.

In Chapter 6 ANDREAS H. JUCKER explores politeness in Mid-dle English. Jucker, on the basis of evidence drawn from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, demonstrates that in Middle English communica-tion there was “a concern for appropriate behaviour”, labelled curteisie. Jucker points out that in Chaucer’s language curteisie “is not restricted to the aristocratic characters of the tales, but it is also regu-larly appealed to by characters of lower ranks, especially if the normal forms of decent behaviour are violated or are in danger of being vio-


lated.” The claim that there was a dominant social expectation for the appropriateness of communication is also reinforced by the way in which speakers chose between the pronominal forms thou and you. Jucker’s study is notable not only because it reveals diachronic changes in English politeness, but also because it demonstrates that face-saving strategies – already typical in Early Modern English – were relatively rare in Middle English. In this respect, Jucker – in a similar way to Bax (see above) – argues that in pre-modern times def-erence or ritualised politeness was typical in historical Europe, hence, incidentally, eliminating the ‘East vs. West dichotomy’. Another, im-portant, finding of Jucker’s, already mentioned in the present intro-duction, is that he demonstrates the complex relationship between the deferential/discernmental and the strategic/volitional domains of lan-guage. Rather than claiming them to be mutually exclusive, he argues that they are “two different aspects of verbal interaction that may dif-fer in their importance in different societies, and their importance may differ in different periods of the development of one language.”

In Chapter 7 ANNICK PATERNOSTER explores politeness in the nineteenth-century Italian novel I Promessi Sposi (‘The Betrothed’). Beyond introducing the reader to Italian politeness, Paternoster’s en-quiry is noteworthy due to its choice of corpus. “The Promessi Sposi was written in a period of important socio-cultural debate, in which it was felt by the middle class that the rules of social interaction, until then characterised by a highly formalised code of conduct, had to be adapted to suit a changing society.” Paternoster – in a similar way to Fitzmaurice – demonstrates the fluid nature of ‘politeness’, as a tool of, and subject to, social struggles. Furthermore, this chapter provides an interesting methodological case-study: the author adopts a multi-level discourse/stylistic analysis to assess politeness features of the text studied.

Finally, in Chapter 8 JEREMY KING explores forms of address in ‘Golden Age’ Spanish dramatic texts. King provides an important cri-tique of the seminal work of Brown and Gilman (1960). As King ar-gues, this “model fails to account for many of the idiosyncrasies of the Spanish address system of this [Golden Age] period: not only does the framework inaccurately predict a number of address patterns […], but it also neglects several crucial factors in interpersonal communication,


such as the issue of public vs. private speech patterns and speech in-volving heightened emotion.” Thus, King skilfully demonstrates the complexity of forms of address in the corpus studied. Furthermore, King, in a similar way to Bax and Jucker, demonstrates that in the Golden Age discernment was “the predominant guiding factor” in the use of terms of address”, and he connects this argument with Watts’s notion of ‘politic behaviour’. References Agha, Asif 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press. Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca / Kádár, Dániel Z. (eds) 2010, forthcom-

ing. Politeness across Cultures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bax, Marcel / Streekstra, Nanne 2003. Civil Rites: Ritual Politeness in

Early Modern Dutch Letter-Writing. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 4/2, 303-325.

Beeching, Kate 2007. A Politeness-theoretic Approach to Pragmatico-semantic Change. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8/1, 69-108.

Beetz, Manfred 1999. The Polite Answer in Pre-modern German Conversation Culture. In Jucker, A. H. / Fritz, G. / Lebsanft , F. (eds) Historical Dialogue Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 139-166.

Braun, Friederike 1988. Terms of Address: Problems of Patterns and Usage in Various Languages and Cultures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Brown, Roger / Gilman, Albert 1989. Politeness Theory and Shake-speare’s Four Major Tragedies. Language in Society 18/2, 159-212.

Brown, Roger / Gilman, Albert 1960. Pronouns of Power and Solidar-ity. In Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 253-276.


Brown, Penelope / Levinson, Stephen C. 1987. Politeness: Some Uni-versals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brown, Penelope / Levinson, Stephen C. 1978. Universals in Lan-guage Usage: Politeness Phenomena. In Goody, E. N. (ed.) Questions and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 56-311.

Burke, Peter 1987. The Art of Insulting in Early Modern Italy. Culture and History 2, 68-79.

Christie, Christine 2008. Linguistic Politeness: Theories and Applica-tions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Culpeper, Jonathan 2009. Historical Sociopragmatics: An Introduc-tion. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10/2, 179-186.

Culpeper, Jonathan / Kytö, Merja In press. Early Modern English Dia-logues: Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dickey, Eleanor 2002. Latin Forms of Address. Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press.

Eelen, Gino 2001. A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manches-ter/Northampton: St. Jerome Publishing.

Ehlich, Konrad 2005. On the Historicity of Politeness. In Watts, R. / Ide, S. / Ehlich, K. (eds) Politeness in Language (Second Edi-tion). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 71-108.

Fitzmaurice, Susan 2002. The Familiar Letter in Early Modern Eng-lish: A Pragmatic Approach. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Goffman, Erving 1967. Interactional Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Behaviour. New York: Anchor Books.

Goffman, Erving 1955. On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Ele-ments in Social Interaction. Psychiatry: Journal of Interper-sonal Relations 18/3, 213-231.

Gu, Yueguo 1990. Politeness Phenomena in Modern Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics 14/2, 237-257.

Held, Gudrun 1999. Submission Strategies as an Expression of the Ideology of Politeness: Reflections on the Verbalization of So-cial Power Relations. Pragmatics 9/1, 21-36.


Held, Gudrun 1995. Verbale Höflichkeit. Studien zur linguistischen Theorienbildung und Untersuchung zum Sprachverhalten französischer und italienischer Jugendlicher in Bitt- und Dan-kessituationen. Tübingen: Narr.

Hill, Beverly / Ide, Sachiko / Ikuta, Shoko / Kawasaki, Akiko / Ogino, Tsunao 1986. Universals of Linguistic Politeness: Quantita-tive Evidence from Japanese and American English. Journal of Pragmatics 10, 347-371.

Holmes, Janet 1995. Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman. Hu, Hsien Chin 1944. The Chinese Concept of “Face”. American An-

thropologist 46/1, 45-64. Hughes, Geoffrey 1998/1991. Swearing: A Social History of Foul

Language, Oaths and Profanity in English. London: Penguin. Ide, Sachiko 1989. Formal Forms and Discernment: Two Neglected

Aspects of Universals of Linguistic Politeness. Multilingua 8/2-3, 223-248.

Jacobs, Andreas / Jucker, Andreas H. 1995. The Historical Perspective in Pragmatics. In Jucker, A. H. (ed.) Historical Pragmatics, Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amster-dam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 3-36.

Jucker, Andreas H. 2000. ‘Thou’ in the History of English: A Case for Historical Semantics or Pragmatics? In Dalton-Puffer, C. / Ritt, N. (eds) Words: Structure, Meaning, Function. Festschrift for Dieter Kastovsky. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 153-163.

Jucker, Andreas H. 1995. Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Devel-opments in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Jucker, Andreas H. / Fritz, Gerd / Lebsanft, Franz (eds) 1999. Historical Dialogue Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Kádár, Dániel Z. 2007a. Terms of (Im)Politeness, A Study of the Communicational Properties of Traditional Chinese (Im)Polite Terms of Address. Budapest: Eötvös Loránd University Press.

Kádár, Dániel Z. 2007b. On Historical Chinese Apology and Its Strategic Application. Journal of Politeness Research 3/1, 125-150.


Kaislaniemi, Samuli 2009. Encountering and Appropriating the Other: East India Company Merchants and Foreign Terminology. In Nurmi, A. / Nevala, M. / Palander-Collin, M. (eds) The Lan-guage of Daily Life in England (1400–1800). Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 219-251.

Kopytko, Roman 1995. Linguistic Politeness Strategies in Shakespeare’s Plays. In Jucker, A. (ed.) Historical Pragmatics, Pragmatic Development in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadel-phia: John Benjamins.

Lakoff, Robin T. 1977. What You Can Do With Words: Politeness, Pragmatics, and Performatives. In Rogers, A. / Wall, B. / Mur-phy, J. P. (eds) Proceedings of the Texas Conference on Per-formatives, Presuppositions, and Implicatures. Arlington: Cen-ter of Applied Linguistics, 79-105.

Lakoff, Robin T. 1973. The Logic of Politeness; Or, Minding Your p’s and q’s. In Corum, C. / Smith-Stark, T. / Weiser, A. (eds) Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Lin-guistic Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 292-305.

Lakoff, Robin / Ide, Sachiko (eds) 2005. Broadening the Horizon of Linguistic Politeness. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benja-mins.

Leech, Geoffrey 2005. Politeness: Is There An East-West Divide? Journal of Foreign Languages 6, 1-30.

Leech, Geoffrey N. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London/New York: Longman.

Locher, Miriam A. 2004. Power and Politeness in Action. Disagree-ments in Oral Communication. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Locher, Miriam A. / Watts, Richard J. 2005. Politeness Theory and Relational Work. Journal of Politeness Research 1/1, 9-33.

Marquez Reiter, Rosina 2000. Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay: A Contrastive Study of Requests and Apologies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Matsumoto, Yoshiko 1989. Reexamination of the Universality of Face: Politeness Phenomena in Japanese. Journal of Pragmat-ics 12/4, 403-426.


Mazzon, Gabriella 2003. Pronouns and Nominal Address in Shake-spearean English. In Taavitsainen, I. / Jucker, A. (eds) Dia-chronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. Amster-dam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 223-250.

Mills, Sara Forthcoming. Discursive Approaches to Politeness and Impoliteness.

Mills, Sara 2008. Language and Sexism. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Mills, Sara 2003. Gender and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mills, Sara / Kádár, Dániel Z. 2010, forthcoming. Politeness and Cul-ture. In Kádár, D. Z. / Mills, S. (eds) Politeness in East Asia – Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Moreno, Maria Cristobalina 2002. The Address System in the Spanish of the Golden Age. Journal of Pragmatics 34/1, 15-47.

Muelheisen, Susanne / Migge, Bettina (eds) 2005. Politeness and Face in Caribbean Creoles. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Nevala, Minna 2004. Inside and Out: Forms of Address in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Letters. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5/2, 273-298.

Nevala, Minna 2003. Family First: Address and Subscription Formu-lae in English Family Correspondence from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century. In I. Taavitsainen / A. H. Jucker (eds) Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. Amster-dam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 147-176.

O’Driscoll, Jim 1996. About Face: A Defence and Elaboration of Universal Dualism. Journal of Pragmatics 25/1, 1-32.

Okamoto, Shigeko 1999. Situated Politeness: Coordinating Honorific and Non-honorific Expressions in Japanese Conversations. Pragmatics 9, 51-74.

Pan, Yuling / Kádár, Dániel Z. 2010, forthcoming. Politeness in His-torical and Contemporary Chinese. London/New York: Con-tinuum.

Peng, Guoyue 彭國躍 2000. Kindai Chūgokugo no keigo shisutemu 近代中国語の敬語システム (The Polite Language System of Pre-modern Chinese). Tokyo: Hakuteisha.


Pizziconi, Barbara 2010, forthcoming. Japanese Honorifics: On the Cultural Specificity of a Universal Mechanism. In Kádár, D. Z. / Mills, S. (eds) Politeness in East Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pizziconi, Barbara 2003. Re-Examining Politeness, Face and the Japanese Language, Journal of Pragmatics 35, 1471-1506.

Schendl, Herbert 2003. Historical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press.

Schneider, Klaus P. / Barron, Anne (eds) 2008. Variational Pragmat-ics. A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricentric Languages. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Schurmann, Franz / Schell, Orville 1977. Imperial China: The Eight-eenth and Nineteenth Centuries. London: Penguin.

Sell, Roger D. 2005. Literary Texts and Diachronic Aspects of Polite-ness. In Watts, R. / Ide, S. / Ehlich, K. (eds) Politeness in Lan-guage (Second Edition). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 109-130.

Seppänen, Eeva-Leena 2003. Demonstrative Pronouns in Addressing and Referring in Finnish. In Taavitsainen, I. / Jucker. A. (eds) Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. Amster-dam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 375-399.

Shields, David S. 1997. Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America. Chapel Hill & London: University of North Califor-nia Press.

Sifianou, Maria 1992. Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece. A Cross-cultural Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Skewis, Malcolm 2003. Mitigated Directness in Honglou meng: Di-rective Speech Acts and Politeness in Eighteenth Century Chi-nese. Journal of Pragmatics 35/2: 161-189.

Spencer-Oatey, Helen 2000 (ed.) Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport in Talk Across Cultures. London/New York: Con-tinuum.

Taavitsainen, Irma / Jucker, Andreas (eds) 2003. Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benja-mins.

Teng, Ssuyu / Fairbank, John K. 1954. China’s Response to the West. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.


Tiisala, Sija 2004. Power and Politeness: Languages and Salutation Formulas in Correspondence between Sweden and the German Hanse. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5/2, 193-207.

Usami, Mayumi 2002. Discourse Politeness in Japanese Conversation: Some Implications for a Universal Theory of Politeness. Tokyo: Hituzi Shyobo.

Watts, Richard J. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Watts, Richard J. 1999. Language and Politeness in Early Eighteenth Century Britain. Pragmatics 9/1, 5-20.

Watts, Richard J. 1989. Relevance and Relational Work: Linguistic Politeness as Politic Behaviour. Multilingua 8/2-3, 131-166.

Wenger, Etienne 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wetzel, Patricia J. 2004. Keigo in Modern Japan: Polite Language from Meiji to the Present. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Wheeler, Max W. 1994. ‘Politeness’: Sociolinguistic Theory and Lan-guage Change. Folia Linguistica Historica XV: 149-174.

Woods, Johanna 2009. Structures and Expectations: A Systematic Analysis of Margaret Paston’s Formulaic and Expressive Lan-guage. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10/2, 187-214.

historical (im)politeness: an introduction - nytud link.pdf · historical (im)politeness an...

Documents