Book review

Politeness in Language

Watts, Richard, Sachiko Ide, and Konrad Ehlich (eds.) 2005. Politeness in Language. Studies in its History, Theory and Practice. 2nd revised and expanded edition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter

Reviewed by Bingyun Li, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

It is generally agreed that politeness is an essential feature of social life. By now, politeness studies have grown into an important line of inquiry, as evidenced by the publication of numerous pertinent books and articles, as well as the launching of a new international journal called Journal of Politeness Research, devoted specifically to the study of politeness and related issues.

The first edition of the book under review (Watts et al. 1992) proved to be a great success in the sense that many of the contributions therein have been widely cited and discussed, stimulating a lot of feedback (see, for example, Eelen 2001; Mills 2001; Watts 2003; Locher 2004; Xie et al. 2005; Xie and Lin 2006; Xie 2007). Now, Watts et al. (1992) was "revised and expanded" with the addition of a completely new introduction.

In his new introduction, entitled "Linguistic politeness research: Quo vadis? ", Watts touches upon many key issues for politeness research, including definitions of politeness, the universality of politeness, first-order and second politeness, the concept of face, the cultural and historical relativity of politeness, the pragmatic basis of models of linguistic politeness, politic behaviour and politeness (for an alternative view of politic behaviour and polite behaviour, see Xie et al. 2005). This new introduction provides some recent insights that have shaped the study of politeness.

An important distinctions that was made in the original introduction was between first-order and second-order politeness. Simply put, first-order politeness covers "commonsense notions of politeness" (p. 3), while second-order politeness is a technical term "within a theory of social behaviour and language usage" (p. 3). For recent developments and alternative views of this distinction, the interested reader is referred to, for instance, Eelen (2001), Watts (2003), Xie et al. (2005) and Xie and He (2006).

This volume is divided into three parts. Part I is concerned with the theory and history of linguistic politeness. Richard W. Janney and Horst Arndt make a distinction between intracultural tact versus intercultural tact. In "Linguistic politeness and politic verbal behaviour: Reconsidering claims for universality", Richard J. Watts argues that polite behaviour cannot be identified with politic behaviour and that politeness cannot be regarded as a universal of language usage "unless it can be shown typologically that every culture makes use of volitional strategies of marked ego-centric politic behaviour" (p. 69). Konrad Ehlich discusses the historicity of politeness as a universal concept. Roger D. Sell analyses the diachronic aspects of politeness in literary texts. Gudrun Held presents a state of the art in politeness research. Part I concludes with Konrad T. Werkhofer's attempt to reconstruct Brown and Levinson's politeness model with regards to its psychological and sociological implications.

Part 2 focuses on empirical aspects of politeness research. In "Secondhand politeness", Annelie Knapp-Potthoff elaborates on how politeness is handled within a framework of mediator discourse. Judith Stalpers, examining metalinguistic expressions used for topic openings in Dutch and French business negotiations, demonstrates that the rules of conduct for business and the rules of conduct for casual interaction are different in the degree of tolerance for non-polite behaviour. Sabine Walper and Renate Valtin are concerned with the ways in which children understand and evaluate possible positive functions of lying.

Part 3 examines politeness in non-western cultural settings. While Shoshana Blum-Kulka discusses the metapragmatic aspects of politeness in Israeli society, Manfred Kummer argues that politeness can be deceptive in Thai. Sachiko Ide, Beverly Hill, Yukiko M. Carnes, Tsunao Ogino, and Akiko Kawasaki present an empirical study comparing how the concept of politeness is understood in American English and Japanese. Florian Coulmas examines the role of honorific speech in Japanese society.

All in all, this is an important collection of papers on linguistic politeness. The revised and expanded edition shows to what extent politeness is crucial in human communication and human existence and in what ways politeness can be understood and approached. However, it should be pointed out that politeness, like language, is not only a social phenomenon, but also has a cognitive dimension. Politeness is, by its very nature, the result of a cognitive evaluation, in other words, a perlocutionary effect. How people evaluate an utterance as polite, non-impolite or impolite involves mechanisms such as framing and cognitive construal. A cognitive linguistic approach to linguistic politeness would therefore further our understanding of the simple-but-intricate notion of politeness.

References

Eelen, G. 2001. A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.

Locher, M. A. 2004. Power and Politeness in Action: Disagreement in Oral Communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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

Watts, R. 2003. Politeness. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Xie, C. 2007. Controversies about politeness. In M. Dascal & H. Chang (eds.), Traditions of Controversy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Xie, C. and Z. He. 2006. Universality, certainty and predictability in academic research. Journal of Zhejiang University (Humanities and Social Sciences). 36/2: 162-169 (in Chinese).

Xie, C. and D. Lin. 2006. Philosophical dimensions of linguistic politeness. Journal of Sichuan International Studies 22/5: 96-100 (in Chinese).

Xie, C., Z. He and D. Lin. 2005. Politeness: Myth and truth. Studies in Language 29: 431-461.

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