THE SCOPE OF POLITENESS

Chapters 3 and 4 have outlined some of the major theoretical approaches to linguistic politeness in the literature and have discussed some of the criticisms of those approaches. The major criticism, centring on the dominant approach towards social structure evident in all the theories (an approach which Eelen (2001) calls Parsonian), will be dealt with in chapter 6. Before taking on that challenge, however, we need to develop an argument briefly mentioned in chapter 4:

• Politeness Theory can never be fully equated with Face Theory.

I will develop my argument in this chapter using data from naturally occurring verbal interaction and/or personal experience.

For the moment, recall the fictive example of a situation at the booking office of a coach station discussed in chapter 2, which most readers, at least from the anglophone world, will have recognised as ‘impolite’ behaviour. The act of pushing in at the front of a queue is not in itself a verbal act, although it might provoke somewhat virulent verbal responses. The social activity of queuing would not be overtly classified by interactants as ‘polite’ behaviour (cf. the term classificatory (im)politeness in chapter 1) unless the interaction order is violated in this way. Queuing is therefore a form of politic behaviour which is reproduced through every new realisation of ‘queuing’ (cf. my definition of politic behaviour in chapter 1). It has become a ritualised, institutionalised form of social behaviour.