WHAT IS FIRST-ORDER (IM)POLITENESS?

A theory of linguistic (im)politeness should take as its focus the ways in which the members of a social group conceptualise (im)politeness as they participate in socio-communicative verbal interaction. In other words, it should concern itself with first-order politeness (or politeness) and should offer the researcher the means of recognising and interpreting the evaluative moments in which participants react to linguistic behaviour which is in excess of politic behaviour (see the definition of ‘politic behaviour’ given in chapter 1 and in the glossary). It should enable us to evaluate those moments as significant points in a social process in which institutionalised forms of discourse are reproduced and reconstructed, but it should also enable us to look for the universal aspects of (im)politeness within social interaction no matter what socio-cultural group is under consideration.

For this reason, it is useful to have a first, rough idea of what (im)polite behaviour entails in our own society. Some examples of perceptions of (im)politeness were looked at in chapter 1, and we saw that it is often easier to locate impolite behaviour than polite behaviour. I shall therefore begin with another situation, fictive this time, in which participants' evaluations of a member's behaviour are likely to be negative. Imagine yourself standing in a queue at the booking office of a coach station.