Chapter 5 introduces two approaches to politeness: politeness as the avoidance of face-threatening acts and politeness as the enhancement of communicative concord. Over time, politeness has changed significantly. The Old English period was a period of “discernment” politeness, growing out of the fixed social order. The Middle English period saw the rise of “deference” politeness following the French fashion (i.e., the honorific system of second-person pronouns). A face-based system began in Early Modern English, but studies are not consistent in finding this to be a positive or negative politeness system. The deference politeness system fell out of use. The eighteenth century extolled polite manners and behavior and has been described as a “compliment culture”. The modern period is characterized by “non-imposition” politeness, most obvious in the development of indirect directives (negative politeness). At the same time, a system of camaraderie politeness, which increases solidarity and eliminates distance between individuals, coexists (positive politeness). The chapter provides case studies of compliments, insults, thanks, and responses to thanks in the history of English.

The opening sequence is a delicate phase of any conversation. Through ritualized acts, interlocutors come into contact, reveal their respective stances toward each other and prepare themselves to broach the first topic of the discussion. Their positioning in the opening sequence influences the subsequent phases of the interaction. An integrated pragmatic approach that combines Conversation Analysis, Speech Act Theory and Im/Politeness Research is well-suited to studying this communicative stage in its complexity.

This chapter examines the opening phase in the dialogues of Menander’s comedy from such a perspective. After showing that, in Menander’s Athens, conversational openings follow rules analogous to those in our society, it then demonstrates how Menander exploits the social delicateness of the phase. Clear patterns in the development of Menandrean conversational openings are identified, which are linked to the communicative situation as well as to the speakers’ state of mind and relationship. Finally, the chapter discusses how in Dyskolos the poet plays with im/politeness in conversational openings to characterize the protagonist, structure the plot and generate humour.

Chapter 3 focuses on the uses of general extenders that are addressee-oriented and express an interpersonal function in interaction. The underlying concept is described as intersubjectivity, which is tied to an awareness of the addressee’s needs. Participants in an interaction are taken to be cooperative fellow speakers, adhering toGrice's Quality and Quantity maxims. The use of adjunctive forms to indicate common ground can also create a sense of solidarity, indicating similarity, and hence also signaling positive politeness. In other situations, speakers can use disjunctive forms to signal negative politeness, that is, a concern with potentially imposing on the addressee. When general extenders are used as part of these politeness strategies, they are often described as hedges, used to indicate possible inaccuracy or imposition and a desire to avoid such things, resulting in an association with approximation.

In the wake of Brown and Levinson, negative (or non-imposition) politeness has often been described as typical of Western cultures and in particular of English. It has long been clear that this type of politeness is very culture-specific. This chapter sets out to trace its recent history in American English. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) serve as a data set for an investigation into several linguistic items that are taken to be diagnostic for non-imposition politeness: please, could you, can you and would you. The evidence in the COHA shows that these elements came to prominence only in the second half of the twentieth century and, therefore, much later than previously assumed, and the data in the COCA suggest that they may already be on the decline again. Several tentative explanations are offered for these developments.