Introduction

While there are times when we may believe with absolute certainty that someone has been polite or rude, politeness is clearly not an objective behaviour, but rather involves a perceived state of mind about behaviour. It involves an interpretation or evaluation of situated behaviour as meaningful in some way in regards to one's person or relationship with others in some way, and so inevitably any discussion of politeness leads us to a consideration of cognition. When we think of cognition we generally think of what is often termed subjectivity: the perceptions, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, desires and so on of an individual person. However, clearly politeness does not only involve the perceptions of an individual in isolation. At the heart of politeness lies a concern with what others think of us, and so inevitably it also involves what is termed intersubjectivity: how we interpret or understand the perceptions, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, desires of others, and in some cases reach agreement or a common understanding about them. The way in which politeness resides in both subjectivity and intersubjectivity lies, we suggest, at the core of the variability and contestedness of politeness, alongside its oft taken-for-grantedness and seeming unseen-unless-noticed qualities (see Chapters 3 and 4). The relationship between politeness and cognition, both in the sense of subjectivity and in the sense of intersubjectivity, is thus a key area of interest for politeness researchers.

While in first-wave approaches to politeness the focus was firmly on cognition as states of mind, in more recent years it has become widely accepted that politeness inevitably also encompasses issues of emotion, or what in ordinary talk might be termed states of heart. To see why this might be, let us consider the following example from the American film, Jeepers Creepers 2, where a horrific flying creature is attacking high school children on a broken-down bus.