The bulk of the material in this volume first appeared in a collection in the series Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology, volume 8. Its reissue will now make it available to a much wider audience. In the years since it first appeared it has come to be accepted as the classic treatment on politeness in communication. As an integrative treatment of phenomena previously dealt with in a variety of disciplines it is now widely cited by linguists, psychologists and students of social interaction. A major reason for this interest is that politeness, as the authors define it, is basic to the production of social order, and a precondition of human cooperation, so that any theory which provides an understanding of this phenomenon at the same time goes to the foundations of human social life.

In addition to their status as universal principles of human interaction, politeness phenomena by their very nature are reflected in language. Societies everywhere, no matter what their degree of isolation or their socioeconomic complexity, show these same principles at work; yet what counts as polite may differ from group to group, from situation to situation, or from individual to individual. If we can find some underlying grammatical and social regularities which account both for this type of variation and for the recurrent patterns, we will have taken a major step in demonstrating and not just claiming the basically social nature of human language.

Face wants as functional pressures on language

This section describes some interrelations between grammar and face redress. We propose (a) that face redress is a powerful functional pressure on any linguistic system, and (b) that a particular mechanism is discernible whereby such pressures leave their imprint on language structure.

Functionalism in linguistic theory. Before we proceed, a few remarks on some trends in linguistic theory should be made. Recently, after a period of suppression by the methodological presuppositions of transformational generative grammar, there has been a resurgence of interest in functionalist explanation — that is, in the search for a source outside the purely linguistic system that might motivate the bulk of grammatical constraints. Most of this work attempts to locate such sources in the principles of cognitive processing, or in the interaction of language with other mental faculties.

In contrast to what we may call ‘internal’ cognitive functionalist explanation, there are ‘external’ pragmatic theories that seek to link linguistic structures to the organization of communication. The theories of Grice (1971) and Searle (1969) are wholeheartedly of this latter sort, but more tentative partial pragmatic functionalisms are to be found in work stemming largely from the Lakoffs and scattered through issues of the Chicago Linguistic Society papers and in Cole and Morgan 1975.

This book, written by a non-statistician for non-statisticians, emphasises the practical approach to those problems in statistics which arise regularly in data analysis situations in nuclear and high-energy physics experiments. Rather than concentrating on formal proofs of theorems, an abundant use of simple examples illustrates the general ideas which are presented, showing the reader how to obtain the maximum information from the data in the simplest manner. Possible difficulties with the various techniques, and pitfalls to be avoided, are also discussed. Based on a series of lectures given by the author to both students and staff at Oxford, this common-sense approach to statistics will enable nuclear physicists to understand better how to do justice to their data in both analysis and interpretation. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

This book, written by a non-statistician for non-statisticians, emphasises the practical approach to those problems in statistics which arise regularly in data analysis situations in nuclear and high-energy physics experiments. Rather than concentrating on formal proofs of theorems, an abundant use of simple examples illustrates the general ideas which are presented, showing the reader how to obtain the maximum information from the data in the simplest manner. Possible difficulties with the various techniques, and pitfalls to be avoided, are also discussed. Based on a series of lectures given by the author to both students and staff at Oxford, this common-sense approach to statistics will enable nuclear physicists to understand better how to do justice to their data in both analysis and interpretation. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

This book, written by a non-statistician for non-statisticians, emphasises the practical approach to those problems in statistics which arise regularly in data analysis situations in nuclear and high-energy physics experiments. Rather than concentrating on formal proofs of theorems, an abundant use of simple examples illustrates the general ideas which are presented, showing the reader how to obtain the maximum information from the data in the simplest manner. Possible difficulties with the various techniques, and pitfalls to be avoided, are also discussed. Based on a series of lectures given by the author to both students and staff at Oxford, this common-sense approach to statistics will enable nuclear physicists to understand better how to do justice to their data in both analysis and interpretation. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

This book, written by a non-statistician for non-statisticians, emphasises the practical approach to those problems in statistics which arise regularly in data analysis situations in nuclear and high-energy physics experiments. Rather than concentrating on formal proofs of theorems, an abundant use of simple examples illustrates the general ideas which are presented, showing the reader how to obtain the maximum information from the data in the simplest manner. Possible difficulties with the various techniques, and pitfalls to be avoided, are also discussed. Based on a series of lectures given by the author to both students and staff at Oxford, this common-sense approach to statistics will enable nuclear physicists to understand better how to do justice to their data in both analysis and interpretation. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

This book, written by a non-statistician for non-statisticians, emphasises the practical approach to those problems in statistics which arise regularly in data analysis situations in nuclear and high-energy physics experiments. Rather than concentrating on formal proofs of theorems, an abundant use of simple examples illustrates the general ideas which are presented, showing the reader how to obtain the maximum information from the data in the simplest manner. Possible difficulties with the various techniques, and pitfalls to be avoided, are also discussed. Based on a series of lectures given by the author to both students and staff at Oxford, this common-sense approach to statistics will enable nuclear physicists to understand better how to do justice to their data in both analysis and interpretation. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

This book, written by a non-statistician for non-statisticians, emphasises the practical approach to those problems in statistics which arise regularly in data analysis situations in nuclear and high-energy physics experiments. Rather than concentrating on formal proofs of theorems, an abundant use of simple examples illustrates the general ideas which are presented, showing the reader how to obtain the maximum information from the data in the simplest manner. Possible difficulties with the various techniques, and pitfalls to be avoided, are also discussed. Based on a series of lectures given by the author to both students and staff at Oxford, this common-sense approach to statistics will enable nuclear physicists to understand better how to do justice to their data in both analysis and interpretation. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.